How hard would it really be to make that decision to never, ever throw a plastic bottle in a rubbish bin (or a hedge or ditch or wherever else lazyitis causes people to chuck stuff)?

With more and more recycling points out and about this is getting to be more realistic all the time. When I was asking one of those nice people at the district council recently about whether we could have a recycling bin at out local park, he mentioned that one of the difficulties with provided recycling points instead of bins is that people often don’t use them properly. Can you believe, people put the stuff in the wrong hole?

I don’t know why people say this, but I’ve heard it said of things, that it is so easy a monkey could use it. I asked a monkey friend of mine and she said she thought it was pimps.

So what if you can’t see a plastic recycling point when you are out and about? I asked the monkey what she thought and she said ‘take it home, that’s pimps too”.

What do you think?

Today I was surfing the net looking into plastics. What I want to know is what all this PET stuff means and what the numbers on plastic packaging actually mean.

This is what I discovered…

PET stands for Polyethylene Terephthalate. No wonder they call it PET for short!

The good thing about PET which is often labelled like this:

is that it’s widely recyclable.  Most people can just put it into their curbside collection boxes and those nice people at the council will organise the rest for us.

It helps if you take the tops off the bottles, squash them flat and then you can put the top back on the bottle or gather the tops up into a separate plastic bag. So, why do you need to take the tops off? Well, that’s simply because you can’t get the air out of them when the tops on.  We don’t need our air to be taken off to the recycling centre – we can recycle that all by ourselves just by breathing in and out – so it is just a waste of space in the recycling trucks. Less air, more plastic bottles per trip, fewer miles traveled by the recycling trucks. See?

Last Friday I decided to do a raid on Mr Smith’s rubbish bin (I’d be grateful if you didn’t mention it to him).  Here’s a picture of the PETs I rescued. Cute, hey?

Did you know that eggshells are good for your garden? Eggshells provide an important goodness for your compost but they do take a long time to break down, so it is best to crush them first. Besides, crushing eggshells is almost as much fun as popping bubble wrap and much more environmentally friendly. Give it a try!

Milk bottle tops, tin foil and foil lids from yoghurt pots can all be recycled. Trouble is, small bits of stuff get lost in the system when it comes to recycling. A little birdie told me that if you gather up small bits of foil and milk bottle tops, wrap them up in a bigger bit of foil and then squash it all together there’s a better chance of the little fellas getting to the right place at the recycling centre. Stack it, wrap it and then pack it. Easy!

Does anyone know how you mend a flat tyre?

I stumbled across this on my morning walk through cyber-territory: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/6207390/Gordon-Brown-has-a-slop-bucket-to-collect-food-scraps.html

Good on him, I thought.  I wonder if there’s anything nice in his slop bucket.  I’m feeling a tad peckish.

Of course being a hardened eco-warrior myself, I have a kitchen caddy of my own.  Not a lot gets in it, I have to confess. No one could argue that I don’t know when to stop when it comes to eating. I do.  I stop when there’s nothing left.

What does your kitchen caddy look like?

Glass is 100% recyclable and can be recycled endlessly with no loss of quality. Glass recycling creates no additional waste or by-products and recycling just one glass bottle saves enough energy to power a sixty-watt light bulb for one hundred minutes, a computer for thirty minutes or a television for twenty minutes. For every six tons of recycled container glass used, a ton of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, is reduced. Every ton of recycled container glass made into new containers saves 1.2 tons of raw materials. How cool is that!

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Well, favourite packaging, really.  As for food, well Gizmo likes it all.

But this is where we hope to unwrap the mysteries of food packaging. Over the coming year Yolanda and Bertram have agreed to help me in my eco-lab.  We’re planning to put an end to the myths and misunderstandings of recycling and we hope to be able to tell you everything there is to know about what products use packaging from recycled materials and packaging that can be recycled.  What’s more we plan to look into where that packaging is recycled and at what cost and saving to the environment.

And yes, we do plan to name names.  We all know that glass, paper, cardboard, and plastic as well as a heap of other stuff can be recycled.  But what I want to know is, if I buy a Mars Bar can the wrapper be recycled? (Now there’s one to check!)  If I buy a packet of Walker’s Crisps can the packet be recycled? (We do know the answer to that one. We’re not telling yet – but we’d love to hear what you think).  All will be revealed…..

Yours

Gizmo

The other day Yolanda informed me that eating 5 sausages – even if they were pork and leek – didn’t count towards my five a day. My first thought was ‘Is this true?’ bUt most things Yolanda says turn out to be true, no matter how much you wish they weren’t. So the next thing I thought about was apples.

I like apples.

However …..

The apples on the tree in the community copse were nowhere near ready.  So I thought I’d try and buy some. It appears that we have run out of apples in the UK. The only apples my hard earned pennies could have bought had flown half-way round the world.  How’s that for a carbon footprint, I thought.

Yolanda always says ‘Don’t buy apples that have flown farther than a Virgin Atlantic 747′.

So today it was a toss-up between plums from Spain or nectarines from Italy. I plumped for the nectarines.

Gizmo