Reducing my use of cling-wrap

Food Kozy wrapper from Kids Konserve

For my birthday, I was given some neat little reusable lunch wraps (thanks, Wendy!). I’ve been using them for the last few weeks and am pretty happy with them.

The ones I’ve got are from Kids Konserve, and I like them a lot. They’re flat plastic wrappers in an round-ish shape, with a velcro closure. The idea is to use them instead of cling-wrap for sandwiches and small snacks.

I usually have leftovers for lunch each day, because I’m not capable of organising even a sandwich before I’ve been awake for a while and had my coffee. But I’ve been using these to wrap up the homemade muffins and biscuits that I take as snacks. Previously I’d tried little Tupperware containers, but they let too much air in with the food.

The wraps work really well – I thought that maybe the uneven shape of the muffins would mean prevent the wrappers from making an airtight container. But the size of the wrapper means that it’s all sealed up well, no problems.

The other bonus is that they’re really easy to clean. Most days I just wipe them off, but when I’ve had something sticky in there I just wash them in with the other dishes. They’re BPA-free and recycleable as well, which is always nice.

Cling-wrap is one of those disposable things I’ve been bugged by for a long time. I’ve still got some, but I’m using a lot less these days. Eventually I hope to find other ways to replace it with other solutions – if you’ve got any good tips I’d love to hear them!

Fresh green links

Southern Right Whale has a calf in the Derwent River, Tasmania – article links to pictures and video.

16 months community service with koalas as penalty for environmental advisor who gave bad koala advice to developers.

New Zealand glacier sheds 50m tonnes of ice – it’s gone from a u-shape to an l-shape.

Indonesia seeks $2.5billion payout for the north-west Montara oil spill – it destroyed fish stocks and seaweed farms relied on by local fishermen.

WA’s biggest privately-owned solar power project has opened – powering 20 homes in eco-friendly tourist destination in Shark Bay, backed up with diesel and wind power.

Now what?

So what does it all this hung parliament stuff mean for those of us who care about the environment? As John Hepburn at Crikey points out, this was the second climate change election (after the 2007 effort) even though neither of the major parties wanted to address it. But the people wanted it on the agenda, and voted as if it had been.

As I said yesterday, I think politicians don’t listen to us, and the media doesn’t do a good job of informing us. They seemed genuinely surprised by the election result. Now is the time to start telling them what went wrong, while they’re paying attention!

Problem: politicians not listening to us. We’ve given them a slap on the wrist, but we need to think like The Supernanny. It’s not enough to just say ‘unacceptable’ and send them to the naughty chair – we have to tell them what the correct behaviour is for future situations and reward them when they get it right.

A lot of greenies don’t like to get involved in politics, as if we think it’s too grubby. And it is certainly easier to ‘think global and act local’. We can grow our own vegies and switch our own lightbulbs and know exactly what result we’ll get on our own schedules.

Politics is messier and takes longer to change. But if we’re willing to boycott corporations and go on tree-planting days and stop buying overpackaged products, why can’t we make an effort to talk to our politicians as well?

They’re not mind-readers. We have to tell them what we want. We can do that by calling them or writing letters. We can also invite them to look at our community projects, and make sure we turn up to any public meetings they hold. They’re not good listeners, but I think we have to be the grown-ups in this situation and make the effort to break through. Find out who your federal MP is, and your Senators, and let them know what you think.

Problem: people not being aware of the issues. Most of the people who read this blog are very well informed. But a lot of Australians only get their political news from a 5 minute snippet on the telly, or from the mainstream newspapers mixed with stories about drink-driving sports stars or whatever. There’s a lot of bias there against greenies, and not much fact-checking either, so it’s not surprising people aren’t informed about environmental issues.

We’ve got less control there. But during the election campaign I saw something interesting. The media was focusing on ridiculous things like budgie-smugglers and free tomato sauce for meat pies. But there was a backlash from the bloggers and Twitterers, noting how abysmal this coverage was when serious issues were going unreported. And the journos who are on Twitter complained and made excuses, and then over the next few weeks they lifted their game a bit, asking policy questions and bringing up some contradictions between new statements and older ones. They still weren’t fact-checking numbers, but it was a start.

It shows that they do care what people think of them. I think that as with politicians, we have to start talking back to the media. We need to keep reminding them that we’re watching and assessing their performance, and that we’ll call them up or write in if we think they’re getting it wrong.

Talking to politicians and the media is quite possibly the least fun part of being a greenie. But it’s a necessary part, and if we don’t want to go through an equally ridiculous election again in a few years time, we need to get stuck into it.

While I was writing this, I got an email from the ACF – they seem to be thinking along the same lines as I am. They’ve asked people to call their local talkback radio or write to their local newspaper to say that lots of people want the new minority government (whoever they turn out to be) to take action on climate change. I wrote in to my paper, saying I wanted a carbon price from the new government. It’s not much, but it’s a start!

I love the smell of democracy in the morning

Do Aussies want what's on offer?

I love election days. No really, I do! I head off to the primary school down the road from us, dodge the leaflets, buy something from the sausage sizzle or cake stall, line up for a bit while I eat my snack, then put in my 2 cents on who should lead the country.

It’s the bare minimum we have to do for democracy, and I’m glad that it works so well in Australia. Other countries have machines or electronic systems that can be hacked, instead of a simple pencil and paper option counted by real people. Some don’t get to nominate a second choice if their first one doesn’t get in. They might have men with machine guns, instead of a school fundraiser. Some nations have to send tanks in to remove unpopular governments – we just send our PM off to chat with the Governor-General and sign some forms. I’ll take the sausage sizzle, thanks!

This year was a bit different for me though: I volunteered to be a booth captain for GetUp.

I spent 10 hours handing out the leaflets I normally try to dodge, getting rained on and sunburned at a polling station in the marginal seat of Swan. We didn’t give instructions on how to vote, or stupid slogans: we had an issues scorecard. GetUp took a survey of the issues people were interested in, then rated Labor, the Coalition and the Greens on each one.

Some people avoided us, or took our flyers just to be polite. But there were a lot of people who were very interested when I called out “Get a political scorecard, compare the parties on the issues”. We even had a few people seek us out on purpose and refuse anything else.

As the day dragged on we got to know the other volunteers who were there for their chosen party. We joked and mucked about in the quiet moments. They were all lovely people, but many of them said it was useless trying to talk to voters because “they’re all stupid and ignorant”. They thought we were wasting our time.

I don’t think voters are stupid and ignorant. Sometimes they’re uninformed – but how can you find out what’s really going on when the media won’t do their job properly? Sometimes they’ve stopped paying attention, because they feel like they’re being ignored and have no influence.

I hope our scorecard helped a few more people feel informed and engaged. At least we did people the courtesy of treating them with respect. And I think the election result proves my point…

Australia has spoken. We said “We don’t trust you buggers any further than we can throw you, and we can’t agree which one of you would be worse at leading the country”. We’ve got a hung parliament, with control in the hands of Greens and Independents. Nearly one-fifth of the votes went to non-major parties.

That’s not a stupid or an apathetic action: it’s a very reasonable response to being treated like a nuisance instead of a citizen. I’m not surprised most of Australia was feeling cranky!

And if we’d been paying attention, maybe we wouldn’t have been surprised by this result. Look at the state election results in WA, SA and Tasmania in the last few years. They all had a big swing to the Greens and a cliffhanger result.

Across Australia, people are tired of being taken for granted by our politicians. They’re tired of the unimaginative media spin. So we’ve given the career politicians a slap on the wrist, a reminder that corporations might have the money, but they don’t have the votes. We do, and we need to be listened to.

The only question left is… now what? How will we fix this situation so that it doesn’t happen all over again next time?

Tomorrow I’ll be writing about what I think should happen next. After that I’ll be quiet about politics for a while – I know I’m more interested in it than many of you, but even I have limits!

Fresh green links

Edited to add: Today is the 1-year anniversary of the Montara oil spill in the north-west of Australia. We are still waiting for the report into the disaster to be released to the public.

Giving it all away – Sarhn at Greener Me had her house flooded recently, and had to pack up her family and move out while the repairs happened. When she moved back in, she took it as an opportunity to get rid of her unneeded stuff, having an event mostly like a garage sale except that everything was free!

Fully Charged – Gavin pointed out this show on YouTube that was new to me: it’s all about electric cars, and is hosted by Robert Llewellyn (who I loved in Red Dwarf, and did the Scrap Heap Challenge too).

Mazuma Mobile – new to Australia, a company offering a set price for your old mobile phone. They resell them to developing nations, or recycle them if no-one wants to buy them. Anyone got any idea what their reputation is like in the UK?

5 foods it’s cheaper to grow – MSN Money has an article about which foods are cheaper to grow than buy. I like their choices, but I don’t agree with them that homegrown carrots taste the same as store-bought ones. Ours are way more flavourful, although I do think they’re not really good for beginner vegie growers.

How to conduct a mini-lifecycle-assessment – you know those lifecycle assessments that show the environmental impact of a product? Re-Nest has found a way to do a basic version yourself. It’s still a fair bit of work, but interesting to see the general idea of how it’d done.

Portugal Rocks Renewables: 45% Renewable Electricity by Year’s End – very encouraging, good work Portugal!