Little shop... big idea...

Unpackaged is a shop in East London London with a big mission. This quote from their website summarises their philosophy:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” (Buckminster Fuller)

Catherine Conway in her beautiful shop

Catherine Conway set up Unpackaged in 2006, starting off as a market stall and moving to premises in 2007. 

She had a simple but brilliant idea - so brilliant in fact that this year it's been listed as a Timeout London Best Shop and tours and study groups go there to see it.

So what's the idea?

She wanted a way to reuse containers and refill them when she went shopping for groceries. Before I tell you more about Unpackaged itself, I want to pause and talk about why using less packaging is so important.

But can't we just recycle?

Recycling is great. It's a green industry and it saves stuff from going to our nearly-full landfills or into polluting incinerators. 



this man just loves recycling bottles

But recycling is 'after the fact'. It's like sticking a plaster on something that's broken, rather than fixing it. 

Recycling in India

Recycling uses huge amounts of fuel/energy (both in the actual processes and the transport of much of our UK recyclables abroad, for example to India and China), adding to pollution and climate change.


Not only that, but recycling is often not actually recycling. It's downcycling. 

This means that rather than a product being turned into another similar product (a plastic bottle into a plastic bottle) it is turned into a lower grade material or a secondary product (a plastic bottle into carpet backing) and then so on, down the chain. That's not to mention the huge volume of recyclables that end up contaminated (from food for example)and are discarded as soon as they reach the recycling plant. 

As Annie Leonard says in her book The Story of Stuff, "There's a reason recycling comes third in the eco mantra 'reduce, reuse, recycle'". It's part of the solution but not the whole solution. If you've got a few minutes now, watch Annie's video on youtube here to find out a bit more about how your stuff is made and why you need to care about it.

So this is where being 'unpackaged' comes in. 

Having less packaging in the first place uses less resources from start to finish - less water, fuel and materials to make the packaging, less burden on waste disposal and recycling facilities.

There's also another clever element to buying unpackaged. You can buy the amount you actually want rather than how much is in the packaging. Do you actually want twelve satsumas, or would you rather have 5? We throw away an average of £420/year per household, which costs the country £12 BILLION a year in disposal costs. Surely reducing that, especially in the face of our economic situation, rates pine fresh on the Commonsense Sniff-o-meter. Have a look at this page of the LoveFoodHateWaste site to find out more about why wasting less food matters.

Obviously, some packaging is good. You can't just put meat and fish straight into your bag, and some products need protection in transit to the shop and home. But many products don't - your apples don't actually need to come in a little tray which is then wrapped in clingfilm. 

Unpackaged takes this a step further. You go along with empty containers - anything you like, it could be Kath Kidston tins or old water bottles - and you fill them up at the shop. The foods are frequently replenished so produce is kept fresh and you use scoops so it's all hygienic. No need for packaging! It's also cheaper because you're not paying for the packaging and labelling - costs which, believe it or not, are factored into the price you pay. Do you really want to be paying for that random plastic bag inside your cornflakes box? Or the plastic bag that your potatoes come in when you're going to wash and peel them anyway?!

This isn't a new idea. I remember going to a health food shop in Dorset as a child with my step-grandmother and being surprised as she proceeded to fill a large jar up with oats, sultanas, raisins, dried apple and wheat flakes, making her own, tailored muesli. And going back even further, it used to be standard practice to take a shopping basket or bag out with you when you did your food shop and you'd just pop your purchases straight in there.

The international chain Wholefoods also sells many foods unpackaged, from fruit and veg to bulk by pasta and lentils. Here's what they say:
Reusing means you're not only using stuff again, it means less energy is being used to make more stuff. And that means you are keeping waste out of our landfills, less energy from being processed and less resources from being consumed — all from bringing a reusable lunch bag. Talk about not taking much to make quite an impact.
Now, keep thinking with us. You're using that lunch bag again and again. Know what else you're doing? Saving money. That's right! A penny saved is a penny earned and you just proved it. Reusing is an eco-nomical thing to do too.

 
 Unpackaged are great not only because of how their shop sells but because they also offer consultancy to companies of all sizes on how to go 'unpackaged'. This way, they're not just sticking to their own premises but helping spread the word and the methods. 


And this is really the key. Shops that sell unpackaged are rarely mainstream. We need the big supermarkets and the manufacturers they use to move into the 21st Century and start reducing from the top - it would save us all time, fuel and money.

youcanarguewithstupid

Further reading/sources:
Lovefoodhatewaste - for tons of great info on how to waste less food
WRAP - Waste and Resources Action Programme, works on reducing waste and increasing sustainability

Daily Mail article on sending our recycling to India here 

The Telegraph on the volume of household waste we throw away here

Looking backwards to move forwards...napkins

Yes this really is a post about napkins. The cloth kind, not the paper kind. In some cases, the best idea or the cleverest solution has been staring you in the face all along. This is one of those cases.

available here

A little napkin trivia



The first napkins were made of dough or bread. From the Spartans onwards, people would wipe their mucky fingers on slices of granary. I'm not sure if they ate them afterwards.

Then the Romans, being the tirelessly innovative people that they were, started using strips of cloth called sudariam meaning handkerchief.

By the 16th Century napkins were an expectation of refined diners.

In 1729 a French treatise told us this:

"The person of highest rank in the company should unfold his napkin first, all others waiting till he has done so before they unfold theirs. When all of those present are social equals, all unfold together, with no ceremony."

And then it went all wrong...

In 1907, there was an epidemic of Polio in Philadelphia. A local school teacher realised that the cloth napkins they used were spreading the infection as they weren't being washed regularly.

He cut up bits of notebook paper and told his schoolchildren to use those to blow their nose on or sneeze into, and then to throw them away immediately.

The first commercial production of paper towels came soon after with the Scott Paper Company's sexily named "Sani-towels". From there the industry grew, producing not just hygienic receptacles for your snot, but all the superfluous little paper serviettes you get in cafes and the rolls and rolls of kitchen towel households everywhere are buying up and chucking out.

 It doesn't make any sense...

It depletes our forests - which in turn causes less carbon to be absorbed and exacerbates global warming; it adds tons of paper to landfill and is an additional burden to recycling facilities.

Make your own just like this here

It's as though there is no other choice. But there is.

Perhaps not the bread option: I don't fancy wiping my fingers on a slice of stale Kingsmill, but cloth napkins are a simple, fun, brilliant, sustainable invention.

They come in all different patterns and colours so you can actually express yourself rather than using the generic paper versions.

Now that's what I call
napkin-folding technique

You can make them into funny shapes.

They feel softer.

They save you money because you can just wash and reuse them instead of buying more and more and more rolls of kitchen towel.

This is on Etsy.com - search
"napkin" on there and you'll be
spoilt for choice

And if you use the paper version for cleaning, the same goes: cloths. Those jay cloth things our parents/grandparents used to use are remarkably effective with a little cleaning product and again, they are environmentally and pocket friendly.

Those are the two golden attributes of a clever, forward-thinking product: green and money-saving.

 

These stickers are part of
an American campaign
here

If every time you use a piece of kitchen towel, you pause for a moment and remember that it's part of a tree, and you're wiping up your spilt baked beans with it and just tossing it into a bin to go to that mysterious place we like to call 'away', it starts to take on a different meaning.

Search on www.etsy.com for 'napkin' and you'll see such a variety of styles, colours and patterns that you'll actively want to incorporate them into your meal times. 

youcanarguewithstupid

Further reading/sources:
Napkin how-to-make-your-own here
Napkin history here and here

Plan Zheroes... the food redistribution heroes

This is one of those initiatives you come across that makes the end of a grey London Monday feel a whole lot better.

One of Carl Warner's many amazing
food pictures - there are more 
on his website here

Plan Zheroes is an organisation and interactive website where charities needing food can hook up with companies with excess food that they would normally chuck in the bin.

Why does this need to be done?

The UK food retail industry sends 1.6 million tonnes of surplus food to landfill every year.

This could be distributed instead to some of the 4 million people in the UK currently classed as suffering from 'food poverty'.

Initiatives like this do already exist, for example the Pret Charity Run that you can read about here and FareShare which aims to redistribute 20,000 tonnes of food per year (and who are always grateful for more volunteers).

Plan Zheroes says that although these organisations do a great job, they aren't a comprehensive solution and many companies are still falling through the net and throwing away food that could be diverted to people in need.

So in steps Plan Zheroes as a network for the retailers with the surplus food to find the charities needing the food, and vice versa.

The really clever part of Plan Zheroes is its interactive map, which allows companies and charities to plot themselves on it with details of what they can give/need. Then they can see each other, connect, and get redistributing!

This grassroots approach means that food establishments and charities of any size can sign up, so that even your local corner shop could donate.

Another Carl Warner, because I love them

youcanarguewithstupid

Further reading:
Clear explanation of food poverty here
Faculty of Public Health food poverty brief, with statistics on the sorts of illnesses it causes here
On the growing crisis of food poverty in the recession here

Why didn't I think of that? ... the WrapnMat

This is one of those genius ideas that really leaves you wondering why everyone isn't using it. It saves money and the environment and looks cool too. In fact, a heck of a lot of people are using them (weirdly they're more popular in the US), so join the wrapnmat revolution!

The wrap-n-mat is a cloth wrapper for your sandwich (or other snack) - one side is plastic so that it's wipe-clean, one side is cloth, they come in a range of colours and patterns and fasten with velcro.


Why is this so genius?


1) it saves you money on foil/clingfilm
2) unlike tupperware, once it's empty it's flat, so doesn't take up unnecessary space
3) no more foil/clingfilm in the landfill
4) it looks cool
5) you can lay it out so it acts as a mat for your sandwich while you eat
6) they cost about £5-10 only and will last you years

I've used these for about 3 years now and they really last - I've bought about 4 in that time but partly because I wanted a different pattern. People always ask me about where they're from and say how cool they are - some people have actually bought their own. I often see people on the tube looking at it curiously.


You can buy them from Nigel's Ecostore here , Amazon here or the American site WrapnMat which has good UK delivery and a great range of materials and also other versions of the wrapnmat for different types of snacks!

youcanarguewithstupid

FAB Research

FAB Research are a bloody Good Thing.

That's Food and Behaviour Research. And that's exactly what they do.

We're pretty used to being told which foods are Good, which are Bad, which are somewhere in the middle. We know about obesity and fried chicken and that a good breakfast is an essential start to the day.

But FAB aren't your run-of-the-mill nutrition info service. 

They produce and compile research that is at the forefront of how we really are what we eat, moreso than we may realise.

This is what they say:

"Diet is important not only for physical health, but also for optimal mental development and functioning.

Nutrition can play an important role in the prevention and management of many kinds of difficulties in behaviour, learning and mood. These include:

• Everyday difficulties in behaviour, learning or mood that can affect children and adults - at home, at school or in the workplace.
• Developmental conditions - such as ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, and autistic spectrum disorders.
• Mental health conditions - such as anxiety, depression, bipolar (manic-depressive) disorder and schizophrenia."

Google 'mental health time bomb' and you get hit after hit after hit about this massive issue affecting all different parts of the UK. It's a humungous burden on the NHS, on the welfare system and on society generally. Mental health problems prevent people leading full and engaged lives. The statistics on homeless people with mental health issues are abysmal [see sources].

Science is starting to tell us more than simply to shove them full of anti-depressants, a dubious solution at best [read this book] and a net with many holes for the dispossessed, diet has a rather large part to play.

It's not just mental health either.

Our obesity epidemic could be helped in a way you might not expect - not eating less, but eating differently. It's starting to become clear that certain nutrients affect your sense of fullness. So rather than taking a pill that makes you 'shit oil' you might want to just up your omegas.

It's all there on FAB's site where they have a list of 968 resources and counting.You can also search by condition - say Alzheimer's or Antisocial Behaviour, letting you find out what cutting edge dietary science there is on that subject.

It's worth a look, if only to appreciate the volume of research coming out about this. It makes you realise how simple changes to a child's diet could bring dividends in their later life.

youcanarguewithstupid

Sources:
Homelessness mental health stats here