Love hummus, hate plastic?
Home » Magazine » Good, issue 2 » Good start » Love hummus, hate plastic?We find the solutions to your dip dilemma. Plus: Our advertising policy explained
Now we’re a plastic bag-free household I have nothing to put my kitchen rubbish into. Why don’t supermarkets sell biodegradable bags?
Phone or write to your usual supermarket to ask and they might look into stocking biodegradable bags. They can also be bought online (zerowaste.co.nz and ecostore.co.nz sell the Biofilm brand).
But we urge you to try something a bit more radical. We’ll assume you compost all your kitchen food waste, and recycle all your recyclables. (If not, you have far bigger fish to fry than those plastic bags.) Without all that food gunk, your kitchen rubbish bin is likely full of dry stuff: plastic packets, biscuit trays, paper towels, tin foil. Now, is there really any reason why that stuff has to be separated from the inside of the rubbish bin by a layer of plastic?
Go on, let your rubbish bin go naked. Chuck your rubbish straight in and try not to worry (line it with a sheet of newspaper if it makes you feel better). Empty the rubbish straight into your big council bin outside, swirl a bit of water around the bottom to rinse it out (if you’re good at remembering to compost you probably won’t even need to) and it’ll be good as new. You won’t look back.
Do you endorse your advertisers in Good, or do you take a more conventional arms-length approach and should we apply the buyer beware principle?
HB Media, the publisher of Good, does have a policy regarding advertising in our magazine. Vincent Heeringa, HB Media’s editorial director, says: “We do not explicitly endorse our advertisers or their messages. However, we encourage our advertisers to focus their messages on sustainability and reserve the right to reject ads that, in our opinion, lack credibility or that our readers would widely regard as green-washing.
“We also abide by the standards set out by the Advertising Standards Authority, covering defamation, offence, dishonesty and accuracy.
“It’s worth noting two additional points. Advertising subsidises the cost of media by some 80 percent. Without it, readers would pay hundreds of dollars per issue, and we couldn’t produce a great magazine.
“Second, all the above notwithstanding, many organisations are making positive changes to the way they manufacture and do business, and advertising gives them the opportunity to tell us about those changes. Advertising can be as useful as editorial, if it is well told. The alternative to green-washing is green-hushing—staying silent about your good work. We need influential business leaders to raise the bar for everyone, and to do that they need to speak up.”
Who you choose to support with your dollars is ultimately up to you. Wield your consumer power wisely, and according to your own principles.
Why is it impossible to find hummus, sour cream, cottage and cream cheese in recyclable plastic containers?
Most dips are packaged in plastic number five, polypropylene, which can be recycled—but not everywhere. (Several councils have recently expanded their recycling collections, or plan to, so it might pay to call your local council to double-check.)
To find out why dips don’t come in plastic number one or two, recyclable all over the country, I spoke to Chris Williams at Tecpak in Dunedin. Tecpak uses an injection-molding process to make the flat, small dip containers used by Lisa’s Hummus, Anathoth and Delmaine, among others.
This process rules out plastic one, PET (polyethylene terephthalate), which is inflated rather than molded into its final shape. That’s why most PET containers are long and thin, like soft drink bottles (although they do manage to make peanut butter jars from PET).
Plastic two, HDPE (high-density polyethylene), can be injection-molded into a dip-container sort of shape, but because HDPE isn’t completely transparent most dip-makers prefer not to use it. Blame the marketing department: most people prefer to buy things they can see. HDPE is milky white; great for packaging milk, not so good for sun-dried tomato dip.
What can you do about it? Buy one big pack of hummus rather than two small ones (it freezes well), or try making your own. Tell your favourite dip-maker their packaging bothers you. Most importantly, petition your local council to start collecting plastic five. All recycled plastics are gaining value internationally as the price of oil (plastic’s raw material) increases, but getting councils to build the infrastructure to collect different grades of plastic will require a lot of community pressure.
Why can I only buy one litre cartons of soymilk? For a family of four it’d be more economic to buy it in larger cartons, and save on packaging.
Kim Stirling, nutrition manager at Sanitarium, says the reason So Good doesn’t come in a two-litre carton is simply because there isn’t enough demand for it. Two-litre cartons aren’t available in Australia either, although if consumer demand increases Sanitarium says it will consider introducing a family-size So Good. How will it know what consumers want? “We regularly run research asking for what consumers are looking for, and we also record all contacts made with us, as that helps us decide on what people are interested in too. So we are happy to have people contact us with their questions or needs,” says Kim. Contact Sanitarium on 0800 100 257, or go to www.sanitarium.co.nz and click ‘Contact Us’ at the bottom of the page. If you prefer a different brand, well, contact them instead!
When you put your mobile in a recycle drop what is recycled and what isn’t?
Telecom collects more than mobile phones for recycling: modems, chargers and even landline phones all get gathered up and shipped to Allied Electronic Recovery Worldwide in California. Some of the phones are refurbished and sold to developing countries, and the rest get broken down to their component parts: plastics are melted down, circuit boards and precious metals are extracted for use in other products—bits of your mobile phone could even end up in traffic cones and taps.
Vodafone prefers to put reuse before recycling, since its mobiles can be used all over the world on the international standard GSM network (Telecom phones, by comparison, typically use the CDMA network). Returned Vodafone mobiles are tested, repaired, refurbished and, where suitable, given to micro-entrepreneurs in developing countries. This extends the life of the phone, and gives someone else a means of communication that can help grow their businesses and break the poverty cycle. Last year Vodafone recycled around 40,000 mobiles. Any mobile phones and accessories that can not be reused are sent to recyclers, who extract useful raw materials just as they do for Telecom phones.
Drop your unused mobile or accessories at any Vodafone or Telecom store—but think twice before upgrading your phone. Do you really need a new one?
