Granma Style

1. Take your broken pantyhose that you dragged around in your bag for a week.
2. Cut in pieces
3. Use as hairbands. Brilliant.

(-So Pernilla, are you actually saying that you officially walk around with underwear in your hair? -Yes I am.)

Second salad solution

Pernilla:

At lunch we quite often buy salad from this Salad bar close by. Every time you waste one of these big plastic salad bowls. They are not great quality, but could probably last for 5 lunches or so. Of course you can eat there, but you just won't.

Today we were looking at all our bowls, started talking about it, and decided to make an effort to re-use them.

Of course, you could bring your own everlasting bowl. That would mean the staff would have to reset their scale when you pay. They probably wouldn't like that. And they'd be telling you off big time how annoying they think you are- German way - and you wouldn't do it.

So minimal effort would be to at least wash the bowls, keep them in the office, think about it when you plan to go to the salad bar, and bring a bowl. Should be easy.

Five bowls plus lids now patiently waiting for a wash and a second round of usage.

Sandwich Norwegien

Pernilla:

I suck, I know.
My French all time low: An on the road, crazily plastified NORWEGIAN sandwich (in France!), eaten in the car together with ehm, coke zero which is..I don't know. I have no excuses.

But the sandwich tasted so much like home I got tears in my eyes. It was absolutely great. I was so sick of French food at this particular moment, and eating something from my home area (oh right, so the Frenchies got it wrong - it's a very Swedish bread) totally made my day. But it was the most overpackaged thing they had. Oh, guilty pleasure.

Not easy, is it?

On the topic of toilet paper....

...a french No waste high point. Or at least a refreshingly good idea. No cardboard tube, just paper rolled up and kind of squeezed a bit.
It's not going to save the world, but it's nice. And seriously, producing all those billions of tubes, you know shipping them, transporting them back, burning them... it adds up. How many little things like that in our everyday life could just be remade in a smarter way? Love it!
Posted by Pernilla

One small step for mankind...

Karin:
I was going foodshopping today but when I got there...
...I realized that I had forgotten my reusable shopping bag, damn. I didn't want to buy a paper bag so I just bougt what I could fit into my handbag that I needed to manage dinner tonight and breakfast tomorrow. Milk, bananas and an avocado.

I'll try to remember it tomorrow and do my foodshopping then... one of the small steps on the way to beeing more responsible (and flexible).

Week 1

Karin:
Time to sum up the week, so this is my garbage for this week:

And after I take away all the things that can be recycled:

Tadam!!!
Not zero, but pretty damn close! This is a part of a pasta package.
Also, there is fruitpeels and stuff in my balcony compost, it doesn't stink yet... But if it does we have a compost bin (brown) in my backyard next to the paper and household garbage bins:



For glas, metal and hard plastic I go 100 meters down the road...



And for soft plastics I have found a station inside my foodstore, so I'll just have to remember to bring it there...


I am amazed over how little the effort have been and how well I did, it's been fun too! Maybe it's just because it's all new, we'll see how much fun it will be in a few weeks unh...?

But looking at wat my flatmate produced over the last week (and she was away for three days!!) kind of puts it in to perspective. (Please note glas, non collapsed milk box, hard plastic and metal amongst other...)

goes up goes down goes up

Pernilla:
I'm now in Bretagne, staying overnight at a small guesthouse by the ocean with poppyfields outside my window and lilacs in flowery vases all around my room. (Hey Karin, how's that compost? is it smelly yet?)
The guy were staying at actually renovated some kind of french cowshed completetly and turned it into the lovliest of guesthouses.

And here's whats cool: he has two wells - one for water coming up, and one for water going down. Simple. Everything that goes down the drain pipes ends up in your own garden, in your own food, after a week or so. Suddenly you feel "hm.. Biodegradable detergent and shampoo might be a good idea here. Bleach? Chemicals? Highly toxic for water living organisms? Ehm , not so sure anymore."

Making your own waste your own problem and not somebody elses problem.

Karin:
Wow that's amazing and totally inspiring. The good old "get-a-taste-of-your-own-medecine"-trick always works!!

Pernilla: Yes I know! Love it.
I had a mini version of it: Everything I wouldn't throw away ended up in my handbag and in my luggage. In the end of the week I was dragging around a kilo of little paper wraps and shit. If you literally need to CARRY your waste, you make sure you minimize it.