What a week. Talk about dilemmas and quandries!
There I was considering my next step of The Rubbish Diet. I'd already pondered upon the problems in our household where we often buy and cook too much food, when really what I needed to do was buy enough and cook just enough.
While ruminating upon this, I followed a link from Tracey Smith's blog at the Sustained Magazine and came across a great new book by John Naish, called Enough, Breaking free from the world of more. Now this looked interesting and right up my street, so I tootled off to Waterstone's to get my copy (perhaps I should have got it from the Library, but this is one book that I am keen to pass around).
The book is interesting because it discusses how humankind has developed a sense of always striving for more, whether that be information, food, stuff, career progression or happiness and it addresses the effects of this on personal ecologies and the planet's ecology. Through this, John Naish advocates that what we need now is to develop the art of enoughness.
Having read most of the book, I agree with much of what Naish is promoting and being one who regularly suffers from Information Overload (purely voluntarily) and having in the past accumulated too much stuff, I know that I need to make some major inroads in these areas.
The problem is that before starting The Rubbish Diet I thought I had enough. However, since starting the project, I have had to put my own sense of enoughness on hold, as I continue to make progress towards my goal of Zero Waste.
Yes...this week, I have sadly been busy buying more...but even though the quandries are making my head spin, I hope to justify my actions because I hope that the following will actually really help me in my quest to slim my bin.
1. First on the list is choosing to SUPERSIZE. Instead of buying my usual 1 litre bottles of fabric conditioner and washing up liquid, I've supersized them to the 5 litre containers, which will save the number of items I have to recycle, but will also save us some money!
2. Then there is the fun item of lovely scrummy reusable cupcake cases, which come in all sorts colours which will save paper cases, encrusted with cake, being thrown away.
3. I also found a stainless steel egg-shaped soap, which claims to remove strong smells such as garlic, which will hopefully save on liquid soap and the containers that come with it.
4. I followed the tip from Mel at Beansprouts about deodorants and placed an order with Lush for a deodorant that comes in the form of a cake and also bought a bar of shampoo. I really hope these work, as it will remove the need for aerosols which can't be recycled and will save yet another plastic container.
5. The big decision though has been to invest in a wormery. I've ordered this from Wiggly Wigglers and I am getting extremely excited that this will arrive today, as it will help me reduce the amount of food waste that goes into the black bin.
So, I think that as far as this project goes, I have now bought enough. I hope so as I've decided I really don't like spending much anymore.
By the way, before you go, do take a look at John Naish's enoughness site, where he and his team are promoting the Landfill Prize, where you can vote for the most pointless, frivolous and over-complicated consumer item that gets dumped onto landfill. The worst offenders will be named and shamed in the national press sometime this month.
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