Waste wraps all around us like a condom thats a little bit too small, encasing us so tightly that its suffocating us, choking us almost until our heads turn blue. But apparently, we have no choice. We don’t want to live without the pleasures, so we go for it anyway, well aware that it will break as we continue fucking the planet for all its worth. It’s screaming “STOP”, but our hedonistic lifestyles have rendered us dumb, deaf and blind to the importance of the 4 very things we have alienated ourselves from. Nature. Community. Work & Creativity. Ourselves [Bioneers program 2015].
Waste is omnipresent both in its physical, tangible form and in its invisible forms due to poor design and poor foresight. In my day of waste collection, I discovered both are equally as important as one another and that I’m completely ignorant to what waste I should consider most.
Today I wasted a lot. Firstly the god damned packaging. Too much of it. Plastic plastic plastic plastic foil plastic foil plastic, thoughI would like to focus mainly on 2 things. My soup & my coffee. Well, coffees.
SOUP
Today, I tried to make potato and leek soup and it went very wrong. I chopped the ingredients and boil them until it’s time to blend it. I try to take the blender out of its cradle…..its stuck? what could possibly be wrong with my blender? I hold the base and pull up………….. BOOOOOOOOOM soup everywhere. I’m scolded. Great.
This mess, to me, represents the interconnectedness of everything. Consider the waste here, right from the beginning. Energy & water to grow food. Energy to manufacture blender. Energy to cook food. Energy to blend food. 5 mins of running water to sooth my burn. Water to clean up soup spill. I liken this to Dr Maté’s biopsychosocial perspective, a much more open minded view of the health of a human relating to their social, relational, interactive and cultural lives than the pure physical qualities of an illness.
COFFEE
On the day of my audit I drank 4 coffees. Each double espresso uses 16 grams therefore creating 64g of leftover organic waste. Sydney siders drink about 1.3 million cups per day. Consider each cup uses 7 grams that is 9100kg of coffee ‘waste’. Wasted. In landfill.
There are 2 organisations in Sydney alone addressing the issue.
Milkwood Permaculture are based in Redfern. They offer educational courses on how to grow your own mushrooms at home using this ‘waste’ produce.
Fungimental are a startup based in Central Park. They have just begun, opening on the 16th June 2016 and aim to collect 500kg of this coffee waste every week and turn it into 800kg of delicious oyster mushrooms every week. These are two organisations using this waste beneficially.
The situation is so ugly that we almost have to double bag it. A bag on our head and a bag on the earth, just incase the earths breaks. Of course, creating more waste.
REFERENCES
Bioneers (2015) Dr. Gabor Maté – toxic culture | Bioneers. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erZhTPkOLb0 (Accessed: 17 June 2016).
Coal earth condom (2011) Available at: http://persuasivegraffiti.weebly.com/random/coal-earth-condom (Accessed: 21 June 2016).
Biopsychosocial model (2012) at: https://www.mentalhelp.net/articles/the-bio-psycho-social-model/ (Accessed: 17 June 2016).
White, P. (2015) Fungimental. Available at: http://fungimental.com.au/ (Accessed: 17 June 2016).
Wealth From Waste 