Recycling: Part I - Plastics

Based on this blog, I've decided to put a few bits on our attempts to go "zero(ish) waste", or at least reduce the amount we throw into landfill.

One of the points raised in Chris Jeavans' blog was that it was virtually impossible to get the Sunday papers not wrapped in polythene, and so the polythene has to be chucked. Although most councils will not do it, most of these wrappers can be recycled. There are a couple of companies in Norwich who will take it; the one we use is Polyprint. The plastic code has to be type 2 or 4, and it has to be free from stickers or glue. Once a small box is full, we post it off - admittedly it is not freepost, but several months polythene does not cost a great deal to send.

Brita will take used water filters, either through their in-store scheme, or via the Freepost address which seems to have vanished from their website. If they are still using it, it is: Brita Recycling, Freepost NAT 17876, Bicester, OX26 4BR.

Brother have been recycling their printer cartridges for years, again via a freepost address. Simply go to their green page, and fill in the details of your product, and you get given a prepaid address label to attach to the box. You also need to give your details, though I only did this once, and saved the pdf file for future use.

We stopped using plastic carrier bags some time ago, though that was largely as they aren't strong enough to hold anything heavier than a loaf of bread. A friend in Germany sent us some 50cent cotton bags, which are still going strong, and outliving the dire 'not plastic bags' available from the supermarkets here, which fall apart and cost ten times the amount of the simple cotton bags.

Food packaging has also been drastically reduced; we tend to use the butcher either in the local village or at the supermarket, and by doing so not only can we select the precise amount of meat we need, it only gets wrapped in a layer of plastic film wrap (we're working on that) and then (i) a paper bag in the butchers or (ii) a plastic bag in the supermarket. The only exception is chicken, which (if we want free range) has to come in the reinforced box which prevents the chicken escaping and me getting in.

All this doesn't really take too much extra time, but the difference in the amount thrown away is noticeable. There are still bits to improve on: my main vice is coffee made in one of those pod coffee machines. The pods are made up from: foil, plastic, and coffee. There was a point when I would separate and clean the three: coffee in the worm bin, foil in recycling, plastic in the bin; it is a bit of a faff though, so until Tassimo come up with a solution, I'll have to accept that I'm not 100% green....but then, who is?

Back From Munich

Back from the short summer holiday in Munich, though to be honest it seemed like a fortnight. I can't get away from the fact that the ME has changed my energy levels considerably. We made the most of the days though - breakfasting at 7am, out of the hotel by 8am, and walking solidly until around 4pm. I think we must have clocked up 50 miles of walking, but it was well worth it, and there is plenty to see in the city.

By the end of the week, I could barely walk; travelling light meant I couldn't take the stick I occasionally need to keep me upright. That didn't stop us however, from visiting Dachau on the last day. Forward planning should have warned us that the trip from the station to the camp was a 45 minute walk, including getting lost. By the time we reached the camp Jane had a winging moaning awkward sod carping on about the pain he was in, and how hot it was in the sun. A walk around the camp changed that, and brought to home just how much suffering people have to endure. The picture below was one of the last taken in the holiday. I have plenty of photos of ovens, gas chambers, disinfection rooms, watch towers and opposing national socialist buildings, which all the tourists (me included) took to reflect the oppression of the place. None of the depressive oppression comes across in these photos, and I took the next photo as a reflection of my impression of the camp. I deliberately wanted only a small portion of the photo in focus, and for that to be the barbed wire. Everything else is a blur.



There is relatively little post processing on this photo. It's cropped to remove some tourists, blurred around the edges and converted to black and white. There was a temptation to darken the photo, but that gave it a 'black' mood, when I was looking more for something more sombre.

Munich is certainly somewhere we'd visit again. A long weekend is not enough to see everything on the list, and although much of what is there to be seen is in a relatively small area, a lot of travelling is needed. I have an aversion to using public transport when we visit a city, preferring to walk and not risk missing anything, but having said that, we spent a could of days on Munich's MVV system.



The above picture was a test of Jane's camera. A 1 second handheld exposure. I'm not sure how I managed to keep so steady over a second, but I did it three times. I was probably too tired to shake. The other remarkable thing about this photo is that it was taken at one of the busiest times in one of the busiest stations (the city centre tourist mecca). No-one walked in front of any of the shots - this was the only train I could shoot as ours was next.

And finally, a museum which reflects that Munich looks to the future as well as remembering the past. The BMW museum is worth a visit if you have a couple of hours to kill and can do with some air conditioning. Much as I hate car shots, it was fun to wander round, look at some very historic pieces of engineering, and take some clichéd photographs.