We love Too Good To Waste

We caught celebrity chef Thomasina Miers on BBC 1 Breakfast TV yesterday. She's owner of the Wahaca Mexican restaurants in London and has thrown her stylish eateries behind the Too Good To Waste campaign.

The campaign was launched by the Sustainable Restaurant Association towards the end of last year and is designed to make diners feel more comfortable about asking for doggy bags or boxes and encourage an increasing number of restaurants to offer them. Celebrity backers of the idea include Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Giles Coren the restaurant critic for The Times, and food writer and broadcaster Matthew Fort.

The doggy bag concept comes from the United States and most of us probably associate it with huge American portions that are just too much to eat in one sitting. But the fact is that for every meal eaten in a UK restaurant, nearly half a kilo of food is wasted – through preparation, spoilage and what’s left behind on the plate. We’re throwing out 600,000 tonnes of food waste from restaurants every year.

Here at Make it and Mend it we launched our Thinking Outside the Bin campaign last week. It's all about the joys of upcycling things that would otherwise end up in the waste bin. You can find out more about our campaign here.

We're all for reducing the amount of waste that finds its way into restaurant bins. How many time have you left part of a delicious meal on a restaurant plate and then suffered an attack of the munchies later? Today's doggy bag is tonight's snack or tomorrow's packed lunch.

BBC presenters this morning were a bit concerned about re-heating things, but as all Make it and Menders know, you just need to follow some common sense rules when making tasty food from leftovers

But perhaps we could come up with a better term than doggy bag or box? What do you think?

You can find out more about the scheme at Too Good to Waste. Sadly their interactive Where to dine map only covers London.

Anne Caborn

MIAMI at Kew Gardens

Hilary and the Two Clares escaped from MIAMI Towers on Friday to spend a great day at Kew Gardens, despite the grey skies and the endless rain. We were invited there by the lovely people at START UK to demonstrate how you can make a contribution to sustainability by upcycling instead of buying new stuff all the time. (see more about START UK and the Start@Kew Festival in the post below)

Clare O shared some scary statistics on the amount of perfectly good furniture that ends up in landfill, then Hilary showed how she turned some very shabby old dining chairs into swanky new ones. You can find out how she did it on the MIAMI website.

Here she is with the before and lined up below are the afters - three very different treatments, including a decoupage chair made from old comic books. Each one is explained in more detail on the MIAMI website.

There were some fantastic people at the event, which was a real gathering of movers and shakers in sustainability - and we'll be sharing with you in the future some of the great things they're doing. People like Clay Swift aka The Green Marine, Edible Bustop, and the schoolboys from Savio Salesian College Bootle who make bat or bird boxes - called the BoBBox, as well as the people from Morsbags, Project Dirt,  Carbon Leapfrog, Gustavo Montes De Oca from the Golden Company, my old friend Amy Cooper from the Secret Seed Society  and many more. Lots of them have agreed to write guest posts for us so look out for more on here and our website about the wonderful things they're all doing.

We hope we passed on some inspiration - and we certainly came away with much more! Thanks to Michael, Catherine, Laurena and everyone at Start Uk for a great festival.

Clare F

The death of cheap clothing

There! Did you hear that sound?  

Apparently that's the death knell of cheap clothing ringing out loud and clear across Europe.  According to all the papers, the floods in Asia will mean that we are going to see a rapid rise in the price of cotton, which in turn will mean a rapid rise in the price of clothing in shops like Primark, Asda and Tesco.

Whilst financially this is going to be a blow for some, for many it will just mean that they think more carefully before they purchase new outfits: which in environmental terms has got to be a winner. 

For far too long society has been condoning, if not encouraging, people to purchase clothes that they don't need and to throw them away shortly afterwards.  Apparently in the last five years we have seen the proportion of textile waste rise from a meagre 7% to a whopping 30%, which we the taxpayers have to pay for.

As a society, we've become used to disposable fashion, without giving a thought to the effects that this might have on our environment, or on the poor people who have to produce these cheap items. So from my perspective, this price rise can’t come soon enough and this rise is all grist to our revolution.

However if you're worried about how you'll manage without all this cheap clothing, fear not, for in reality we really don’t need all these clothes especially as we supposedly only wear 20% of the clothes in our wardrobes, 80% of the time.   With a little bit of care and attention your can make your clothes last a lot longer.  And if you really do want something new to wear for that special night out why not try altering, adapting or refashioning your clothes.  If you are worried that your skills wont stand up to the task find a friend to help you….or if all else fails why not try ‘swishing’ at a clothes swap party.  With a little bit of thought and creativity we can all find a new wardrobe for a fraction of the price, but not at the expense of the environment.

Come on join our revolution and think before you buy, because life’s too good to throw away!

Hilary

Related posts on the website 

A beginner's guide to swishing 

Holding a swap party

Getting new life from old clothes

How to reinvent your holiday wardrobe

Makeover your summer wardrobe without spending a penny

How much power do your home appliances use?

I just found this really interesting page from GE (General Electric). You can find out how much electricity your home appliances are guzzling and even check out the annual costs (in US dollars). If you are from the US it's even more useful as you can compare costs by state.
>> GE Home Appliance Energy Use

For us Europeans it's still very helpful from a comparative point of view. The annual cost of using a hairdryer is more than curling irons or a vacuum cleaner. As I expected the tumble dryer is way up there in terms of electricity consumption and annual running costs. What did surprise me though was how costly fridges and freezers are, behind only furnaces (boilers?), water heaters and the deadliest of all - air conditioners. Other high consumers are plasma TVs, ovens and dishwashers

By clicking the menu the little appliance visuals rearrange themselves so you can check wattage, gas use, cost per year and kilowatt yield. I was also very surprised at the cost differential by state - a staggering annual cost difference of almost $2500 if you used all the appliances and live in New York ($4134) rather than Washington state ($1720). Go have a play!
Related links:
>>  Blog Action Day - Hang your Washing out!

>> Save energy - starting in the kitchen

Would you scrap it or save it?

I've read several articles this week celebrating the success of the ‘cash for scrap’ scheme. Apparently more than 60,000 cars have been ordered since its start in late April. But these figures worry me because that means that there are 60,000 serviceable cars that have been sent for scrappage. What happens to them?

You would think that we would be in favour of this, anything to make your money go further and you get a greener car to boot. This offer sounds too good to miss. So why don’t I get it? Could someone please explain the sense in this to me?

I know I am not an economist and could possibly be totally missing the point, but this all seems to be counter-intuitive to me; it just doesn’t make sense. Why are we offering money to people to scrap a car that is still working - in order to buy a new one.

Most people that drive a car of this age are not in a position to buy a new car. Ok the government will put a thousand in the pot and the car manufacturers will put a thousand in the pot, so we will get £2,000 off the price of a new car. Please note that is a new car, not a car that will be new to you. We are talking brand new, and this is where the problem lies. Even with £2,000 off the price of a new car you will still have to find at the very least £3,000 to buy the car. £3,000 that most people can’t afford.

My son drives a car that is ancient; he drives it because that is all he can afford. He wouldn’t be able to find another £3,000 so he would have to borrow…and there we go again. Borrowing what we can’t afford is what got us into this mess in the first place.

And what happened to helping the environment and living a more sustainable life. Seems to be that when money is tight our ethics become somewhat shaky. Because if you think about it what are we doing to the environment by scrapping perfectly serviceable cars? I understand the argument that theoretically new cars are more environmentally friendly to run; however what is the environmental cost of taking serviceable cars away and crushing them up - and reusing them how?

We are not just looking at the cost to the environment between running an old car versus running a new car; the cost is bigger than that. We should be taking into account the cost of scrapping a working car as well, because I am sure you will find that running an older car is probably better in the long run.

What are the carbon emissions in manufacturing a new car against the carbon emissions of keeping an old car going efficiently? Why are the government not forcing the car industry to improve the efficiency of engines through tax breaks reducing the usage of petrol?

If the government really wanted to help us it should be offering that £2,000 to pay for keeping an older car roadworthy for longer, helping to mend and maintain it as greenly as possible, not throwing money at us to encourage us to keeping consuming and wasting perfectly good resources. More to the point the government should not be encouraging us to get loans to buy new cars. It should be focussing on getting the banks to lend on mortgages again and helping people to have a roof over their head.

I understand the argument for spending our way out of a recession, but unfortunately is it exactly that behaviour that got us into this mess.

More to the point we are just talking scrap, not even salvaging or reusing parts. The very term scrap indicates wasting.

I realise that mending cars will not mend the car industry, but there seems to be a conflict between shoring up an industry that allegedly harms the environment and encouraging people to buy cars that they don’t really need. I thought we were meant to be encouraging people to get out of their cars and back on to public transport. What could an injection of money do to our train services? We could probably create work for those being laid off from the car factories.

Is this not the contemporary conflict in a nutshell; throwing out the old to buy the new, which did not need to be made in the first place, to keep an economy going based on borrowing that is not needed. This is not sustainability on any level – it is waste for economic reasons and nothing more.
(Hilary)