uncovering the hidden waste of western consumerism and the effects on the environment and my efforts to make use of as much wasted resources as possible
Breaking News!!!!! Mariehamn, Åland November 29th, 2009
MATHIS-HALLEN HAS LOCKED THEIR DUMPSTERS IN RESPONSE TO SUCCESSFUL FOOD SAVING TECHNIQUES USED BY PIPPI'S DUMPSTERDIVING CLUB!!!!! and other resourceful common sense citizens who took to the streets after AND EVEN BEFORE ÅLAND's LANDSKAPSREGERING encouraged them to waste less food.
Here once again your license to save food wherever you find it wasted
SHAMELESSLY SHINY NEW BRASS LOCKS IS THEIR LAST RESORT TO HIDING THEIR SHAME FOR WASTING MANY TONS OF PRECIOUS FOOD EVERY YEAR!!!!!!!!!
TODAY ON SUNDAY November 29th, Pipp-i made a routine stop at Mathis-Hallen, to save some precious fruit from being wasted, after all the thousands of km coming to beautiful Åland from some sunny place in the world.
Often the only reason for ending up in the trash/compost bin is that for example bananas are starting to have a few brown spots, and so the greener or yellower ones are preferred. The shop keepers, disturbingly, play along in the game and throw out the ones people leave by the side, and simply order more. Instead they could just refuse and let people pick from a shrinking pile, but no!, people are so spoiled by the abundance, and take the nicest looking stuff for their money. The shop keepers could end this, by ordering new stuff less often, but then they probably feel they would loose against other shops who simply do not feel troubled by throwing out perfectly good stuff. It's a feedback loop that needs to be enlightened, and dissolved.
It is a real shame so much food is wasted. How many tons a month just on little Åland, with a population of only 27000?
Folks! The problem of wasted food isn't going away by making it a more hidden/invisible thing.
It is a well documented fact, and my blog and my experience in several countries proves the point that big shops waste more, whereas in smaller shops employees can take things home, less is ordered in...... Locking dumpsters just adds insult to injury. WE were ALL encouraged by the local government of Åland to waste less. While some, perhaps feeling exempt from this sensible request, seem to acknowledge this request by locking their dumpsters and hiding their waste! What is the next step? Write to your local government and ask them to do something about it. miljobyran@regeringen.ax Talk to the shop management and protest their waste...
The Daily Feed - A Sunday afternoon behind Kantarellen and City Livs, Nov. 29th, 2009
here is your approach hey even a pineapple again, some nice pears, loads of fair-trade bananas, some oranges, still have loads of organic South-Tyrolean apples from a few weeks ago
Just for kicks..a little journey.....Imagine this sunny day on a volcanic hillside in some central American nation, hey it might even be Ecuador... The workers of the fair trade banana cooperative are cycling from their rural huts made from clay with rusty tin roofs to work. Passing through an area that 20 years ago used to be thick second growth rainforest, then became a heavily sprayed and fertilized banana "factory", people got sick, children died from the toxins, the water was undrinkable, then fair-trade came around, wages improved, consumers in Europe decided they didn't want to eat shit (even though millions of flies seem to suggest otherwise), and didn't want the folks who picked their yellow happy bananas to walk around with tumors on their neck the size of melons, the future had arrived, and all seemed happy ever after.
Imagine those workers hands, suntanned, creased, happy, strong, male, female, beautiful, dirt under the fingernails, a silver ring perhaps, here and there, a quick cut, skillfully executed with a special harvesting knife, the green fronds are strong but need careful handling non theless, so they don't arrive here as mush!
Voilà!!!
And imagine that these ships who bring the bananas still pollute the oceans, the heavy delivery truck traffic splits ours and their towns down there with noise and black diesel soot, the jungle still gets cut down for more hectares of bananas, coffee, whatever! you name it, they grow it! Central America still has some of the most bio-diverse ecosystems in the world. On km2 has more different species than all of Scandinavia, and many are not even named yet or already extinct before ever discovered.
And here, what happens after all this journeying of these bananas, pineapple, mangoes whatever, a great many of them lie on display for week and then end up in the compost bin. Have a close look, it is basically a daily occurrence, look at my other blog entries, you will literally get the picture and not just one, many, and what can you do. Change your habits, don't be so picky, or join me behind the shop for a post harvest harvest.
So come and Grab a paper bag from the recycling bin
Avoid these beasts, usually they are locked and designed to crush everything that goes into them
Rather head for these babies! beware of the hungry cats nearby!
Open up one and behold.....! 37 pounds of butter, bäst före 25. and 27.11.09 would you throw it out if it was over by one day in your fridge? not to speak of all the joghurts, and cottage cheese......
Well, heck 5 litres of eko a-fil bäst före 25.11.2009
Hey there's the cat food, lots of fish, eggs, you might want those, knowing that eggs keep for months when refrigerated and even without
Cat or dog food, from happy cows and pigs tortured and murdered in some animal concentration camp perhaps even near you
Not enough to take to home your friends yet, well there always is the plentiful dumpster in the city Center, at City Livs. here one possible approach
My god!, they didn't spare tomatoes today I guess it's "Små Jul"(Little Christmas) here today. Thank you!
....and do i need more fair trade bananas? brings the harvest up to 30 kg again, oh well, what the .... they are too good to pass up, peel them, freeze them for later, give away to strangers and friends, indeed there are many excellent possibilities on a fine day... i took some bananas hiking to Orrdalsklinten in the moonlight today, yippeee! That was a worthy end for them i reckon, not in a dark plastic box, they are tropical beings, duh!
really makes for a nice bouquet, doesn't it?
again! avoid these compactors, or shops that only have them, best, boycott shops who lock their dumpsters and destroy food without letting people who feel like it rescue the stuff, and let them know why you are boycotting them too. Rather go for the green plastic compost bins to the left
Open it, wide, eyes wide, dive, lunge, pick your choice of salad or broccoli, got sheep? you might wanna take it all!!
Dumpster diving (known as skipping in the UK)[1][2] is the practice of sifting through commercial or residential trash to find items that have been discarded by their owners, but which may be useful to the dumpster diver. The practice of Dumpster diving is also known variously as urban foraging, curb shopping, binning, bin diving (mostly British), alley surfing, aggressive recycling, curbing D-mart[3], dumpstering, garbaging, garbage picking,garbage gleaning, dumpster-raiding, dump-weaseling, tatting, trash picking, treasure hunting, skally-wagging, or trashing.
The term originates from the best-known manufacturer of commercial trash bins, Dempsey, who use the trade name "Dumpster," for their bins, and the fanciful image of someone leaping head first into a dumpster as if it were a swimming pool. In practice, the size and design of most dumpsters makes it possible to retrieve many items from the outside of dumpsters without having to "dive" into them.
In rural areas and some ancient agricultural societies, a similar process was known as gleaning and some medieval houses had "poor boxes" where still edible food was placed for the poor to take.
Now for what i have documented during the past two and a half months here on Åland. Åland is a small swedish speaking archipelago with 27000 inhabitants, one of the wealthiest societies in the world, an autonomous part of Finland, located in the baltic sea @the 60th parallel between Estonia, Finland and Sweden. So i find it especially incredible that in such a small place there is so much waste already, if one would extrapolate to all the millions of people who are served their food by supermarket, we must assume that indeed, incredible amounts are wasted anually. And a lot of the containers are loocked or only accessible from the inside of the shops, so that no one can use the food, it all gets driven to a landfill, since often not even the employees are allowed to take home anything.
During my recent bike trip from Germany, here some pictures from before the trip from a Alnatura Bio Supermaket in my hometown Frankfurt am Main,
via Switzerland and back to Germany, my best friend from switzerland and I, here he is shown behind a shop in a Bavarian town along the Danube river, eating dessert with organic cheese in Hand, We frequently and randomly swung our bikes past the backside of supermarkets.
Austria, was still a dumpsterdiver's Paradise, while there was a sudden and sharp drop of goods found all through Slovakia, Poland and the Baltic Republics. Nowhere except Germany and Austria was the diving as good as here in Åland.
In all the baltic republics, and Poland and Slovakia, after the fall of communism, and the nonexistent large western style super markets with overfilled shelves, that vaccum of lacking such stores was quickly filled by large foreign western european chains from France, Germany and England, and never on these thousands of km did i find an unlocked food dumpster, though I must assume that these shops have the same wastage rates known to the industry as "part of the game" as anywhere else where they don't bother to look the dumpsters. One positiv exeption were some, though few chains in Germany. They display prominently by the entrance, that they are supporting "Die Tafel" (transl: The Table), and organisation collecting such foods for the needy and homeless, who can come and get a bag full of groceries for some symbolic sum. But here in Åland, there are probably only well-off people (my observation), who would mostly frown upon food from the compost bin, hahahaha. And who i have frequently observed at the local recycling centers, throwing away incredible amounts of usefull stuff, not even bothering to find new users for them, or placing such items in the shelves of the shareing sheds at these depots, so that others can have them later, and they won't be crushed or destroyed by weather.
Here a picture of my trusty cruiser on Kumlinge in mid September 2009, where i found 80 aluminum cans @ €0.15 each nicely packed in boxes. Took it to the next shop and got approx. €12 Euro out of that. That bought me 4 kg of local organic/ekological wheat flour, a jar of local åland honey and some chocolate.
This picture collection is by no means complete, because i didn't take pictures every time i went diving, but given with dates and location should give you a good idea in the amount of waste produced. I have only collected food from a few shops, whose dumpsters were easily accessible, not locked, like in about half the other shops in Mariehamn. My Main sources were thus:
1. City Livs in Downtown Mariehamn 2. Kantarellen in Jomala 3. Matthishallen in Downtown Mariehamn
Start by getting on your bicycle perferably and by getting yourself some paper shopping bags from the nearest recycling container. People throw them away in perfectly good shape by the thousands, somehow it doesn't occur to most consumers that they could simply be emptied of the newspapers delivered to the recycling depot and taken to shop once more, or to dumpstershopping!
some of the most amazing finds were (location by number, see above in Brackets (No:)):
20 Fairtrade pineapples, where only the leaves had begun to dry up(1.) 6 Fairtrade pineapples on another occasion (1.)
Hey, you think I'm a freak!?? Try my smoothies!!!
@round 20-30 kg organic bananas (2.), yellow, in top shape, perhaps they were radioactively contaminated, an invisible to me damage, for i couldn't see a good reason why they were in the compost bin. Me and my friend peeled a lot of them and froze them for use in smoothies
a whole tray of crème fraîche (1.), one of four discarded trays, the bottom one of which was still good for another three weeks, was thrown out, along with the three outdated ones
sometimes as much as hundred liters of milk, or many yoghurts, filmjölk, cottage cheese, local åland butter (where the packaging was pushed in from a fall to the floor, otherwise fresh and impeccable
Kantarellen Oct 18, 2009
Of all this i tried to high grade the lot, taking mostly organic and fair trade items, for that is the real food, while the rest is the poisoned and processed stuff most people feel comfortable in sticking into their bodies just like the bogus flu vaccinations...........see for yourself........ the facts are out there hidden in "plain view"
If you have cats and dogs, there ain't a shortage of meat or even fish
However i don't eat meat, unless invited and it is organic, but since i have no hunting instinct, and prefer fruit over anything else, i go for the fresh and still alive stuff, namely fruit, which was meant by nature to be eaten by someone else, to spread their seeds.....
all at Kantarellen Sept 18 and Oct 23, 2009
Here a video about the treatment of animals,
EARTHLINGS is a feature length documentary about humanity's absolute dependence on animals (for pets, food, clothing, entertainment, and scientific research) but also illustrates our complete disrespect for these so-called "non-human providers." The film is narrated by Academy Award nominee Joaquin Phoenix (GLADIATOR) and features music by the critically acclaimed platinum artist Moby .
I find it very troubling how these other earthlings are treated by us humans and how even their remains, after living a life in a concentration camp, pumped full with hormones and drugs, and killed in the most inhumane ways, apart from how pets and animals are used for research, and how we, by throwing away their flesh pay so little respect to the beings who gave their lives in order to feed so many of us! Honor them! Feel what they might feel. End their suffering. That's your power as the consumers, we are the majority, and we can rule! There are other foods than meat, for many of us they are even more healthy. The production of meat requires enormous amounts of water and fossil fuels, and grains and other plants that need to be grown only to be mostly lost down the metabolic chain. 10 kg of grain and grasses make approx 1 kg of meat!!!! and then 10 kg of that make one kg of us!
City Livs, Mariehamn, Åland, Nov 18, 2009
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