Week 4 of Zero Waste

This week was a busy week.

Since last Saturday I have been suffering from a cold which caused a few things to come to light.

I do not have enough handkerchiefs to handle a cold and
I need to look up packaging friendly paracetamol. Anyone with suggestions please comment below.

Wednesday night I went to the Bea Johnson talk where she recounted her experience starting and staying zero waste. Even though it was a repeat of much of what she covers in her Ted Talk I did pick up a few more tips and the questions at the end were useful as they were more localised to Cork/Ireland. More on this in another post.

Thursday a friend of mine from Canada came for a visit so we played tourist for a couple of days. We don't often eat at restaurants but we did this weekend and I picked up on a few things I need to get better at.

I need to bring my own napkin and refuse the ones they bring (I ended 1 meal with 2 disposable napkins I did not use which were going to be thrown out), and
I should also keep my cutlery instead of getting new cutlery for each course (even though they are reusable they need to be washed which uses water/energy/soap etc)

Friday and Saturday we got out of the house and went cycling on the Waterford Greenway and toured around the Blarney Castle Gardens. It was beautiful and great to be out in nature - even though we got absolutely soaked on the last 10k of our cycle.

As part of zero waste goes hand in hand with minimalism and putting value in experiences rather than things I have included some photos of our outings.

All this activity left us with little time to cook or do our weekly chores/shopping so we cheated and got take out one night but I was running low on containers anyway so at least we will re-use the containers.

Shopping

We had a bit of slip-up this week as Colm got the bags ready for the shopping but forgot the containers so we got a bit more packaging this week than we should have.

We only went to 3 shops this week, the English market yesterday as part of our touring for olives, sun-dried tomato, regular and gluten free bread and then the Blackpool shopping centre for the butcher and Dunnes.

The shopping is getting less onerous!

Cost

68€ - breakdown below

20€ at the English market

8€ at the butcher

40€ at Dunnes

Only things over 2€ in the Dunnes shop were gluten free flour, packaged fruit, streaky bacon, and cat food - notice the common element for most? Plastic!

Meals

Our dinners for the week will be: