I was raised by parents born in the 1920s who like others of that era had values of the stereotypical wartime generation (e.g. ‘waste not, want not’ and the old adage ‘make do and mend’) and were skilled craftspeople (e.g. engineers, cooks and bakers, upholsterers, and seamstresses).It truly was an Anderson Shelter, vegetable garden and home-made everything upbringing.

My culture and core beliefs were fused by studying art alongside a career in housing rights and advocacy. Things came together (very randomly) when I began looking around me at work – I noticed my 300 plus colleagues were throwing away their plastic milk bottles: it just seemed thoughtless and annoying. So I started to take them home each week to recycle.

I soon had a huge pile which included some rigid plastic. I discovered plant pots could not be recycled by the local authority. After research I took them to Thrive in Battersea Park for their garden. I then realised the milk bottle tops I had valiantly been taking home for two years were not being recycled, and the Green Centre in Brighton could receive a small amount of cash for them by sending them to a recycling company based in Portsmouth.

I set up a scheme recycling tops to benefit older peoples’ advocacy. It is much needed: it ticks my box of campaigning to raise awareness that our elders are facing neglect due to the current crisis in our care system, and that advocacy is grossly under-funded. I began in August 2010;  by April 2012  I had 87% of half a tonne of tops in my garden shed.

The scheme snowballed slowly; but now the council-owned sheltered schemes in Wandsworth, Age UK (my workplace office in Euston)  2 nurseries, one primary school, a community group and about 16 coffee shops and neighbours and even on occasion the Natural History Museum all collect for me.

I have collected an immense amount of tops. I am now considering how to sustainably transport a large number of them to Portsmouth. Not all of the tops can be recycled but I cannot bring myself to just dispose of them as waste.

Art and creation have followed; for example I did a couple of documentary photo shoots profiling my monthly round collecting the bottle tops and I  have created a tops map for a carbon awareness event at the Pump House Gallery.

A side product is how this mild adventure has enriched me and my life. It has led to meeting others, becoming involved in the Tooting Transition Town movement, learning about my community and all things carbon-related. In addition to the bottle tops I have an application in for solar panels, started planting seeds again and am harvesting my apples into chutney.

With Lizanne being more inclined to closed loops systems and waste management and me experienced with community interaction and locality, we decided to embark a journey together.

As our final MA project we created the blog www.design-resource.org: a collection of design projects that use waste materials as a resource to make meaningful and ecologically sound objects.

From our personal journey and research, we noticed that increasingly designers like to respond to the impacts of waste: they are aware of pollution caused by landfill and incineration, the consequences of exploiting natural resources and the degradation of ecosystems.

We realized that not all recycling is environmentally friendly. It depends on many different factors like: production process, use of toxics, treatment of materials, mixing of materials, whether the objects keep their recyclability, etc.

For instance, something can be recycled and made in a beautiful way, but a high amount of toxics or energy might be used. On the other hand, something can be environmentally friendly but poorly designed and made.

To consider what is good and what can be done better, we developed a framework with tools to analyze the design projects.

The framework highlights five key considerations when designing and making products from waste materials: material, production, eco-credentials, craftsmanship, and narrative. More information on each specific category can be found in the ‘tools’ section of our blog.

We invite our visitors to comment on the blog entries when they have a different perspective or a key bit of missing information that could enrich the knowledge around recycling and design-making.

This way we hope to give more understanding of when designing with waste material is sustainable and when it is not.

The composition of waste is very diverse and complex. Most products and materials are from their outset not designed to be recycled, which makes it difficult to turn recycling into a straightforward process and it can be hard to define when recycling is beneficial and when it is harmful. It is therefore understandable that designer-makers occasionally make mistakes and in turn recycling processes can be carried out in an insufficient way.

Still, we are convinced that designer-makers – with their creativity, expertise and knowledge – can help to find solutions for the waste problems we are facing today. We feel designer-makers have an eye to see beyond ‘waste’ and have the skills to turn it into precious and worthy objects.

Our blog shows that here is a world of opportunities for designers to explore and re-use waste materials in a skillful way.

Lizanne Dirkx is a designer – researcher based in The Netherlands, with and expertise in sustainability, design and design thinking. Lizanne works as a freelance designer on commissions and self initiated projects.

Raquel Sereno is a designer – researcher based in the UK, with expertise in sustainability, design thinking and material experimentation. Currently working as Project Manager in a community based project with Oliver Heath. Also working part time as freelance designer on commissions and self initiated projects.

Sunday dinner soup courtesy of Lee Copplestone

This soup is made from leftover Sunday dinner veg. Its very tasty.

You will need

• leftover carrots, leeks, broccoli, cauliflower, potatoes etc (any vegetables are fine, apart from roasted vegetables or chips)
• ½ pint of stock (+/- depending on amount of veg)*
• ½ tsp mixed herbs
• 1 tbsp houmous (this is the MAGIC ingredient that both thickens the soup and adds flavour)
• dash of single cream (+ dash of white wine/cider/apple juice if desired)
• salt and pepper to taste

1.  The first step is to cut all cooked vegetables into similar sized small pieces and place them into a blender. Pour in enough stock so that it just covers the vegetables then add the mixed herbs and houmous. Then blend the mixture until smooth.
2.  Add more stock to create desired thickness of soup and a dash of cream or wine for a richness of flavour. Finally add salt and pepper to taste and simmer gently until hot. Serve with croutons or grated cheese.

* If you’ve had roast chicken use the bones to make your own stock for the soup.

Sweetcorn and rice fritters courtesy of Angela Tibke

A quick and speedy dinner or snack that uses up that left over rice from the night before.

You will need

• 150g boiled rice (cooled and well drained)
• 90g Self raising flour
• 198g sweetcorn
• Salt and pepper to taste
• 4 tbsp  milk
• half an onion, chopped finely
• a pinch of Mediterranean herbs
• 2 eggs, beaten
• oil for frying

*You can add any other vegetable e.g. peppers or spinach if they are in need of using up or try a hint of chilli.

The 14,022 coffee shops in the UK generate a combined turnover of over £5 billion and a strong growth in the coffee industry is predicted for the years to come.

Coffee waste

In the UK, it’s estimated that around 1.25 tons of coffee grounds are used every week, with the likelihood that the majority is sent to landfill. This is clearly a problem. Coffee grounds can be composted and reused for things like farming industry. But the likelihood of that happening is unlikely.

Waste Watch got in touch with Fungi Futures (very friendly people!) to have a go at turning some of this waste coffee into something useful. In fact, something better than just useful: something edible.

Fungi Futures provides a kit which allows you to grow Gourmet Pearl Oyster Mushrooms from used coffee grounds. They provided the information and the mushroom spawn for free…all we had to do was get hold of the coffee.

Seeing that our office drinks quite a lot (of coffee) I thought we could easily muster enough from the daily emptying of the cafetiere. I was wrong. We needed a far larger amount: ten kilos. After some explaining to bemused cafe workers and almost having to dance in front of a coffee shop full of customers, I managed to get hold of over ten kilos of the stuff.

It was a lot easier to source ten kilos of coffee than I first thought and the sheer amount of coffee drunk locally really showed just how much must be wasted around the UK, let alone the world.

Making mushrooms

A willing team of volunteers from our office’s new Gardening Group, weighed and mixed in the coffee grounds in the correct proportions (275g of spawn to 1.5kg, to be precise).

This mix was then put back into a special grow bag with a perforated vent to allow the spawn to breathe. A few paper clips sealed the top of the bags and the mushrooms were placed on a desk in our office with a blanket to keep them warm at night.

This was the first stage: incubation, and should last for around 3 weeks before the fruiting stage. If we did everything ok, we’ll now get tasty, edible mushrooms. All we have to do is wait…

Week Three

The waste coffee to mushroom experiment is entering its third week. The bags are looking whiter then ever as the mycelium continue to grow. In the next few days I’m going to cut the tops off the bags and allow the mycelium to fruit and it’ll be these fruiting bodies which will what we eat! A couple of bags have taken strides into the lead with their whiteness in shroomy anticipation and a couple are lagging behind a bit. Hopefully they all come good when it’s time to harvest. The technique for the fruiting phase is that when the bags have gone completely white with mycelium I cut the tops off leaving a little gap above the coffee, and then spray the bags with water twice a day. I’ll need to find a way to store the bags so they can be sprayed yet without making a corner of the office really damp, else it becomes somewhere mushrooms we’re not so keen on eating start to grow as well!

Green Mould

The following three weeks have been a turbulent time for the mushroom project. What started off as very promising looking bags of coffee and mycelium took a turn for the worse. Two of the bags ended up developing a fairly sinister green mould.

It didn’t look good and advice from the ever helpful staff at Fungi Futures said these bags could be sprinkled with salt then left for another week or so. Hopefully in this time the green mould would have died off and the growth of the oyster mushrooms would resume. Unfortunately I was unwell and out of the office so the bags were somewhat neglected for a week. Upon my return the green mould (which had yet to be treated) had appeared in nearly all the bags including an almost total take-over of three of them. Action was needed, so three bags were composted straight away and the remaining five were cut open and sprayed. Some salt made its way on to the small patches of green in all the bags and I was unsure whether we would see any mushrooms at all. Things were not looking good!

Nervously waiting

A nervous week followed the day of action opening the bags. There was little sign of new life in any of the mushroom bags after some rather intermittent spraying. Hopes were down on the prospect of a successful mushroom growing project. Maybe it hadn’t been warm enough in the office overnight? Maybe the coffee was not clean enough? Maybe we hadn’t looked after them properly? Then one day we were relieved to see our favourite bag had developed a small colony of mushrooms growing out of the small gap between the coffee and the side of the bag! Success at last! Much excitement followed and we were relieved that at least one bag had worked.

The following day however we were quite surprised to see that the mushrooms had doubled in size overnight!

And then later that afternoon we could clearly see they had grown a fair amount during the day whilst we sat near them. Colleagues sitting closely with their backs near to them feigned alarm (I think?) at theses new office invaders though it was remarkable just how quickly things were moving on after what we thought would be a failed attempt.

Two days after that and the mushrooms were looking really healthy.

Now two of the other bags also had colonies growing in them and the first batch were getting rather large.

By the end of the week batch one were towering out of the bag and looking like they would be ready for harvest soon. General feeling in the office however was part amazement, part intrigue and part caution about just how quickly they were growing.

Surprisingly comfortable.

If I hadn’t freaked out about the state of the planet, I might never have made my underpants out of nettles.

But I did freak out. I had read more than was sensible about how wasteful we have all become. So I set about re-engineering my life. I got an allotment, and switched to Abel & Cole for local, seasonal deliveries of whatever food I couldn’t grow myself. I bought an electric car, and switched my tariff to wind-power. And then I started to think about clothes.

Clothes raise all the same issues as food, but tend to be overlooked. (You can raise a sheep to eat it, or for its wool. You can grow plants to eat, or to extract their fibre. You can fly apples around the world, or cotton.) If you eat “for the planet”, you might want to dress that way too.

So I did some “extreme mending” on jeans with holes in them. I bought some baggy shirts in a charity shop, and took them in using a treadle-powered sewing machine I bought on ebay for £5. Then somebody said something that provoked me: “It’s difficult to make shirts if you have not been properly trained.” I’m one of those irritating people who thinks he can do anything. (Not superlatively, mind you, but I can have a go. I may not win an Olympic gold, if you see what I mean, but I can run for a bus.) So just to show them, I copied a shirt I already owned onto paper, used that pattern to cut some fabric, and made my first shirt. It took about a day, and involved lots of advice from my wife’s great-aunt, Peggy Parker.

Soon after, I made a pair of jeans while my wife was out at work. Then I went to Prick Your Finger, a haberdashery in Bethnal Green, and told the proprietor, Rachael Matthews, that I was thinking of knitting a jumper. Good idea, said Rachael. And that was all I needed: “permission” to do something I was planning to do anyway. I made socks. I sent off to the US for a kit to make your own shoes.

For the final item, I wanted to claim clothes-making as a legitimate activity for men – because let’s face it, most people still think it’s a woman’s game. I decided to make the only garment I could think of uniquely designed for men: Y-fronts. And instead of using cotton, I would use a sustainable fibre that grows locally, without any special care and attention: the nettle.

Nettles have been clothing people in this part of the world for millennia. The Germans wore a lot of nettle during World War One, when Britain controlled 90 per cent of the world’s cotton. If it was good enough for them, it was good enough for me. I won’t go into detail here about how I got the fibre, but suffice to say that I crocheted my pants while my wife watched TV. Then I put on my whole outfit, and went outside for a walk. It felt great.

It might not have happened without all the hand-wringing angst, but it soon became an entirely delightful process. I became genuinely hooked on making clothes – a creative discipline more challenging in its way than the painting or drawing that I did already. In short, I was “treading more lightly” but also having fun. If you don’t believe me, why don’t you give it a try?

Beef cattle awaiting a very respectful slaughter on the John Penny farm

New Year’s Eve 2011, I am eating steak, savouring its steaky goodness and waiting to begin a self-imposed meat embargo.

Earlier that year, I read an article online that talked about modern meat consumption and made the suggestion that if you eat meat, you should have enough respect for the animal to eat all of it, not just the sanitised and consumer-friendly chicken breasts, mince and chops that supermarkets provide. This struck a deep chord within me. Growing up, every night it was either chops, something with mince or a roast. We never ate offal. Stewing steak was as sustainable as it got. I felt that I had to make a change within my life to correct the imbalance that I saw between the meat I had eaten in my past and the way I wanted to carry my carnivory forward. A year of ethical offaltarianism was due to begin.

Initially, the decision to cut out regular cuts of meat (no bacon, no chops, no burgers, no mince, no chickens, no KFC, no steaks, no roasts) was a logical one: I hadn’t eaten enough offal (and unusual cuts of meat) to consider myself a respectful carnivore, so eat them I must. I’m 27, so a year seemed an appropriate amount of time to recover my ‘meat debt’ (as I see it). I had to consult my partner beforehand, to make sure they would be OK with it since I do a lot of the cooking. I was given pretty much unconditional support: “I don’t think I could eat genitals” was the only caveat.

The more I thought about it, the more conditions became apparent. What to do about eating out? What about fish? Where do I get offal from? What are people going to think? As for eating out, I try and be vegetarian in restaurants, or choose the offal on the menu. At friends’ houses, I just eat what I am given as I am not going to force anyone to cook me kidney. Fish has been a real education, because although I already avoided cod, I didn’t know very much about eating fish sustainably. Many hours of Trawlermen later, and periodic checks on the Marine Conservancy site, mean I know which fish and shellfish is safe to buy. The sourcing of offal is a trickier question, which I’ll return to, but in a nutshell – Leeds Markets. What do people think? Oddly (or instinctively) people with a vegetarian diet seem to grasp the concept the fastest. Some think it is deeply odd. Most look bemused, smile and change the subject.

An excellent side-effect of eating offal, is that in the early days (when I forgot that eating meat every day is really not what a body is designed for) I could afford to eat meat every day. Offal is cheaper (there are exceptions such as sweetbreads). Why is offal so much cheaper? If you eat meat, you will have watched the price of pork belly soar post-Gordon Ramsey. Why isn’t the demand there? Pound for pound there’s a lot more muscle meat on an animal than organ meat, so why is it declined by the majority of consumers? When and how did we become so squeamish? Several books on the subject concur that a fall in demand for offal was caused by rationing (or the lack of it) in World War 2. Offal wasn’t rationed, so a lot of households well into the 1950s would have been dependent on it as a protein source. The theory continues that once rationing ended, a societal reaction occurred where people didn’t want to be associated with wartime poverty. Cut to the present day, where interest in offal is increasing as people (like me) become more and more interested in ways of eating sustainably and inexpensively.

How sustainable is offal production?

This is obviously tied up with the much bigger question of whether we should eat meat at all. My view is quite simplistic – meat is part of everyday life in the UK and this will not change – if I can eat meat in a way that not only respects the animal, but reduces the impact that my consumption of it has, then this will at least make a contribution to a more sustainable future. This means buying locally, and trying to ensure the meat I buy hasn’t travelled far either. The majority of offal produced in the UK is exported across the world, one of the biggest markets being in China. By eating offal that’s due for export, this is a way of chipping away at an increase in food mileage from the UK. Animals will continue to be sent to slaughter, but by eating other parts alongside more regular cuts, it is insurance that the whole animals will be used (and cherished). If we can do that in a way that reduces the global impact of the meat we consume, then surely there is a case for sustainability.

At a personal level, why should you eat offal?

Ethics aside, many people argue vehemently for its nutritional value in the diet. I am not a nutritionist, nor am I undertaking some extreme Atkins-type diet; I belong in the middle ground of “everything in moderation (apart from pancakes at the appropriate time of year)”. However, here are some top dietary offal facts:

1.  Sweetbreads are high in vitamin C
2. Kidneys contain a variety of B vitamins
3. Tripe contains vitamin B12
4. Brains are high in phosphorous
5. Heart is high in iron and selenium.
6. Liver is high in vitamin A.

I am not saying that you can only get these vitamins and minerals from offal. I am saying that I was pleasantly surprised at how high the levels of the extra ‘good stuff’ were. There is a question of cholesterol associated with offal – some sources say that you would get more than your RDA from it, whereas others argue that although liver and kidneys are high in cholesterol, it is of the same type as that in shellfish and eggs. Which, the body is good at breaking it down. From the research I have done, I’m happy to have offal a couple of times a week, from a variety of sources. However, I would encourage people to come to their own conclusions.

 Where to buy offal

The hardest debate that I have tried to work out within myself is one that has run through several of my blog posts: is it better to support my local indoor market and buy a slightly lower quality of offal, or I should I look to suppliers from further afield that are organic? Kidney, liver and lungs are essentially filtration organs, which could easily build up artificial residues (so could any meat, but levels are higher in these parts). At the moment, I still do both. In fact, I’ve got a pretty full freezer drawer of offal (mostly donated it has to be said). I think the answer lies in finding a local, organic Leeds farm to supply me. Next year I am sure, will show a lot of changes to my meat-eating habits. My partner and I are considering buying a whole pig for the year. Nose to tail indeed.

This year of offal has affected me holisitically too. My love of cooking has been thoroughly re-kindled. I couldn’t live without my slow cooker. I’ve become healthier and use a lot more wholegrain foods, fruits and vegetables (soluble fibre to beat that cholesterol). Through eating meat respectfully, I feel have become more respectful myself.

If you fancy having a go at this offaltarian malarkey, please do get in touch on my blog at offallygood.wordpress.com. There are many issues I haven’t touched on, but would be delighted to discuss – veal and the dairy industry being a topical one.

Take my recent experience in my kitchen.   Our tiny workspace had become over-cluttered with so much stuff, I had little space left to cook and no enthusiasm to get creative.  I just couldn’t summon up the inspiration.  Yet, all my cookery books, baking tins and kitchen gadgets filled the worktops and cupboards, serving as a reminder of the good old days of adventurous culinary concoctions.

With my personal food waste on the rise and increased ready-meal packaging hitting my recycling bin, the crunch-point came.  It was time to declutter and put all that unused stuff to good use, sending the rest to a good home to release the creative space I needed.

However, while I was busy decluttering, I started to consider my relationship with stuff in general, its relevance to the wider issues of waste and the importance of revisiting a few home-truths.

Of course, we are now used to thinking about waste as rubbish that ends of in landfill, but as a friend recently highlighted, letting things languish unused in our cupboards and drawers is as wasteful as burying it in a big hole. He’s right.

Furthermore, anything that is wasted, either through binning or lack of use, is not just a waste of that product in itself, but a waste of the resources that have gone into making it.  You only need to look at Annie Leonard’s movie, The Story of Stuff, to see the wider picture.

Specific evidence of embedded resources is becoming increasingly apparent, with such news that it takes about 20,000 litres of water to produce even basic items such as a T-Shirt and jeans. And with recent data from WRAP, revealing that 1.4m tonnes of textiles are dumped in UK landfill each year, that’s an immense waste of resources and energy, as well as the material, that’s being buried. But even more worryingly, these figures account for textiles alone. They could easily be extended to any other type of unwanted belongings that end up in landfill to reveal the full extent of our wasteful landscape.

However, it is encouraging to see the UK responding pro-actively to this issue at all levels, across industry and within the communities.

For example local authorities are increasingly working in partnership with charities to create reuse facilities at local recycling centres.  Elsewhere we are also seeing commercial support from large retailers such as M&S, promoting the work of Oxfam and the importance of ‘shwopping’ our stuff instead of binning it.  These facilities provide new avenues to capture many unused items from members of the public who may never walk over the threshold of a charity shop or enter the world of local networks such as Freecycle.

The community sector is pulling together strongly too.  Where towns were once just dominated by the good old fashioned jumble sale and car boot sales, these days, thanks to organisations such as the Transition Town movement, you are just as likely to stumble across a Give and Take Day where you take along your unwanted possessions and have the opportunity to find other things you might need, all free of charge. Examples of tool sharing banks are also popping up within communities as well as emerging online networks such as The Borrowers and SharePals, which allow you to share, lend or hire all sorts of useful belongings.

But still, finding reuse and sharing opportunities for all this unwanted stuff is only half the solution.

Having recently worked hard to declutter just one room, I know that personally I would rather not find myself in such a situation of such wasteful clutter again.  Don’t get me wrong, we’re nowhere near being super-hoarders, just an average family home with very little spare space.

The problem is that stuff is just too easy to come by.  We grow up believing it’s what defines us, what empowers us, what educates us, entertains us and what makes us belong.  And yes, much of this is true, but there also comes a time when I believe that we have to understand the concept of enough, just as thought-leader John Naish outlines in his great book, Enough, breaking free from the world of more.

But to move forward and change the culture, we must all be ready to play a vital part and I firmly believe individuals can take the lead.  Just like recently, when I asked a good friend what her son wanted for his birthday.

“Nothing,” she answered.

That was a rare and refreshingly honest answer from a mother, who despite having the space at home to store it, acknowledges that they already have too much stuff, much of which goes unused.  So, instead of adding to the shelf of things, I took the children to our local theatre to see a kids’ comedian followed by a play in the local park. It was a fantastic afternoon that will add to the memory bank of good times.

It was a timely reminder that investing in good times seems a far better use of my personal finances than contributing to unnecessary clutter. With Christmas approaching, I will now be looking for opportunities to create fun experiences for families and friends. They don’t have to be expensive, some of the best creative ideas can be free.

And I shall also bear this in mind for myself, next time I’m tempted by a new cookbook or kitchen gadget that promises to turn me into a domestic goddess with a cluttered kitchen.  It’s definitely time to retrain my brain to understand that I can easily get new recipes from the Internet, borrow that much desired book from the library and still conjure up great food using the tools I already own.

The money saved can be easily put to better use instead of filling those cupboards with false hope.

But coming back to that inner domestic goddess, even though she’s more Pantomime Dame  than Nigella, I believe she may have finally emerged.

For having decluttered my tiny kitchen and re-homed lots of baking equipment, the first thing I did to celebrate was to make a chocolate cake, something that I’ve not had the physical space or inclination to do for months.

My husband almost fell off his chair in shock, as did the kids who couldn’t believe their eyes.

Not at the amount of flour sprinkled everywhere, I’ll have you know, but the surprise cake that welcomed them at the end of the day.

I guess, whichever way you look at it, that’s a living example that less is most definitely more.

Less stuff, more cake!

Perhaps that should be my new manifesto.

Top ways to waste less & live more

1. Ditch the habit of collecting DVDs & CDs.  Borrow, rent or switch to portable digital media instead and enjoy having more space at home and less clutter.
2. Swap material gifts for cinema or theatre visits, or treat the family to an annual membership of an organisation\charity that they support.
3. Don’t keep hold of unused stuff.  Re-home or recycle instead. Allow a couple of hours a day to target a specific room, sort the stuff into separate boxes and commit to relocating it out of the house by the end of the week.
4. Learn five recipes that you can create off the top of your head.  It makes home-cooking quicker and easier than having to pore over a recipe book each time.
5. Every time you are tempted into buying that next new thing, ask yourself if you really need it, then try living without it for a week, a month or longer.

Read more from Karen at The Rubbish Diet including the latest update on her recent kitchen declutter, where there was surprisingly very little thrown out to landfill.

Smoked Haddock, Lancashire Cheese and Spring Onion Fishcakes

Serves 4

A right thrifty recipe that could be made from scratch using fresh fish or made using any leftover cooked fish and potato from a previous meal, making it the perfect credit crunch lunch. I use smoked haddock in mine which I feel gives the cake extra depth. Calling it a cake always makes me laugh as it gives me flash backs to Peter Kay’s Garlic Bread/Cheesecake sketch. Fish Cake anyone????

You’ll need…

Leftover mashed potato or 2 Maris Piper Potatoes-peeled and boiled until soft

150g Smoked Haddock fillet

2 tablespoon cream

1 clove garlic-crushed

50g Lancashire Cheese – crumbled

4 spring onions chopped fine

25g plain flour

1 egg-lightly beaten

25g dried white breadcrumbs

Vegetable oil for frying

To Serve

Mixed salad leaves

Diced tomato

Chopped shallots

1. Mash the potato through a ricer so there are no lumps.
2. Place the haddock on a small baking tray and pour over the cream and garlic. Roast in a hot oven for 3-4 minutes until it starts to flake. Remove from oven and leave to cool. Once cool flake all the fish.
3. Mix together the potato, flaked haddock, spring onions and cheese. Season to taste.
4. Form into 4 ‘cakes’ and then roll in the flour, egg and then the breadcrumbs.
5. Deep fry in some hot oil 180° for 2 minutes until a light golden then place in a hot oven 180° for 6 minutes.
6. Serve hot with some mixed leaves and a tomato and shallot salad if desired

www.nuttersrestaurant.co.uk

The thinking is simple: we have stuff we don’t use all the time, if we share it with others we share the cost and save the planet. It’s not new, we were doing it for years in the small communities that we lived in – we called it bartering.

Alas, society changed and communities began to fragment to the point where we don’t know our neighbours and it mainly died out. While there are amazing local organisations doing great work on all sorts of projects, I want to look at how localised movements can become national and international communities of sharers simply by connecting people.

Technology has changed everything. We now build communities and networks on areas of common interest with the click of a mouse. Even better, these communities have an inherent balance of supply and demand. Small movements become behemoths and fundamental behaviour changes can take place.

Couchsurfing and Gumtree have been joined by the likes Airbnb or Onefinestay, meaning thousands of people use others’ spare rooms instead of staying at more expensive and inefficient hotels. Companies like Whipcar and Zipcar make running a car affordable, with the former allowing you to rent your own out to others. ParkatmyHouse then saves you money on somewhere to park on your journey across town.

Don’t like the idea of strangers in your house? A new company Storenextdoor are experimenting with turning your spare room in to your street’s storage locker – fully insured, cheaper and meaning that you get value out of the empty space.

All of these have one thing in common. They’re all “start-ups” which have leveraged the power of the internet and the interests of existing consumers to make life easier and more affordable. Bertie & Bean started with the realisation that eBay was a real pain for young parents thanks to the fees and faff with packaging and that Freecycle was amazing but they didn’t deliver. Kids grow out of clothes way too fast and even with the best of intentions parents accumulate bags and bags of them.

Eighteen months on and thanks to the amazing help and support from all corners, we are now the first peer to peer exchange where senders don’t pay, print or weigh anything, let alone have to find a box or bag for their stuff. By taking the “hard work” out we hope that more and more people get use from items before they go for recycling, or worse the landfill.

If you’ve got a great idea, then just type “startup event” in to Google and then go along to one. You’ll find some people there that can help you bring your vision to life and others with the money and the contacts to help you on your way. Changing the way that we think about consuming is a big job, but it’s vital to our survival, both economic and environmental.

Feel free to explore any of the below ideas (some are being done elsewhere already):

• Rent out private bikes to people when you’re not using them
• Car pooling to airports for holidays and single travelers (have you paid for airport parking recently?)
• Buddying with drivers to give lifts to others in major cities (make sure you vet both parties)

A list of Collaborative Consumption Companies Worldwide

Complicity and agency

There do need to be more stringent regulations that ensure manufacturers take greater responsibility for the waste they generate – something as robust as the EU’s recently updated Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive for the electronics industry. And local councils need to contract companies that will recycle, reuse or compost all waste. This is something that the more active among us can push for directly through the various channels available to us – be it through our elected representatives or via a lobby group. But we can all show a bit of consumer muscle and tell companies what we expect from them by simply asking what they’re doing about their waste – the instant we buy from a company however, it becomes our waste.

Asking – in person or by e-mail – is the important part. But sharing your findings on Twitter offers activists and clicktivists the opportunity to highlight a company’s shortcomings, as well as promote any commendable efforts, with millions of people – there are 10million Twitter users in the UK alone. I have had several ‘open’ responses from companies on Twitter, revealing how they track and respond to what is being said about them, including big chains like Pret a Manger, Specsavers, Tesco and Sainsbury’s. I think that #AsktheQ encourages companies to be more transparent about their activities – for what is being done, what isn’t, and what plans companies have to do more. Not everything can be achieved overnight but by encouraging firms to tell us what their sustainability targets are and then tweeting about them, we can better hold them to account.

Opportunities for collaboration and piggy-backing

My approach tries to be collaborative and I am always on the look-out for opportunities to work with (especially influential) individuals and organisations. I believe that fundamentally, asking questions that challenge the status quo forms the basis of any campaign that calls for change, so #AsktheQ can be integrated into any initiative that taps into consumer power. This is why I am supporting Waste Watch’s ‘Waste less, Live more’ week and the Soil Association’s ‘Organic September’ campaign because they are consumer-focused and contain clear environmental messages.

Last month I saw that European Commissioner for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Maria Damanaki had written a blog on the importance of asking about the provenance of the fish you buy, to ensure it’s sustainably sourced. So I tweeted about that. And the Environmental Justice Foundation campaigns against human rights abuses and environmental degradation linked with shrimp farming so I retweeted their suggestion that shrimp-eaters ask where their prawns come from, with the #AsktheQ hashtag.

There are also annual days or weeks of global or national importance such as World Water Week and National Zero Waste Week, and the Feeding the 5k food waste events, which all offer opportunities to piggy-back on other hashtags. I have also been putting questions to high-profile, major events organisers like London 2012 and Edinburgh’s Festivals about their sustainability targets and their sponsors’ environmental commitments. And my bread and butter is news items that I can link in with, for example the proposed single-use plastic bag levy in England – consumers can ask companies whether they offer non-plastic alternatives and if the local council in that particular area recycles carrier bags (many do not). In fact, the possibilities are almost endless so I spend a sizeable chunk of my day on Twitter!

What you can do

So in addition to last week’s suggested #AsktheQ tweets to determine what our hidden waste footprint is, you might also want to put the following questions to companies:

1. Ask if the company has a waste minimization or reduction strategy and ask what their targets are.

2. Ask if a company stocks independently-certified, sustainably-sourced products and if not, what would incentivize them to do so.

3. If the information you’re requesting isn’t on the company’s website or in their latest CSR or Sustainability Report, ask them to publish it.

If you’re on Twitter tweet what you’re told, even if it’s an ‘I don’t know’, using the hashtag #AsktheQ. Where the company in question has a Twitter user account, use the correct @name so they are alerted to you mentioning them.