Compost juice

Looks yummy, edible? yeah i thought so but couldn't bring myself to, I shall return with the right mindset. Why? perfectly good looking fruit, who needs a mindset to eat fresh fruit, well these close ups are misleading but show this food shouldn't be in compost bins. I guess it is better than going to landfill like most of the organic waste generated in New york. The only reason many of the recycling projects have begun is economic and I feel that is the case here, cheaper than sending it to landfill. Time to write to wholefoods with their business model in mind as i can think of many profitable uses for this waste. Control costs, reduce waste, maximize profits, that's what it is all about. So the strawberries could become; jam, coulis, ice-cream, sorbet, shortcake, parfait, mousse, ok i have laboured my point. Yes all these uses require a labour input and different equipment, surely compost is worst case scenario even pig food is probably a small step up. The energy and resoucres wasted is ridiculous even before transprotation. So give it away, well they kind of are. Anyone can go rummage through these bins on Chrysite close to Houston and i intend to after seeing someone else save lettuce and
tomatoes before discovering fruit. Wholefoods is mad this fruit could be juiced and sold fresh at a premium, here inlies my plan, compost bin fruit juice for sale, nah probably free giveaways outside. Should be more interesting than the apples trees that dissappeared so fast that only two out of 15 apple remained for my photos. I dont know whether that makes it a success or animals ate them, hopefully hungry people but i really got to figure out a way to see how people interact with my trees.

East houston

Scoped out some trees and if i can bear the cold, -4C i am going to do three trees with 5 apples each 2 of which are in black plastic, represents rubbish (trash for all you yanks) bags and the 40% of food that consumers waste. Incredible figure i think almost half of what we buy may as well be donated to the inefficiencies of capitalism. Shows the world has no shortage of food just big problems with over production and transportation logistics. I am targeting Wholefoods bowery as i am interested in their waste stream, they are involved with Action waste a company with a good compost service and i have noticed there bins on the street. I think with the image wholefoods like to portray it is a good candidate to strive for innovation in sustainable food systems.The positive publicity potential is huge so options i am putting forward are promoted public access to compost dispostal, buffet item fit for human consumption but not sale go to homeless shelters, non compostable food waste goe to pig farms and fish waste to local fish farming projects. Will see how it is recieved and who know maybe they are doing some good things, just not blowing their own trumpet for how good they are.

Moving into serious teritory

I have been scoping out options for the next hanging. East Houston is where it has to happen, I like the idea of putting one up outside wholefoods but the trees are far from ideal. I am pursuing the freegan aspect with the next two trees i plan to hang food from. Tonight if i can deal with the cold i am doing the apple in a rubbish bag tree, then the next one i am excited about. I am going to go recover some edible waste from out side supermarket and hang them. Fruits of the streets of New York City. Wondering if anyone will feel comfortable to pick this tree, think it might feel destructive. Dont want to include a sign but feel i need a way to get my concept across clearly.

bad locations

Some of my placement was poor, as my main goal is to get people to notice and invoke thought. Today i picked a tree, plenty of people saw, still no one has approached me, either in installing or picking. I picked because no one else was and it worried me they might get wasted. Also it happened I was asked to make a cake for a student baby shower so I think i will call it a hung apple cake and see how many people bite or maybe urban spiced apple.

Apple logo

I make the connection between our flawed food systems and consumer behavior. Produce is rejected for naturally occurring odd shapes. The apples I brought were all seconds going cheap at the green market. The consumer will not pay top dollar for imperfections but many are more than happy to take imperfections for a discount. Supermarkets strict specifications are required because the consumer will not buy the ugly fruit unless it is cheaper than the rest. My next mission is to find out about what happens to the produce a supermarket rejects. I assume animal feed and wasted.

A bite, well two bites

Was happy to see someone enjoyed my efforts outside the apple store. Laughed and felt stoked, can I now claim to have collaborated with another street artist. Off to take a photo, been raining since I saw it so hope it is surviving. Am conflicted as I am almost certain this apple will now be wasted.

apple store

The second installment went down in a much busier location last night. For fun I did a few trees outside the apple store. It added another element to the project. I have found the type of tree is important for the look and how many people notice. Many of the apples were already picked this morning but i have no idea who picks them or what happens to them. I have witnessed many people stop to notice but want to see a picker. I think I may have annoyed some street vendors with my placements and am concerned the apples may be getting wasted. I need to work on my reasoning, my most important one being creating awareness of the unnecessary still eadible food waste sitting on the street. So I am thinking of putting a apple in a mini rubbish bag and hanging it.

My other reasoning is I felt cool when I saw people stop to ponder my silly creation. Also I choose some of the newly planted one in a million trees, part of the cities "going green" plan, as I already said why doesn't New York plant a urban orchid. My final justification for decorating trees is reminding people about the process of eating.

Urban orchard

The apples got picked, only one remains.

sullivan street orchard

Will anyone pick an apple? Will anyone notice?

Apple tree

I have decided to make a tree an apple tree. Why? Many reasons....
Starting with reminding people about the food chain. Then hoping to make people think about food on the street, everyone is talking about rooftop gardens. Why not roadside orchards? Next to see if people are willing to pick food from off the streets, hopefully leading to increased thought on the waste that enables freeganism. Another aspect is promoting the numerous green market varieties available, this is where i intend to purchase my tree apples. The hardest part due to my waste obsessive nature is to make people feel comfortable enough to pick and eat one. Seem like a street art project for the lower east side but may experiment with soho first.

What can we do?

After a brief stint in a commercial kitchen again I am left pondering a way to reduce waste. The top end fine dining establishments have good margins so only worry about wasting high cost product. The overworked chefs finish a 6 day 70 to 80 hour work week and have to do the weekly clean down. Involving cleaning/throwing out the fridges, mainly prepped produce that is currently good. Just hours ago it would have been a component in a $120 meal but now it is headed for landfill. Similar practices going on at the other thousand restaurants in Manhattan combine to produce tonnes of wasted waste. This is a resource still fit for human consumption, pig food, compost, biogas or for something for anyone able to figure out the logistics. A legitimate fear, lost sales, causes much of the retail waste. Who will buy a sandwich at 930pm if they know it is free at 1000pm. The reality at many Manhattan supermarkets as long as you are willing to pull your sandwich out of a trash bag on the curb.

Food on the curb

If all the good... well edible food discarded daily could speak up about its mistreatment. What would it say? Does food actually want to be eaten? Well it sounds better than rotting or being discarded. After experiencing a Freegan trash tour I have become very concerned about the nightly calories bagged and tossed out to the curb. What a shame this resource is destine for landfill

True cost plan

I think a product's price should reflect it's true cost to society, what a delight it would be to read of implementation in the The New York Times, Saturday, July 4, 2009.

Fall

I have been disciplined at home, separating and storing organic waste in a mini fridge in our mini apartment. Then 2 or 3 times a week dropping the compost off at union square, a 15 minute walk. The reduction in waste is very noticeable and some of the time consumed is offset because the trash doesn't stink so doesn't need to be taken out every night.
I feel more involved in the nutrient cycle when I return kilos of peelings and coffee grinds to the market. Frequenting the market has helped me become more connected with seasonal food, I am like many chef saddened that the tomatoes, any day now will be done. It is a difficult time of year for the seasonal chef to come to terms with, goodbye warm bright abundant spring and summer stalls and welcome snowy apples and squash, the new inspiration
My eagerness to be part of a complete nutrient cycle unfortunately does not always carry through to my work. A shame as I am responsible for purchase and preparation of much larger quantities of food. Why don't I make a bigger difference? the situation, the plague of only being willing to go so far. The effort reward trade off because the reward is only personal satisfaction I am only willing to give up so much time. For two people the effort is minimal for twenty or thirty it requires a great deal more. My weak excuse was logistics last time, it was achievable but difficult (30 peoples food waste in a mini fridge? no, a 3 stop 2 hour public transport mission?no) as always the biggest challenge was to educate crew that waste that doesn't financially effect you is still something to try and minimize.

How long til my lappie is junk

It pisses me off that when I buy a laptop it has been designed to be obsolete junk in well about 5 years. I have only owned my first laptop for just over two but already desperately want an upgrade, those super thin postable ones are super cool and less of a pain to lug around the world but unfortunately that doesn’t quite justify it quite yet.

While in Guatemala I had a system failure and must have been the only person ever to go into get it fixed that said yes I do have everything backed up. Amazingly I only lost a few, like five photos.

Now I am running a Spanglish system, extra useful for the continuing error messages and other notices popping up around the place because I don’t even need to try understand if it might be important to understand them a task far beyond my bad English and worse Spanish.

Back to it pissing me off, it doesn’t need to be like this and shouldn’t as far as I am concerned this is another criminal act like wasting food. I try to continue with out of date technology for as long as I can examples I was traveling with tapes when the first ipod came out, my film camera was taped shut while my friends showed me photos instantly. I continued to fight for the mysterious joy of developing, paying more than my camera was worth to develop a roll. Ok cell phones I liked my brick so much that even when it switched off upon receiving a call most of the time I resisted for far too long. Still the technological waste I have produced is unacceptable. Already at least three phones, like five tape players, one discman, one mp3 player and now I have two ipods. At least the size of the products designed to be toxic waste is getting smaller and a few people are thinking about making them less toxic. I am going to pick on the chip producers because they an easy target, intentionally redesigning the shape so instead of just changing a few pieces of your computer you have to buy a whole new machine.

Overproduction!!! In the seventies America decided to encourage farmers to grow as much as possible and ended up with a farming industry reliant on government payout. Michael Pollen explains that best and I will rant about that more in another post.

So I would love to hear that the presidential candidates had thoughts on this ludicrous form of production the under regulated free market has created. Surely the economy can grow and we can all get richer without designed waste and overproduction.

I love bluefin

Fatty bluefin tuna, the most prized and expensive raw treat so good that dangerous levels of heavy metals don't matter. I have flown this beautifully versatile protein in from around the world and feel privileged to eat and work with it. Such a mighty fish deserves respect, the biggest ever caught weighted nearly 1500 pounds.
The Mediterranean is the bluefin's spawning grounds. In 1990 Purse seiner technology enabled one fishing boat to trap 3000 tuna in one drop of the net, combined with tuna ranching (the business of fattening tuna) to continue the abuse of the EU's fisheries. After years of illegal methods and blatant disregard for quotas the EU's ministers continued to do too little too late. This June the purse seiners (70% of the catch) were banned albeit part way through the season when a reasonable quota had probably already been exceeded. This huge step met serious resistance, understandably as the price of bluefin has tripled with fish being worth as much as $100000 each.
Last year the fishery was also closed early, as more evidence of the lack of sustainability in this fishery emerged, it appeared that quotas had been set 800 tonnes over the replacement capabilities. The EU's fishing capacity is so large that this quota could be reached in just two days of fishing.
So what will happen next season? The demand will stop as people realize that eating this beautiful fish is not worth causing its extinction....no the Japanese demand isn't but maybe outside of the sushi kingdom. Gordon Ramsey has removed bluefin from his menus, it is easily replaced by yellowfin. More likely the fishery will reopen next year, more quotas will be ignored, illegal spotted planes will be used and nothing will be enforced let along held accountable or even face penalties. Even if the EU continues the ban throughout next season to promote recovery, the laws of economics means that other countries will increase supply to serve the continued demand.
No more bluefin for me.
Many fisheries are in danger, hopefully more companies like CleanFish can help show there is a better way to continue to enjoy the delicacies of the sea

Recycling Food

I hate throwing good food out, as my parents always told me there are people starving. I have become good at reinventing meals or recycling food. Unfortunately spoilt yachties aren’t satisfied always eating leftovers. So I had to get good at disguising what would normally go into the slop bucket as a brand new fresh made with love meal. My success is judged by how often I get compliments on the same food someone wanted to throw out the day before. After the meal is eaten and enjoyed I take great joy, maybe some pride, it can even be a little like 'i told you so, nah nah" but i think i just want them to feel bad for having wanted to waste good food .

Mould!!! Anything with mould or even slightly blemished fruit will not be touched. Easy, the fruit is guzzled back when liquefied and the moldy cheese is simple represented later cut to look nice, rather than making people sick I am probably strenghtening their immune systems. To date I have not been linked to any fatalities or had my food accused of causing a upset stomach.

One of my crew meal favorites is “jail house slop”, a crew member is like an inmate, living by someone elses rules, stuck on a boat living in cabins smaller than cells being served gourmet food, getting you clothes washed and folded everyday, well in some ways but it can definately feel like being a paid slave. Ok jail house slop, it involves piling whatever you don’t want to throw away (and is still perfectly edible) together with some sort of sauce and baking but most importantly it needs to be served in giant metal tray. Stuffed mushroom have been great for telling the crew that the delicious stuffing was yesterday’s snubbed vegetables. I do feel a bit absurd when I won’t throw out potatoes or rice and have reinvented something multiple times. Some enjoy my food recycling as it fondly reminds them of the forgotten waste not methods of parents or grandparents. Could food recycling be a start in moving away from the throw away society we westerners have embraced?

Why are we so willing to waste food? Is it because we have become so obsessed with food bacteria? Do we notice the quantity and value of the food we throw away? Laziness? Indifference?

Try saving all your organic waste for a day. Even when only cooking for two and trying not to waste anything I am amazed at the quantity of compostable waste I produce.

Food is energy so a sustainable efficient food system is the first step to sustainable efficient energy systems.

Xela

El Quetzal, by far the best of three schools I attended in Guatemala with only 4 students it was very personal. With great activities, excellent teachers and an onto it director. It highlighted the advantages of small scale operations.

My introduction to Xela was some what ummm difficult, strange or challenging! Getting there involved two over stuffed chicken busses (I was so happy that someone actually had chickens on one) and a shuttle bus, actually a van they manage to shove 20 people into, I am too tall to enjoy any comfort traveling this way, after an hour with my ear pressed the roof of the van the relief of arriving was like being let out of a torture chamber.

Then I discovered Amebas! It kind of felt like have great abdominals but caused by a gaseous stomach, I am interested to see if I now hold the record for the most burps in a day. Amebas are a strange way to make friends, anything in common works it seems, it also seems everyone in this town has had or has these stomach rumbling bugs. Everyone has some advice or remedy ranging from starvation to alcohol poisoning. I choose to go to a doctor, after a week of probiotics, no booze and heaps of yogurts I returned to eating dodgy street food. No drinking is hard when socializing and caused difficulties when I was at a bar and not willing to drink beer with some locals.

From drugs to drunks, which is worse cheap booze or drugs? The local rum is some what of an icon; Quetzalteca Especial may have potential as an alternative to fossil fuels at only a few dollars a liter. With liquor this cheap and potent it isn’t surprising to see numerous borrachos passed out on the streets at all hours of the day. It is easy to understand this escapism behavior when I think about the barely existent prospects of the desperately poor people here. Life is so hard with little hope of hard work bringing much improvement. Saving money is tough, my teacher had a job offer in Latvia and needed to save enough for a ticket, his strategy was to eat only one meal a day, and I am astounded when I am able to eat for under 2 dollars at a restaurant. Five weeks of typical Guatemalan eating and I felt slightly malnourished but mainly craved fresh vegetables that didn’t have all the goodness and texture boiled out of them, a quick trip to the market, an hour in the kitchen and it felt great only having one starch on my plate.

Oh I forgot to mention that I encountered three storms and it rained constantly for my first week turning the roads into rivers!

Drugs are available here too but the type of tourist is slightly more interested in studying Spanish and volunteering than indulging in illicit substances.

http://www.entremundos.org/ is the biggest organizer of volunteer projects but many others are also doing some good work. The most interesting projects I found were recycling initiatives one involving filling plastic bottles with rubbish and using then as building materials. Another project in Zunil is trying to change the local’s habit of dumping rubbish into the river by reestablishing a once successful composting project that failed because of its success. It started making money, that caused infighting and it fell over. There must be forms of monetary incentives to encourage recycling, something like the returning of glass bottles. For composting the suppliers of raw materials could receive credits for compost for each kilo of organic matter supplied effectively turning the collection of organic waste into a form of income.

Wasting food is criminal!

I am dead serious and am trying to figure out a way to punish it. Some research in England has found 40 percent of all brought food is wasted! Nearly half of everything you buy to eat just goes down the drain or in a landfill. Not only are we wasting heaps of money but all that energy in the production and transport.

I would like to know a basic conversion for that banana you let go rotten, something like it the same energy as a light bulb for how ever many hours.

I have food waste perspective from working in restaurants and on boats, a mother who hates to waste anything and another who is more obsessed with things going off.

Working on boats I have spent around 15 thousand dollars on feeding around twenty people for a month. I try to reinvent and reuse all the leftovers but no one cares and all are so spoilt, I guess at least a quarter of what I buy and make goes into the bin. In some restaurants the food waste is given to pig farmers, very few compost and the majority nothing with this resource.

The freegans, it is possible to live off the waste of society. On one trip around Manhattans supermarkets at around 10pm I took home hundreds of dollars of perfectly good food. You feel strange about eating out of rubbish bags but it is astounding what you find. This is an example of the flaws in the capitalist economy, why isn’t this food being sold at a discount or given to needy? Because it might effect the profits if people can get stuff cheaper or free. The food being wasted everyday in Manhattan is sad when you see so many even in the city itself struggling to survive.

Living with a Guatemalan family I feel bad leaving a grain of rice on my plate even when meals are well carb heavy is an understatement. Pasta, potatoes, tortillas, beans, bread and rice all appear in some combination most meals.

The only other time I survived on carbs was as a student when we only had rice pasta and potatoes so my flat mate decided to cook all of them.

I am told in some under educated Mayan villages families face malnutrition when they are perfectly capable of having a balanced diet. They sell all their vegetables, eggs, milk and other produce to buy beans and corn.

Thinking in terms of green house gas and carbon reduction, reducing food waste seems to be an overlooked issue. How can a tax be imposed on food waste? Supermarket should be charged for disposal of foodstuff, something that reflects the energy loss and encourages efficient use of the resource. Be it composting or some form of making use of the energy.

There seems to be so many options to make use of this resource all we need is some legislation to force our lazy asses into it.

Gautemala thinking

Habits are hard to break as anyone who has cursed themselves with smoking knows. It gets interesting when you need to change you lifelong toiletry methods. The countries infrastructure is inadequate, how can an entire country end up with a sewage system that can’t take paper? What do you do when early one morning after a night of a few too many drinks you forget? Not thinking straight standing over it assessing my options I go to fish it out and realize that with never work but am to scared to flush…. Will it cause the whole town’s sewage system to block up? Oh man what do you do?
The smell does help you remember usually.
Well maybe this is my knew obsession, the rubbish strewn everywhere does bother me but I think it is like cigarettes no one knows better or cares enough to change those habits. The lake shore, the fields of corn, the town is a collage of plastics. Other villages around the lake are much cleaner and even have simple forms of recycling.
My trip across the lake was great a small boat with a bit of wind and chop, I knew we were in for interesting one, so put my snowboarding jacket on. Halfway across I was holding a sheet of plastic and loving it looked around to see others not so enthusiastic and I couldn’t stop laughing.
I finished a week of struggling to teach kids English, hard when my English is terrible and my Spanish worse. On the final day I finally managed to keep their attention for all of an hour, rewarding.

In this village to ask for Maria is a code for drugs. Almost everything is available very cheaply at nine in the morning I was offered coke walking along the main drag. Mayan women seem to prefer drug dealing which is easily understandable when the other option for many is to walk the streets day and night selling cakes. Some of the cake selling women have figured out a way to make a little more per sale. It has become an employment option because of the type of tourists attracted to the area rather than the availability. People have even tried to create Thailand style full moon parties amazingly and impressively the community saw the influence on its youth and requested them to stop, for now they have stopped.

In a village full of problems I see hope. The Mayan family I lived with had a plan that was wonderful to hear, they only had two kids and didn’t want anymore, they intend on putting their kids through university. The father enjoyed telling me his plans and obviously asks everyone for their thoughts on his plans. He has an organic coffee farm involved in fair trade and is building more rooms on top of his house so they can accommodate more students. What do you think of his plan?

The dependency on tourism bothers me an economy can not solely rely on the tourist dollar. The situation is fragile and I have had many discussions with locals about “where are all the tourists” the state of the world economy is this why? The Spanish teaching industry is booming and surely this is a good thing increasing the education among the community. Only if communities don’t become dependant, is it sustainable? Well definitely more so than continuing to fill the lakes and rivers with untreated sewage!

Super green markets

The “green market” in Union square is one of my favorite things in Manhattan. I love it as a chef who had lost touch with seasonality, my excuse being it is all the wrong way around, Christmas equals summer outside eating.
Fresh food tastes great and the interaction and trust developed with the purveyors reminds me of my favorite food, fish that I caught, cleaned and cooked. There is a great loss when food is in tidy packaging on neatly stacked shelves, the reality of where that food comes from. I love the interaction markets encourage, the way you relate to your food much better than in a supermarket. Also on a social aspect you are far more likely to talk to people at a market or local store than at a supermarket.

How green can the market be? I felt very good about myself when I managed to produce a “zero waste” meal for two. I brought my own bag, Tupperware for the scallops, I was tempted but refrained from removing the rubber band from the asparagus.
In my time in New York I was astounded with the abusively excessive packaging and daily waste. I have discovered it is very hard to live a minimal impact lifestyle and have a huge respect for those who endeavor to. Recycling systems are confusing and it is such a hassle to separate compost able waste let alone taking it to drop off spots. You have to be willing to sacrifice a lot of time and effort and many of us know how easy it is to forget the bloody reusable shopping bags.

Does the economics of it make sense? Is it “Greener”
Sure local food travels less but all this mass production stuff we got into had reasoning behind it, efficiency. One big truck or ten small trucks and vans? The whole competitive advantage concept, some places grow apples more efficiently and others bananas. We trade because it improves efficiency and therefore our standard of living.
New Zealand can produce a pound of butter and ship it to the UK for less energy than it takes to produce a pound of butter in the UK!
Why will many people pay more for local food? I think some sort of patriotism. I will often pay a little more for the familiarity of NZ products.

It isn’t easy to grow food in Manhattan so I wonder about the economic sense of trying but am torn in many ways. I love the idea of rooftop gardens, growing you own food is very rewarding, cities contain more pollutants than farms will this mean the food grown is effected? The time and effort possible transferred from more productive work
Wasting food
We consume for sustenance but modern cuisine has moved so far away from the basic human need to eat as fuel for survival. Mainly for indulgence and speed or laziness
The quantity of food that is thrown out is unbelievable! Right through the range of producers and consumers, restaurants, supermarkets and households all waste stupid amounts of food. The economic system encourages waste, people are laziness, greedy and it waste is accepted by western society.
I think we need to discourage food waste possible by finding a system of making the waster pay for the costs of that waste. I can see this in a restaurant scene when the waiter clears a table a charge is added to the bill for the proportion of the wasted food.
BBC intersting links

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4444429.stm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/costingtheearth_20050414.shtml
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/devon/7334916.stm

Human behavior in a throw away society

Public space recycling has potential to create a significant reduction in waste. It’s estimated that as much as 50 percent of rubbish in public space is recyclable.

Thinking about it, most of the waste I produce in streets and parks is drink bottles and cans. Problem, putting recycling bins in place doesn’t seem to work very well.

Walking through central park on a nice day I brought a bottle of water, drank it and wondered about my options of disposal. While thinking about the trade off between how bad I would feel not recycling verse how far I was willing to carry a unwanted bottle around I came across a rubbish bin overflowing with bottles and just as I was about to add to the pile I noticed a alternate option. Right next the overflowing pile of plastic was a recycling bin. I disposed of my bottle happily, feeling environmentally conscious. Assuming the effort and all other factors were equal in all aspects of this choice why is the “bad” landfill bin overflowing instead of the “good” recycling bin.

Putting my bottle in the recycling bin made me feel better about throwing out, I don’t think I am alone in this feeling and I am sure that if confronted or questioned about their preferences on this issue the overwhelming majority would choose to recycle a bottle.

Two bins side by side, why would anyone knowingly choose the option that is worse for their environment? The consequences of this choice are barely apparent at the time of disposal, although in this case as the bin was overflowing I see minimal consequence.

Habit, we are not used to having the option? Indifference possible because it is a drop in the bucket, so much waste produced what difference does one bottle make? Is incentive required? Monetary? Social responsibility?

I am willing to make some sacrifice in the name of being green but at some point the benefit ceases to outweigh the cost. The amount of sacrifice will differ for everyone but the more visible (or is it understandable) the cost becomes the better.

More people willing to make greater sacrifice.

Make it easier (reduce sacrifice) more people willing to recycle.

Thoughts on how to improve the use of public space recycling bins

Society progressing to a state where it becomes a social taboo to be seen irresponsibly disposing of waste.

Targeted education, many people don’t see that the option exists even when it is right in front of them. Inform us!!!! We care about the planet and want to do our bit

Talking rubbish bin! Yes it sounds absurd but could serve as a reminder to help people break the habit of not caring about what they do with there waste. “Hey you could recycle that” yes I imagine it would be very annoying.