Soft plastics recycling bag

Since late last year, it's been possible to recycle soft plastics in Auckland.  As well as actual plastic bags, you can recycle all sorts of things - small things like muesli bar and sweet wrappers and bulky things like bubble wrap.

The recycling is collected at supermarkets*, rather than with the other kerbside recycling, so we needed a separate container to accumulate it in.  Initially we used a plastic bag sock, but that wasn't very suitable: small things fell out, and transferring the contents into a plastic bag to put into the recycling container was a pain.  I realised I wanted a way to accumulate the recycling in a container that could itself be recycled (to eliminate the double-handling we'd been doing), was quite capacious (to accommodate bulky things like bubble wrap) but that had a firm base and a tight top (so little things didn't fall out).

*find your local collection site here - they're in Auckland, the North Shore and Hamilton, with hopes to expand throughout the country over the next few years.

Inspired by the rubbish bin we had when I was a child (which held heavy paper bags securely in place by folding the top of the bag under a rigid ring), this is what I came up with.

   
A bag that contained a regular supermarket plastic bag, with the handles of that bag folded over a rigid ring and secured by a loop of elastic.  When the bag is full you tie the handles of the supermarket bag together then remove it through a zip at the bottom.

On not paying the Living Wage

As I've mentioned here before, I'm generally a big fan of paying people a Living Wage: i.e. enough to provide for the basics of food and accommodation, alongside participation in the community.  However, two things have recently given me pause.

Firstly, this documentary on RNZ National, about a company in Southland who hire staff with intellectual disabilities to sort rubbish for recycling.  The company has a minimum wage exemption, enabling them to hire about 30 people to do work that could just as well be done by three people and a fancy machine.  If they had to pay them the minimum wage, the business wouldn't be economic, and they'd buy the machine instead.  But, by getting a minimum wage exemption, they've been able to greatly improve the quality of life of 30 people (all of whom waxed lyrical about the joys of having a job), whilst still getting the job done.  So, by allowing this employer not to pay the minimum wage (which is significantly less than the Living Wage), we, as a society, have greatly improved the quality of life of those people.  We've also, presumably, reduced the amount we need to pay them collectively: topping up their wages surely costs less than paying them a benefit.

Feijoa paste

Having seen feijoa paste for sale in a fancy deli last year,  I decided to have a go at making my own.  This recipe was all over the internet, but it looked awfully fiddly, so I decided (encouraged by this site) to simply use the guava paste recipe I invented a few years back.  It worked well!  It was pretty easy to do, and has a great feijoa flavour :-)

Professor Sir David MacKay

I was saddened to learn of the death 10 days ago of David MacKay.  He's the creator of two quite different resources that have been hugely helpful to me:

• Dasher - the computer program that is enabling me to 'type' this blog post using tiny movements of my mouse (I wrote about it some years ago here);
• Without Hot Air - the book (and associated blog) that taught me to always ask if the numbers stack up when it comes to climate and energy policy.

Both the resources I mention are available for free download at the above links.

When I realised the same David MacKay was behind them both, I emailed him my thanks and received a very kind reply :-)  I was sorry to hear of his death (particularly at the young age of 48) and to learn that he leaves behind him two very young children.  He seems to have been a kind and humble man, and he certainly made my world a better place.  I'm sorry that he doesn't seem to have known Jesus.

His Telegraph obituary is here, and you can follow his experiences with the cancer that killed him on his personal blog starting here.

A momentous day

This afternoon a friend who was visiting noticed a pretty special visitor feasting on our guavas!

A pair of gorgeous Kereru had come to visit!  It's been a couple of years since that's happened, but we do have a bumper crop this year.

And then, it was time to say goodbye to Sarah.  She's headed overseas for five months - to Thailand, then Canada and lastly the US.  You can follow her travels on her blog.

It'll take a while to get used to the bare shelves in the pantry and freezer...

Her freezer shelf is packed with empty milk bottles - cold air sinks, so hopefully this will save on power as the freezer won't have to cool down a new batch of warm air every time we open it.

How should we, as a church, spend "our" money?

Our church is currently considering a couple of big financial decisions.  This has got me thinking about the philosophy Martin and I apply to our personal finances, and whether or not the church's finances should be run along similar lines. I'd like to share here some of the considerations Martin and I make when setting our household budget, and the questions those are raising for me about the church's budget.  I'd be interested in your thoughts!

We try to take as our starting point that the money we have isn't really ours - it's God's.  He, after all, owns everything!  So we want to distribute the money He's entrusted us with in a way that honours Him: in a way that reflects both that we serve a God of abundance who desires good things for us and that our primary calling is to love both God and our neighbours with all that we have.

In terms of loving our neighbours as ourselves, it might be logical to try to keep no more money for ourselves to live on than what some 'global average person' has to live on.  After all, God loves us equally, and it's largely the global financial system - a construct of sinful humanity - that puts Martin in the top 1% of income-earners globally and leaves so many others so badly off.  However, doing that would also be the end of me: after all, in most of the world, someone as sick as I am would have died long ago.

A short visit to Serbia!

Ages ago, I noticed that the Pt. Chevalier Serbian Orthodox Church has a monthly bake sale.  Today, for the first time, we were able to go along.

 

The food all looked yummy, but I was really taken by the main sanctuary of the church.  I asked if I could take some photos.  They not only said 'yes', but two women generously took turns explaining it all to me.