Bin Inn!

Bin Inn is here! Well, in Lower Hutt anyway.

It's a mainstay of the Rubbish Free Year bloggers because everything is in bulk and you can take your own reuseable containers. I always felt envious because there was no such thing here.

But a branch opened at 418 High St about six months ago. I stumbled upon it in the weekend and had a quick look around. The things you can buy there in bulk! Pasta! Flour! Detergents! Lollies! Lentils! You can grind your own peanut butter. It is a plastic-free wonderland.

It's open on the weekends Sat 8.30-4 and Sun 10-3. Next time I'm out that way I'll be taking a clutch of my own bags and containers and filling everything up.

Amazing green wall

This amazing green wall on the Caixa Forum Museum stopped me in my tracks in Madrid.

After I got home I discovered this is a vertical garden by Patrick Blanc. It was featured in the Listener in early July.

It seems like kind of a fad, but I like that one of his aims is to increase biodiversity and that it runs on wastewater and acts as insulation for the building.

Windmills

I quickly snapped this pic from the train (I was a couple of hours north of Madrid) because I was so excited to see a windfarm. But then if turned out they were everywhere - all over Spain, France, England and Scotland.

Heartening, really.

Serious recycling in Spain

This is Bilbao and the most awesome recycling bin I've ever seen: a recycling bin for domestic vegetable oil. Householders can deposit their used cooking oil here and it's used for biodiesel to power the public buses.




Brilliant, huh?

Recycling in Spain

I was really impressed with the recycling facilities in Spain. In most of the places I visited there were recycling bins on the street (the photo is from San Sebastian on the north coast). Even more impressive, along with the bins for glass, paper and plastic, there would also often be a bin for compost.

I talked to someone at the environmental centre in San Sebastian and he explained that they have these bins instead of a door-to-door collection system the way we do. People in the surrounding apartments bring their rubbish and recycling out to the bins on the street.

The main trunk line

My main effort at making my Europe trip a little bit greener was to commit to not making any domestic flights. Everywhere that I reasonably could, I took the train.

So, the very first thing I noticed was that of all the places I wanted to travel (Spain, France, the UK) the only train journey that didn't have a scheduled service every day was between Wellington and Auckland.

That's right - the train between two of our main centres only runs three days a week in the winter. How crazy is that? I guess so many people fly instead that it's not viable to run more often.

But I reckon the train service is really valuable. It creates about 1/8th the carbon emissions of flying. It would be terrible if it stopped running altogether.

So I'm glad that I put my money into supporting it.

And, damn, it's a beautiful journey.

Europe

I'm just back from two months in Europe.

First up, I want to say right away that in no way do I think that flying halfway around the world is environmentally friendly. That's around 8 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, chickees. About as much as the average New Zealander emits in a year. Or, shockingly, around eight times one of the suggested annual quotas if you divide allowable emissions equally among the world's population.

However, since I needed to go the UK on family business, I was bound to be interested in thinking about environmental stuff while I was there, right?

So I'm going to share a bunch of posts on a tourist's view of sustainability in Europe.