Showing posts with label Waste (non compostable). Show all posts
Showing posts with label Waste (non compostable). Show all posts
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
A twist on home-brew
I'm a fairly green home-brewer, in both senses, I'm only onto my fourth ever brew. But despite this I have a tip that doesn't seem to be common knowledge. If you buy twist top beer, save the bottles and the caps. They can both be reused again and again, cutting waste and expense. I can now confidently say the caps work as I've started to drink my first brew and have experienced the pleasure of my ales being released under pressure, with a twist of the wrist.
Labels:
beer,
home-brewing,
recycling,
Waste (non compostable)
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Consumption (or, it's Permablitzing time!)
So far I've been impressed with David Graeber's book, Possibilities. His first essay, "Manners, Deference, and Private Property: or Elements for a General theory of Hierarchy", has been used in various posts here over the past several weeks. His second essay concerns the very idea of consumption, and he naturally begins with some etymology.I fail to see how anything has changed since the fourteenth century. Waste and destruction have only intensified with population expansion placing greater and greater pressures on the Earth's ecologies. Graeber almost never writes using ecologic language, and I would guess he is an urban dweller who buys his food in from across the country and from overseas wrapped in plastic. However, his writing is nearly always suggesting an ecological revolution because he understands the toxic corollaries of twenty-first century capitalism, and where it has come from. Once we have a fair grasp of the pathologies of late-capitalism, it's time to turn to the solutions, as David Holmgren might say; it's time to permablitz the world.
The English "to consume" derives from the Latin verb consumere, meaning "to seize or take over completely," and hence, by extension, to "eat up, devour, waste, destroy, or spend". p.59
Graeber argues that if we were still speaking a fourteenth century dialectic a consumer society would mean 'a society of wastrels and destroyers'.
...wasting diseases "consumed" their victims: a usage that according to the Oxford English Dictionary is already documented by 1395. This is why tuberculosis came to be known as "consumption". At first, the now-familiar sense of consumption as eating or drinking was very much a secondary meaning. Rather, when applied to material goods, consumption was almost always synonymous with waste: it meant destroying something that did not have to be (at least quite so thoroughly) destroyed. p59.
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