Archive for the 'waste' Category

Do I buy it?

Published on 17 January 2007 in waste, navel-gazing, renungan, toys and world. 6 Comments

I’m really relieved that we’ve sold our house. It didn’t take that long, I suppose, given that we only put it on the market in October ‘06.

Once settlement’s taken place we’ll have more money than we’ve ever had before - at least for the split nanosecond before the bank takes its share. We will have a bit left that we can use to do things like buy a new fridge (ours is twenty years old and sounding very rattly) and a barbecue, to complement the nice outdoor area we have in our back yard.

We’ve also promised ourselves each a bit of money to play with (read: indulge ourselves). I am really looking forward to this. The only thing that remains a constant on this wish list is the Pelikan M450 Tortoise fountain pen that I have wanted coveted ever since I saw it. I don’t think it is even available in Australia so it is going to be a bit of a challenge importing it from overseas… The other challenge is going to be resisting the temptation to buy a few other pens so that I make the most of the shipping costs. Actually, I probably won’t be able to, given that the pen costs a bit (ranging from US$380 to US$450, depending who I get it from). Must investigate.

I don’t know what else I’ll do with the money, yet. We finally saw An Inconvenient Truth on Monday evening, which has given me a lot to think about, especially about Being A [Mindless] Consumer. Reading Dave Pollard’s response to the announcement of the Apple phone was also good. It’s too easy to forget about all the hidden costs of all those Bright Shiny Toys.

Findings

Published on 6 January 2007 in memorabilia and waste. 2 Comments

Tidying years of accumulated papers and assorted stuff, I’ve found all sorts of things I’d forgotten I’d kept.

Some are important things, like my birth certificate, from which I learn that I was born at 5:25am (is this why I’m a morning person?). I’ve also found my certificate of Australian citizenship - I became an Australian citizen on 18 May 1988. I wonder why I have never ever commemorated this date. Celebrations might be in order next year, though, because I will have been an Australian citizen for twenty years - longer than I ever was a citizen of Malaysia, now I think of it!

Lots of things with sentimental value - photos and old letters. I don’t have as many photos as I would like, but still quite a few, including many taken the year I spent in China, and some old photos “borrowed” from Mum’s collection. I really ought to go through them and sort them into some sort of order. Some are also very interesting, and I might scan and share them some time. I have a whole boxful of old letters and cards. Then email happened, and there is quite an obvious decrease in the number of letters I received. I certainly haven’t been as diligent about keeping the emails I’ve received. This may be a good thing in terms of storage, given the huge amounts of email we each generate, but I wonder, as I look back, what I will remember of this time and how much I will have to jog my memory.

I found the vet’s bills from the time of Baubles the Cat’s accident - she lost her tail eleven years ago! The item on the bill: “Amputation - $89.00″ made me pause.

I found lots and lots of old diaries, including two of jl’s (I’ll bring them with me to Sydney). No matter how “online” I get I still enjoy the practice of maintaining a paper diary. (Maybe, even if I don’t have a lot of letters, I will still have my diaries to look back on.)

I’ve thrown away bank statements, bills and receipts dating back all the way through to 1993. Fourteen years of holding on to these things is enough, I think. I don’t even know why I’ve kept them for as long as I have. Also gone: 90% of my university notes and papers. These, such as the illegible but strangely nice to look at notes written after an afternoon spent in the student tavern, are interesting to look at, but they have just been sitting in their respective boxes all these years, attracting silverfish. It has been very cathartic to throw away so much stuff. My room feels nicely empty now.

I have to hang my head in shame, though. Some days ago I blogged about the huge amounts of paper I’d accumulated in my office. Well - my home office is not much better. The picture shows the five stacks of paper - journal articles and stationery - I’ve squirreled away. As I said earlier, this year I am going to be a lot more careful about printing things willy-nilly. I’m also going to have to curb my stationery fetish and start using up all the note pads, note books and journals I seem to have accumulated.

As if to reinforce this point, I found, among all the stacks, a poster from the New Internationalist magazine: “A 20-step programme to help you kick your global-warming, energy guzzling habit”. Step number ten: “MINIMIZE PAPER USE” [emphasis mine]. The other points are useful too, of course, but the paper thing - sigh.

I also found a postcard depicting a variety of pen nibs. I’d definitely forgotten I had this! In the picture it’s perched on the bottom stack of papers.

Paper

Published on 19 December 2006 in waste and work. 4 Comments

So much for the paperless office. For the last week or so, in between my other usual tasks, I’ve been spending time tidying my office, and in the process have filled one whole 120 litre paper recycling bin, and am halfway through a second bin. I feel like I’m drowning in paper!

It’s so wasteful, and lest you think I’ve been responsible for creating every single sheet of that paper - printing each sheet out for myself - much of this paper was from meetings I attended, agendas, minutes, and assorted documents, all printed for members of the various committees. In my job I have the task of attending numerous committee meetings - teaching and learning, research and development, school board, collection development, team - they all generate paper.

Every time I do my annual tidy up, I ponder this waste, and wonder whether I should insist on just getting my meeting papers electronically, and bring the agendas with me on my PDA. I’m sure I would still collect a certain amount of paper from the documents that are tabled at meetings, but this would still cut down on the amount of paper quite significantly. The only problem with this is that I would be the only one who asks for the documents electronically, so the secretaries would have to remember to send them to me, instead of printing them out as they would for everyone else. (I’m not sure they would be happy about this, as I think it would be an extra task for them. Printing the agendas, on the other hand, would be routine - just set the photocopier to print, collate and staple twenty copies.)

I shouldn’t give the impression that I’m merely a passive receiver of paper. While much of the paper is meeting fodder, quite a lot of the paper that gets discarded is paper I’ve printed myself. Even if I can’t get the secretaries to stop giving me hard copy, I really ought to start with myself, and consider whether I really need every single thing I send to the printer. I seem to have a penchant for printing journal articles to read later. That’s my excuse, but printing the articles off seems to allow me to procrastinate and the actual reading may or may not happen. In the process I end up with yet more paper. The other excuse I make is that if I have the hard copy of the article I can annotate it - and yet, if I am honest with myself, very rarely do I actually annotate anything I read. Saving said articles on my thumb drive would probably be a better option - I don’t have any problems with reading things onscreen, and filling my thumb drive to capacity would be a good reminder that I haven’t read all those articles yet!

I also need to get over my impulse to Save-Things-Just-In-Case. This is how I end up with three or four year old documents that I couldn’t discard at the time, for whatever reason, and which I never ever look at or even remember the existence of.

The next thing I need to do is to resurrect my PDA. I stopped using it because it was playing up - occasionally the screen wouldn’t respond, or the whole thing would freeze - but I didn’t really investigate to see if there was something I could do to improve its performance.