Amazon’s reach and waste

January 25th, 2012

We are always glad to have suggestions for improvements at the Larches and rapidly decided we needed to get two new knives – a bread knife and cook’s knife – when our New Year guests commented about the existing ones.

Antique? Well not quite but old, pre stainless steel certainly and quick to rust, if not dried after use.

But the decision made us also think about how best to store all the knives for easy retrieval. So this last Sunday after a lunch time discussion of alternatives, we decided on a magnetic knife holder.

They work like magic. I’d always fancied one but we’d never had the right space for it.

So log on to Amazon – yes we could have one and at 3.32 pm an email confirmed the 40 cms long rack had been dispatched with free next day delivery.

As promised, the van drew up a little after 2.00 pm on Monday and the parcel was handed over and signed off.

Amazon had got the rack selected, packed and delivered to a country area in under 24 hours from a Sunday start. Impressive.

No complaints there. This is online shopping at its best and saved me a lot of time.

But the box (opposite) was a different matter!

Slitting it open I wondered first if there was anything there. Loads of brown scrumpled up paper tumbled out, but no sign of the rack.

Finally I found it at the bottom, well packed in its own box. It measured 2 x 5 x 47 cms, so it didn’t take long to work out the Amazon delivery box (11 x 35 x 55 cms) would have held easily 34 of the racks – if I had wanted that many!

And that scrumpled up paper? On inspection it turned into a long seamless sausage-like creation, which flattened out into one continuous length of paper over five metres long by 38 cms wide.

For just one knife rack they had needed, because of the over large box, a length of packing paper that stretched from the eaves of the cottage to the flower bed – as you can see in the photo at the top of the page.

I’m a fan of online shopping because it can save on ‘travel to search’ time and costs. But the calculations from this example about use of resources are pretty scary. Just a hundred similar Amazon deliveries would use up 500 metres of the packing paper, which would either be thrown away or recycled at best. How many trees do you need for this and for the over large packaging?

The knives look great now and I had them installed on the new rack by 3.30 pm on Monday. That’s good going – a 24 hour turn round for job completion is fast. But isn’t it time Amazon looked at its wasteful packaging policies? No gold stars here for good environmental practice.

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New roof for The Larches

March 6th, 2011

P1020106 Over the last five weeks The Larches has been surrounded by a girdle of scaffolding.   We’ve known we really needed to have the house re-roofed for over a year. Trying to hold many of the lower slates in place proved impractical. The result was leaking from the gutters especially at the back and the danger of slates falling in high winds.

A new year’s resolution got us finally to move! And when the roof was stripped the rotten soffits and some defective joists proved how right we were. 

It’s been interesting to pull back the curtain of time to get a glimpse of how the house was built over 125 years ago and to see how roofing techniques while modified, still retain much of the traditional practice. Perhaps the biggest difference comes with the weather and wind proofing. 

The old roof was sealed throughout by parging. This is a method of coating the batons and the undersides of the tiles with parget – a mortar of lime and horsehair. Nowadays this has been replaced with a much simpler and quicker method, where a breathable membrane sheet is secured under the batons and the slates are nailed to the batons.       

Fortunately the original Borrowdale slates (about 10 mm thick) were strong and of good quality, as Frank the roofer had predicted, and the majority could be resized and reused without breakage. In this way the vernacular style of a graduated roof can be retained with the largest slates being used at the bottom and the smallest (and shortest) ones covering the top rows of the roof. Replacement ones are primarily for the bottom rows.

Since modern slates are almost invariably thinner (to reduce costs), second hand Borrowdale slates, suitable for environmentally sensitive areas and similar to the ones we have, are hard to come by and now sell at a premium price of £3,000 a ton.

The photos below show the back roof ready for the slates, the roofers working up the rows from the bottom, the look of the completed roof after a chimney has been removed and finally the filled lorry after the scaffolders have spent a morning dangling acrobatically from poles as they dismantled the scaffold and boards. It’s been fascinating to walk all round the house at roof level to see the work, but now we’re glad to be back to normal.

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Recycling the showman’s way

July 26th, 2010

P1010076 We were down south last week and had the good fortune to spend a while with members of the Harris family, a showman community based at The Orchard just outside the village of Ashington in West Sussex.

Living and working in the same spot since 1902, they trace their antecedents back to John Harris, a Tyneside basket weaver who settled in the area in the 1850s, working initially as a forester and timber merchant. By the 1860s he had started the fairground business with his sons, buying one of their early steam roundabouts from a Tewksbury manufacturer in 1890.

P1010068 Now run by five brothers and two sisters, the business involves transporting equipment and running their fairground in villages and towns all over this area of rolling downs, meadows and woodland. They also hire out individual items for weddings and special events. Volunteers, who love the laughter and excitement of the fairground scene join in regularly to help with the swing boats, roundabouts, gallopers and side shows.

Hard to classify, fun to be with and dining mostly together, the family extending across generations is like some utopian example of the Arts and Crafts movement – a time capsule that has refused to die. Living close to nature, they are above all immensely practical, turning their hands to any job.

P1010083 They’re experts too at recycling, throwing little away and collecting useful items over the years. “Just put it under the hedge – you never know when it will come in handy”, says Rob, one of the brothers when I asked what they did with old gear. (See photo of field opposite they have recently acquired.) It reminded me of the MOMA Waste not installation we saw in New York last year.

The Scammel trucks for towing the equipment are ex WW2 stock, so you can’t just pick up the phone for a new spare part. A replacement for an axle on one was found from a hedged machine. Another truck was re-fitted with an old Rolls Royce engine (See photo at the top).

P1010065 With a little imagination there’s not much they can’t find a useful home for. An old shop display model now keeps watch in a large greenhouse where the tent canvases are dried after a downpour. An old galloper (below) has been put out to grass – for the time being – on an empty landing. Objets trouvés like the old cow advert (below) reflect a simpler rural economy.

Can this real life example of Cameron’s Big Society idea – with up to 70 people actively involved in a small community based business – survive in an increasingly competitive and slick leisure field? The work is hard and seasonal and depends on hours of unpaid labour. Time only with tell. But if you have a chance, try out the Gallopers or the Paratroopers at their next Fun Fair. You won’t be disappointed with the experience or the friendliness of the Harris fairground.

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Sustainability Austrian style

April 29th, 2010

For a number of years – in winter and summer – we’ve been visiting our friends Rob and Sally in their wonderful wooden chalet, Mirlhof in Austria’s Dachstein Mountains. Always we have been impressed by the marvellous scenery, the industry and energy of local farmers and their attitude to a plentiful local resource – the timber in the forests.

154_5416 They use it for building houses, for logs (always beautifully stacked as the photo shows), for seating, for furniture, for hides, for toys, for fencing, for carving and no doubt for much more. The forest’s wood is local, sustainable, readily available and easily transported.

Here in Cumbria there’s plenty of forest but there’s less woodland cut down for timber now by the Forestry Commission because cheap imported wood from the Baltic makes it is less economic to do so. This then is the first difference. In most areas of Austria the forest is controlled by the community, which has a use for the wood and arranges for the felling. Timber yards and stacks of drying boards are a common sight in the villages and on the roadside.

But there is another difference too, which you can tell from going into the large supermarket type ironmongers. They’re full of the widest possible range of tools and equipment of the highest quality – tools for building, for farming, for turning, for drilling, for cutting, for forestry, for home improvements; and most of them are made in Austria.

Only a country with a wide skill base – where people can use the tools and discriminate between the good and the indifferent tool – can support shops like these. And it can be hard to resist a purchase!

Last month I came across in Grobming the tool that half consciously I knew I needed but had never seen in existence – what I am calling a ‘bough-shave’ named after the spoke-shave, a tool we are more familiar with. It’s not one you would find at B&Q. If you know its proper name let me know!

We’re using local resources where we can at The Larches and have pressed the garden’s long holly branches that shoot skywards into service for the safety railings above the cottage. The bark needs removing as it will rot and scraping it off with a knife is tedious. My new two-handled bough-shave by contrast allows the task to be done with speed and provides a long-lasting hardwood barrier (See photos below of the bough shave in use and the final top barrier with the suspended tool).

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Fair Trade in Keswick

October 18th, 2009

moot_hall1 It was interesting to see Keswick in the news again last week as one of the towns in the country most actively engaged in supporting the Fair Trade movement. The Guardian article Lakeside shopping (10 October) in its special feature Section “a positive change: Celebrating the Fairtrade Foundation” described how nearly 300 bodies including hotels, shops and cafes in Keswick have signed up to providing Fair Trade drinks, food and other items as a way of helping poor farmers and producers out of poverty.

There’s also a readers’ resources area and a useful graph in the Section showing the growth of the Fair Trade movement in the UK over the last 15 years. Total Fair Trade sales are up from £2.7 million in 1994 to £712.6 million in 2008, of which bananas now represent £184 million and coffee £137 million. It’s still a small part of this billion pounds sector, but a very encouraging development.

At The Larches we provide Fair Trade tea for visitors on arrival and we’re exploring how we can obtain introductory packs of Fair Trade coffee. More information about the very successful local campaign is on the Keswick Fair Trade website.

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