Envir-o-mental!

This is a little rant warning - I've been meaning to have a little rant about my environmental peeves here, so this is going to be it.

Packaging: In Aus biscuits come in a silly little tray in a plastic wrapping, I think this is more packing that needed. HERE biscuits come in the tray then plastic then a BOX!! The worst example of over-packaging was when I bought some ginger and lemon tea. We used to get this all the time in the Wattle St house and it came in a box. This box looked different so I thought that it might be individual tea bags, maybe even the kind in little paper wrappers but when I took the plastic (1) off the box (2) the little individual paper wrapped tea-bags (3) were wrapped in plastic in sets of five (4)!!!!
(OTOH I already mentioned the milk in bags, which at least creates less landfill).

Power use: So far pretty much all the people I have talked to have no control over the heating in their apartments (i.e., there is no thermostat) so they all OPEN A WINDOW so as not to expire!! (We had our landlord look at our heater and he showed us how to turn it basically off over night when the weather isn't too cold).
Many of the houses around here also seem to leave their lights on all night. WHY? So people can see how nice their place is? So they don't feel so bad when they have to get up and it's still dark? Global warming anyone?

Buying things: It seems to be hard to find things like recycled loo paper, and low impact detergents unless you go to a hippy store (which we sometimes do : ). Some of the things are actually recycled or whatever but it's really hard to find that information out!

Recycling: They do have recycling here but you have two identical blue boxes one of which should have your paper and one of which should have glass, plastic tins etc. If you put paper in with the other things they don't take the recycling away!

On the up side people generally do seem to make pretty good use of public transport, and the Uni is looking into recycling green waste and using less salt on the roads. And we have a strange assortment of organic veggies to keep us happy (we're still not quite sure what a rutabaga is, but we know we've had some nice kale : ).

love lumpkin

P.S there was some confusion about which one was lumpy and which lumpkin. I would have thought you could figure it out but here's brief recap (as always avoiding names to protect the... well, us I guess ; ).
Lumpkin is busy with work, but writes poetry and is overly addicted to exclamation marks and smilies.
Lumpy does not currently work but has a camera and writes funny quizzes.

The story of how the names came about is that I (lumpkin) apparently started calling lumpy "lumpy" because lumpy was often still snuggled in a nice warm lump in bed when I was already up in the morning. I only learned last week that I was named lumpkin out of revenge! (I thought it was sweet before...). Did that completely fail to make sense? Well then, you should have NO doubt as to which one is which (as long as you remember I have a family history of nonsensical nicknames ; )