'The economy is going to crash and burn when we all crash and burn...'

In the first of a new series looking at environmental issues, MAEVE MCCORMICK, who started up the Zero Waste Cavan webpage talks about trying to eliminate plastic from her life, the perils of shopping, and her insistence that one person can make a difference, despite the frustrations along the way.

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Maeve McCormick’s something of a dreamer. She admits as much herself.
“I wanted to build my own house out of mud!” she confesses with a generous laugh. 
“It’s so hard to manage a  normal house. I’ve moved on.” 
Along with the mud brick house, she’d hoped to own five acres and live off the land: grow crops, fruit and veg, keep chickens, rear livestock, and all on a permaculture model. 
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she admits. Maeve and husband Barry Carmichael, who is credited for tempering her more ambitious green aspirations, have their hands full with the acre and a half plot, which includes a large garden and greenhouse. Her veg patch has fattened the local slug population, yet she’s a little harsh on herself, considering it’s only ‘year one’.  Maeve’s strides towards providing organic produce for their kitchen table is documented in her Instagram page ‘Home Grown Sustainability’. 

Plastic addiction
A Facebook group she has started, ‘Cavan Zero Waste’ focuses on an equally ambitious project: Maeve’s attempts to wean herself off the plastic addiction that has engulfed society to the extent that many of us aren’t even aware we’ve succumbed to it.
“I think at the minute there’s 750,000 people following the Zero Waste Movement in Ireland – it’s massive considering the population. In Dublin there’s maybe four or five Zero Waste shops, so it’s really big up there. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t have it here as well.”
Maeve’s house certainly does contain plastic, but much less than the typical household. It still pains the archaeologist that she has any at all. A container beneath the sink is holds the plastic wrappers and packaging accrued over the course of the week. There’s not a whole pile.
“Anything plastic we use, we wash. Anything! It sounds mental but you really know what you are using then, and you know where you are going wrong.”
The kitchen is probably where Maeve makes the greatest gains in striving for plastic liberation. They shun disposable J-cloths and sponges, opting instead for hard-wearing dish clothes which can be thrown in the washing machine. A scrubbing brush with a wooden handle is excavated from the back of the cupboard. 
“We’ve had that two months easily, then we just swap it out,” she explains detaching the scrubbing head. “These heads can be composted and replaced.”
For detergents she buys “absolutely giant tubs” of environmentally friendly washing up liquid and laundry powder 
“Then I refill these things,” she says holding a normal size washing up liquid bottle, “from that so I don’t have to keep buying small tubs.” 
She excitedly shows the Celt a gift she received from a friend, a nifty device called an ‘EcoEgg’.
“If this works it’s ground breaking,” she correctly declares of the oval container which has its detergent pellets that reportedly wash up to 720 loads. 
“I’ve not used it yet, so I can’t say whether it’s good or not. I’ve heard people talk about it and they all say it’s brilliant.”
An alternative to clingfilm or tinfoil which Maeve uses are beeswax wraps, a malleable parchment you can find in craftshops, which comes in a variety of sizes. 
“We’ve had that for nearly a year I’d say,” she says of one in good condition. “All the clingfilm we’ve saved from using that is unbelievable.”
Similar plastic savings can be made in the bathroom – whether it’s bamboo toothbrushes, or organic package-free toiletries. Maeve retrieves what looks like a circular bar of soap, but it’s actually shampoo bought online from handmade cosmetics website Lush.
“I must have tried about 10 different shops for these plastic free shampoos – once I found one that’s good, that’s the one I buy now.”
That’s key for anyone hoping to reduce their plastic consumption:  you only have to figure out a convenient and satisfactory alternative to such things once; then that becomes the norm. It’s not a sacrifice.

Loose veg
Food’s another key area. Maeve’s food waste is stored in a caddy and later brought to the garden’s compost heap.  Maeve finds the major supermarkets’ insistence on stocking the vast majority of fruit and veg packaged in clingfilm, cellophane, plastic containers or netting a source of despair. 
‘Market Fresh Fruit and Vegetables’, a greengrocers in Ballinagh has proven “a real saviour” for Maeve. You can buy almost everything without plastic. You can even bring your own cartons and stock up in free range eggs.
Of the major retail players she reckons you can get “a decent enough shop without plastic” in Lidl and Aldi, but stresses that they still have “loads of plastic” in store. Even when supermarkets give the options to buy loose veg, they invariably provide a roll of small plastic bags for customers to put them in.
“The only swap they [supermarkets] would have to make would be to have paper bags – it’s so simple. It’s not people being bad, I think it’s because no one has walked up them and said it to them and made them think about it.”
Encouraging Cavan retailers to address the plastic issue is a driving force behind the nascent Zero Waste Cavan group. Top of the list are shops providing items that people use daily such as detergents, cosmetics, food where changing habits would have the greatest impact. 
“The intention is to go from shop to shop to shop to talk to them. It’s very easy to make changes so people don’t have to walk out of the shop with plastic, but they just don’t see that.”
Another area where she hopes the Zero Waste Cavan group could make life easier is buying meat. 
“Going into butchers and asking them if they wouldn’t mind putting stuff in lunch boxes – that’s really nerve wrecking – I’ve only done it once in this entire journey. Once.
The butcher was “really nice” about it, and she hopes to draw up a list of the local butchers who are open to it. She envisages butchers advertising their willingness to cooperate.
When it comes to buying dry food to sidestep the suffocation of plastic packaging the rest of us endure, she shops from the ‘Minimal Waste Grocery’ website based in Dublin. It has a really  impressive stock. You order your rice, oats, couscous, quinoa, pasta, popcorn “100g of this 200g of that” and it’s posted out in compostable paper bags. She stresses that they really are compostable – as in you can put them on your compost heap as opposed to the many items presented as compostable, but which have to be put into an industrial composter.
“It’s greenwashing – where they tell you something is environmentally friendly and it’s not at all, because we don’t have an industrial composter in Ireland.”
Receipts are another bug-bear. While they look like innocuous  pieces of paper which can be easily recyclable, Maeve explains they aren’t. Most modern receipts have a plastic coating that includes the controversial component Bisphenol A (BPA).
“A simple stop would be if every shop said, ‘Do you want a receipt?’ It’s so simple, you just say no and then you don’t have all these non-recyclable bits of plastic. If you need a receipt the option’s there, you can take it.”
Elsewhere in Maeve’s house where metal and wooden utensils predominate, her wastefree outlook informs the space: notably the livingroom. It’s stylishly kitted out in furniture sourced for free from the Cavan Freecycle website or bought secondhand, and all for just €300.
“That’s something  that’s in line with exactly what we wanted to do: we didn’t create any new sofas, we didn’t create any new chairs by doing up our own sitting room.
“It’s all about reusing what you already have or what you can get that’s already used – try not to make new stuff.”

Economy
Which doesn’t sound great for the economy, observes the Celt. 
“At a certain point you have to stop caring about the economy because the economy is going to crash and burn when we all crash and burn anyway,” she says. She doubles down on the point: “I don’t give a shite about economic growth,” she says in a comment which could be mistaken for being flippant. She knows that she could suffer too financially, but she’s just weighing up economic prosperity against global survival.
Maeve argues that while we may be financially hit, living in a more environmentally friendly way is also a more economical way. She further contends that while the traditional, polluting sectors like oil and gas are likely to take a hit in a  more environmentally aware society, solar and wind power might skyrocket.
“There’s always going to be something to replace it, we need something to replace it.”
She cites a common phrase amongst Zero Waste Activists - ‘There is no away’. 
“When you throw something away, there is no ‘away’. I think that’s what people need to be more aware of: where the hell do you think it goes? It goes to the dump, and you think you’re being really good by putting it in the recycling bin, but who’s taking the recycling? You know you see the pictures of really poor people scrambling and scavenging [over mountains of waste] is that really what you want for your crisp packet?” she says with a laugh of despair.
Just to clarify, she’s not preaching here. She’s pointing her finger at herself as much as anyone else. At times she suspects that her efforts are in vain.  
“It’s really frustrating because I’m trying. This is me trying and it’s impossible.”
She confides that she’d love a “calculated breakdown” of her production of plastic and carbon footprint, with the forlorn hope it might give her endeavours some validation.
“I don’t think it would be that different,” she speculates, “which is very depressing.”
She accepts that taking such an interest in environmental issues in these times is “depressing”.
“The science is becoming more clear... They’ve discovered that the CO2 issues is worse than they thought it was; they’ve discovered that the ice was melting faster than they thought it was; they’ve discovered that the mass extinctions are worse than they thought it was. “Everything is so much worse. Which means that everything they thought was going to happen in 30-odd years is going to happen a hell of a lot sooner.”
Her exasperation soon gives way to determination again given the urgency of the problems we face. 
“I don’t believe that thing where one person can’t make a difference. I don’t believe that at all. I think they can.”