The Whiteboard in the Kitchen

It gets used for shopping lists, to-do lists, reminders, a record of whether F has met her daily objectives during lock-downs (exercise, language practice, going swimming etc) - write it on, wipe it off stuff....

She thinks I can't read handwriting.  I know what 'catfood' looks like in every possible format.

At the top the board has a nearly faded line that says: 2019 - Finish more things than I start

As Pili pointed out, that would appear to be a temporal absurdity.  What Pili didn't realize at the time was that our cupboards are full of started/unfinished projects of one kind or another.  Lots, if not all, got moved with us from England in their partially completed state.  What F was resolving in effect was that they would not get moved back again in like condition.

Two years later 2 equally faded items remain on the original list, many things have been started (and completed) in the meantime, and the stash of fabric probably has not gone down all that much because F can't stop herself buying more - her excuse being that various bits have been required to complete existing projects.....

This year the nearly faded 2019 line has been joined by one that says: 2021 - do more to reduce single-use plastic in our lives.

I shall be keeping the score on that one.

F has pointed out that for me it could mean a further change of diet.  I like food that comes in single-serve pouches.  I eschew tinned food.  My diet has already been reduced from 3 pouches per day to 1 pouch, plus raw chicken, and a meal from a little aluminium tray.

My contribution to this resolve is nothing to the changes that F and Mr B are going to have to undertake.  All human food that doesn't come from the laiki seems to come packaged in plastic of some kind.  Avoiding it is not going to be as simple as going to a different shop.  It is going to have to involve change of diet (Ha 😸 - so I'm not alone in this), taking their own packing to other shops and convincing the vendors to use it, and a lot of hunting around for somewhere that allows customers to refill various products from a bulk supply (like shampoo, laundry detergent, etc).

Shall I photograph their plastic waste each month and see where they could make improvements?

F has already discovered that she can buy butter in glass jars (no one wraps it in paper anymore).  She commented that when she was in Riga in the early 1990's you could still buy dairy products (milk, cream, yoghurt) in the open air market by taking your own jar and getting it ladled out of a big cream-can thing.  Food hygiene rules have done away with so much of that now, and big, plastic, yoghurt buckets form a significant part of our plastic waste each month. (We are currently keeping them for growing on plants for community gardens, but there is a limit....)

In Greece you can buy one brand of yoghurt in ceramic bowls - sealed in plastic. The ceramics are not recyclable, are heavy and therefore costly (in every way you can measure it) to transport, and probably take a lot of resource to make/bake/glaze etc - to say nothing of the heat-sealed plastic it comes wrapped in.  This isn't a complaint - just an illustration of how difficult this resolve it going to be to fulfil - not every non-plastic alternative is necessarily an environmentally better one when viewed as a whole.