Mixed reactions, mixed success. Baby steps toward zero waste.

She screamed out in horror when she saw me coming. Approaching the soy milk seller was amusing this morning. She was calling others for help as she doesn’t speak English. It’s not the first time I’ve scared someone with my white face.

I got a very different reaction from my regular sellers who work at the back of the market.

“Haven’t seen you for a long time! Where did you go?”

They usually see me a few times a week and they know I can speak a bit of Khmer so no need to be scared. Between eating foreign treats for Christmas (bought at the supermarket) and having Khmer relatives stay over New Year (so they did all the shopping and cooking) I hadn't been shopping for a couple of weeks.

Like the reaction of the sellers, my success at zero waste was also mixed. . As I wrote about here our rubbish is piling up:  Breaking up with plastic.

We have no garbage truck to whisk away our bread bags and milk cartons since we moved out of town. All our rubbish stays with us in one form or other.  If we can’t compost it, or send it out to be recycled we either burn it (breathing in the smoke), or bury it (so it becomes part of the soil that gives us our water and food). 

Horrifying! Is this a mini version of what’s happening on the whole planet? All the rubbish/trash has to go somewhere.

Success this morning included taking my own bag for vegetables and box for eggs. Now that the sellers are used to my weird habits it’s easy. Even though some of them need to use a bag to weigh the produce, they know to tip it into my cloth bag. And the egg lady has finally given up trying to give me a plastic bag.

This morning’s fail was buying chicken and beef while my meat boxes were at home with pork in them. You can see in the photo the sellers had to put the meat in the single use plastic bags. And I mean really single use, they often break before I even get home. Not like the supermarket bags which you can actually use many times. The ones from the market are too small and break too easily to ever really use for anything.

A new rule recently came in that we have to pay for supermarket bag; a step in the right direction. But there are only a handful of supermarkets in the major towns in Cambodia as far as I’m aware, and the majority of shopping is done at markets where vast amounts of really thin plastic bags are used.

I’m not sure whether to call buying soy milk a success or fail? I’ve been meaning to do it for a while. A few months ago a dog broke open our rubbish bag during the night and I spent the morning picking up the mess. It was really interesting to see what we throw out! One things is milk cartons and bottles. With no local dairy industry I don’t think I can go anywhere to refill reusables. But locals make soy milk. Maybe we should try to swap? There are some issues with that though but I was happy to finally take the flask and get it filled today. Baby steps in the right direction. Even if I did scare the soy milk seller!