Please excuse the time since I've last posted on this blog. Around that point, I took the skills I'd learned in ten years of fast fashion sport retail to a new project more in line with the values that I've been writing about here: a not-for-profit social enterprise grocery store in the somewhat downtrodden and de-industrialised suburb of Port Kembla. You can learn more about Port Grocer on our Facebook page.
Port has been going through something of a cultural revival over the last decade, and a business which sets out to do groceries and essential goods differently - keeping our packaging and food waste footprints as small as possible along the way - has been the right idea at the right time in many ways, but it has also been a massive challenge to get it up and running, especially during a pandemic.
I've always liked sorting out and properly disposing of waste in my old workplaces, to the point where people thought I was wasting my time. Here I'm in charge of doing just that - and developing bin systems in the store, so our team of a handful of paid staff and around 30 volunteers can get food from paddock to plate while keeping our waste footprint as small as possible. It's a small thing and we're still less than 6 months into trade, but I'm pretty proud of what we've done!
One particular part of the project that I have been organising is our Library of Things. The idea is simple - take common household appliances or power tools that are expensive to own, take up space, collect dust and often end up in landfill without having done much to justify the emissions and labour that went into making them, and instead make a communal library of them. Unlike a hire shop, we are built with communal access, environmental benefits and facilitating people to make do with less in mind from the get go.
The idea is simple but at the same time it runs at odds to most of our society's impulses, and our initial uptake has been slow. If you're local to the Illawarra and would like to browse our library, check out the catalogue here. Membership is $25 for six months. </endspiel>
Anyway, regularly scheduled content on here will resume soon. What time I have been making for writing, I have been dedicating to more creative historical fiction. I did even attempt to tackle NaNoWriMo, although my head of steam really only lasted for a week or so, until I ran into a conundrum and felt like starting over - but I have still been learning a lot about the issues of food waste and climate change which I'm itching to write about!
