Zero-Waste Lent: Week 4 (Entertaining)

This week brought with it an interesting challenge: hosting a party.  How could I plan for 20-ish people at my house and generate no/minimal waste?  Would their waste count toward my personal total?  Could I ask them to change their behavior to accommodate my Lent challenge?  I spent the week figuring all of this out and making it happen.  Oh, and there was one more catch that made it even harder: the party was anime-themed and needed Japanese food, which is notorious for being individually wrapped in layers of plastic.

Ultimately, I could have handled this problem by not having a party, but while that could have helped me meet my goal for Lent, it wouldn’t really help me figure out how to change my behavior.  This event was on the calendar before I figured out what I was doing for Lent this year, so I wasn’t going to cancel it.  The party itself is one we hold quarterly to celebrate new meads that I’ve made, and with my favorite anime coming to Netflix this year, I decided to make it a theme party.

There are so many layers of impact here: 1) homebrewing, which is incredibly water-intensive and waste-generating, 2) having a party to celebrate it, which usually means at least some level of one-time-use items, 3) serving specialty food at said party that is individually-wrapped and imported from the other side of the planet.  Ultimately, all of the waste from this party is my responsibility under the spirit (if not the letter) of my Lent guidelines.  Based on the suggestions of my dear friends at book club who have been following my blog, I conducted a waste audit of the party, and I have assembled it all in a separate collection from my personal waste pile (which has only grown this week by one piece of dental floss and one Girl Scout cookie wrapper… oops.)

Food

Under my ground rules, I could not, for example, go out and buy sushi from the grocery store because that would have involved purchasing the plastic packaging around it too.  I was, however, able to use things already in my kitchen.  Fortunately, I cook Japanese food often enough that I had some options… 

I bought some fresh vegetables and made tempura: onions, asparagus, and kabocha – plus broccoli, carrots, and sweet potato, which I didn’t even have time to make.  Unfortunately the Japanese pumpkin had plastic wrap around it, but thankfully no Styrofoam.  I already had tempura mix in the kitchen.

I intended to make sushi, but I only had 3 sheets of nori large enough to make rolls.  I did, however, have a big pack of snack-size nori, so I pulled those out and set up a hand-rolled sushi station: sushi rice, veggies (carrots, cucumber, asparagus, and avocado), and nori.  Those snack-size pieces resulted in the bulk of the waste for the party.  Christian also requested that I pick up some salmon for the sushi, and I was able to get some freshly-wrapped at the meat counter at Fresh Thyme, which meant no Styrofoam!  It was still wrapped in plastic wrap and butcher paper that appeared to be coated to prevent leaking, but since it was soggy, smelly, and Christian’s addition to the party, I did not fish(!) it out of the garbage to add to my waste pile.

Other food that our guests kindly brought did include some packaging (green tea sponge cake, seaweed snacks, and shrink wrap around sake bottles), but I did not ask them to adhere to my personal challenge, and anyway, nothing was as bad as the nori packaging from my own kitchen.  My mother-in-law brought us a crock pot full of Japanese curry and a pound cake covered with a tea towel instead of plastic wrap.  Overall, I was really impressed at the small amount of packaging we were left with at the end of the party.

Beverages

I’m not putting much in our single-stream recycling these days since learning more about how it is (and isn’t) sorted at our local Municipal Recycling Facilities here in the Pittsburgh area.  I’ve set up bins in our basement for glass (which is no longer collected curbside), as well as aluminum, steel, and paper (most of which are not effectively sorted).  I made it really easy for my guests: I had a small box near our garbage can for bottle caps and told them just to leave their drink bottles and cans by the basement door when they were empty so I could sort them later.

We drank a variety of meads that I had made (all corked), and a friend brought some very nice beers that were also corked.  Those corks all made it into the garbage pile because they are sadly not recyclable or compostable.  (I think I may write some brewing-specific posts in the future to cover that information in more detail.)

Party Supplies

We usually try to use our own plates, cups, and silverware at our parties, with disposable options for each set to the side in case they’re needed.  This time, I took the boxes of one-time-use supplies down to the basement so no one would have them as an option.  I had to run into the kitchen a few times over the course of the night for extra plates, spoons, glasses, etc. but it worked well overall.  While Christian and I have far too much glassware for ourselves (especially pint glasses), we don’t have enough specialty glassware for the variety of drinks we usually serve.  People were drinking mead out of brandy snifters, beer chalices, and scotch tasters – for shame!

I was worried we would have to dip into the supply of disposable chopsticks taking up an entire kitchen drawer, but we were good on that front as well.  I’m not quite sure how two people can accumulate 17 sets of nice, reusable chopsticks, but we did not run out there either. 

Of course, the tradeoff of less waste means more work to clean up afterwards, and it looks like we’ll have at least two full dishwasher loads.  (Christian is working on the first one now, as I write this post.)

The one tricky area was napkins.  Ideally, I would like to have a set of cloth napkins for entertaining, but I wasn’t able to make that happen before this party rolled around.  I did not set out a pile of paper napkins like I usually do but rather kept paper towels available in the kitchen for people who needed them.  Interestingly, not that many were used.  The ones I picked up off various surfaces after the party went into the compost along with toothpicks from the asparagus tempura.

I cleaned with cloth rags for the party instead of paper towels, and I kept one of those rags on hand during the party in case of emergency cleanup.  As it happens, it proved useful in a small soy sauce spill.

Finally, we got all of the leftovers put away in Tupperware containers… with the exception of the rice, which my husband put away in a bowl, covered in plastic wrap.

In Review

As I said when I started this blog, I am not an ascetic.  I am going to keep the hobbies I love and spend time with my friends, but I wanted to learn how to lessen my impact in the process of doing those things.  There was a lot of work involved in cooking from scratch, rather than ordering food; in washing plates and utensils, rather than throwing away paper and plastic.  But overall, I’m pleased with the result of knowing that it’s possible, and that we managed it.  I think the party was a success, and our guests weren’t too put out by having to use mismatched glassware.

Weekly Recap:

• Waste Total – apple and banana stickers, 4 pieces of dental floss, “member” ribbon from conference nametag, empty toothpaste tube, #4 plastic ring from glass milk bottle, plastic sleeve from Girl Scout shortbread cookies
• Personal Victories – using a silicone cup for my beer at the movies
• Missed Opportunities – making snacks for myself instead of raiding my desk drawer for Girl Scout cookies
• Husband Hardships – his eyes are getting tired of rolling every time I try to explain why we’re sorting the recyclables on our own now

Do you have any reusable product substitutions you like to use while entertaining? Is there a single-use product that you just can’t give up? I’d love to hear about it below.
Thanks for reading!

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