Tribewanted: Vorovoro

Bula Tribies! Not sure how many of you remember this, but back in December, Duncan posted a blog detailing the food and waste data collected by the tribe and how it was distributed. (http://www.tribewanted.com/blogs/projects/931 )
The report was wonderful and was a great leap forward for TribeWanted in how it can actually measure its sustainability and impact.

I had the pleasure of poring over 30-some pages of this data when I was on the island in January and helped collate the December data and get it into spreadsheet form. I found a couple of issues that I thought you might find interesting and touch on them below. Caution, this is really long :)

First, as a primer for those of you who don’t know, there are two (hopefully three, with the separate fishing log) notebooks in the kitchen that are used for record keeping and tracking weights and food miles. The first of these is the “food book.” Every time the tribe comes back from town with supplies, a reef trip, or picks a bunch of fruit, it is all weighed and entered into the food book to track the source of the food and the total weight. The second log is the “waste book.” This book, predictably, has weights of waste put in. When we take our waste off the island on the way to town, ie, plastic to be recylced, trash to the landfill, etc., it is weighed and recorded in the log. Also weighed is the food in the buckets that ends up being used to feed the pigs and the chickens. This goes into the reuse column in the book and is chalked up to being reused onsite. If you go to Duncan’s blog and look on the right side, there is a tab that says, “files.” Click this and you can download the November spreadsheet and get a handle on it if you like.

So on the eve of new data becoming available I decided to post a couple of the issues that I have and ways to improve the documentation in the future. These directly address the recorded data from December and the beginning of January, and is pretty much a copy of the recommendations I made to Carol – so much of this may already have changed.

Probably the biggest reason that the december data is a bit bad, and the reason that the data wouldn’t be very comparable to the rest was that at the middle of the month, the pig food and chicken food stopped being entered into the waste category… now this is purely the weight prior to adding feed (or at least should be) b/c I wouldn’t consider feed bought especially to feed the critters as “waste”. So November and the beginning of December address the weight of the pig and chicken food, but then the rest did not – this is also true with the first week or so of January until I discovered the error… hopefully recording has continued since I found the error. Worst case scenario – if the leftovers haven’t been weighed, we could just take this column completely out of the data for the last couple months and ignore the pig and chicken food weights and their effect in the “reused” column.

Somewhat tied to this, I am not sure if the pig and chicken feed is included in the food weighing when it comes to the island (I don’t remember seeing it, but I wasn’t specifically looking, either), but realistically it should be… It is something that we are sourcing off-island and definitely adds significant food miles – although it could highly impact the data, towards the negative…

The big issue I have, and the one that makes the whole approach a bit tweaked, is with what is actually going into the measurements. Realistically, when we are weighing items to be recylced, or landfilled, we pull them out of the box, weigh them, and go. But where did this come from? If you think about it, when we are weighing items for the food book, we are weighing market items, fish, etc. How much of that comes in a plastic bottle or a crisp package? Next to zero. The vast majority of the waste weight is facial wipes, crisp packages, plastic bags from town trips – and the majority probably glass beer bottles, and plastic soda bottles. None of this is actually ever counted as having come in. How can we then count it as going out? So it looks like we are producing a much higher percentage of waste when compared to the incoming items than actual. Realistically, TW as an organization is pretty incredible on the incoming/outgoing waste side of things. One way to remedy this is just to separate the two completely. The best way to do this would be to release the reports at completely different times – even if you say they aren’t related, people are going to look at 400 kg of food and 150 kg of waste and think 40% waste?! This is pretty much the only way to effectively do it, as we can’t quite weigh every little bit that people are bringing onto the island – plus alot of the waste is coming from items that aren’t actually food. Now I’m not saying to stop measuring waste completely, as I think this would be a step in the wrong direction. It would be best to express the waste as, this is our total waste, we are recycling this huge percentage of total waste, etc… with a big mention that the numbers include plastic bottles washing up on the beach, beers, and the bottles of bounty that so-and-so brought for his birthday. On the food side, we need to focus on the food miles then instead of being able to relate it to resulting waste in any way. Pretty much the food being fed to the pigs and chickens is the only weight that is accounted for in both the food and waste logs.

Food miles – this transtions into the other big problem I noticed when inputting the data – forgot about it until right now. If we are going to be continuing to track food inputs, then we will have to focus completely on the food miles side of this. Now I agree with the fish miles and everything (and hopefully marau has been maintaining a fish log which will give a bit better idea of the actual miles traveled (I’d guess the average for Tuesday trips is close to 6 to 10 miles) Can you do parentheses inside of parentheses?) However, when we are entering food into the spreadsheet, one entry is made for every town trip and the mileage is 13. This skews the numbers really far. While I can see the arguement for the market food miles to be 13 (the emphasis here is that it is indeed local), this makes the food miles on the oil, the cans of tuna – everything not from the market – to it being sourced locally. We all know this is far from the truth and while it’ll be too labor intensive to separate everything out, maybe a week or two of shopping trips should be looked at to determine the actual mileage of everything. This can then be added up and divided by the total weight of this food. This would provide a simple average mileage number per pound of the non-market food. So you’d just have one extra entry per town trip – market food and then non-market food. I thought of this when I did the numbers for december, so I separately added up the market numbers and the non-market numbers before adding them together.

So yeah – these are my thoughts and recommendations and I have several others. The documentation and record keeping has been great so far and it is a superb step in the positive direction… these are just my recommendations on how to improve the whole process.