Plastic Free Puppy?!

We have our puppy!  She is a rescue and completely delicious.  Fast learner (er, love treats), gentle and kind.  Very much in love.

But she comes with added responsibilities re: single use plastic.  I am unnerved by the amount of poo bag nonsense/lying/misdirection.  Firstly is Sainsbury’s basics which proudly state that their bags are ‘degradable’.  YAY!  They degrade!  Oh, hang on…  everything degrades.  The question is does it BIOdegrade?  Does it become harmlessly at one with its environment when in its final resting place?!  Answer NO.  No it definitely doesn’t.  All plastic ‘degrades’.  In the literal sense it de-grades.  It becomes less, not simply of mass but of quality.  It breaks into pieces and is eaten by the animals.  So we will leave Sainsbury’s offering on the shelf, thank you very much.

On to Pets at Home.  Pets at Home very proudly state that all their poo bags are biodegradable!  YAY!  That’s more like it.  Oh, hang on.  Ah.  Biodegrades in how long?  Gazillions of years?  And breaks down into small bits along the way?  Ah.  Not so good.

And then I found the least of all evils in the form of ‘earth rated’ doggy bags.  now, they are not completely biodegradable because rarely plastic is.  But they are big!  this is great because I use it again and again for garden waste.  Out and about I have not yet needed one…  Puppy is fussy 😉  They come highly rated but I am no expert and will shop around when re-ordering.

And what about toilet training pads?  I bought some of these but never used them.  I don’t understand them to be honest.  Am fairly sure I just want my puppy to go outside from the off so take her out regularly and just deal with accidents.  It is working a treat.  A pad that smells like somewhere she might want to wee seems to be setting her up for odd habits.  So I will ditch these responsibly.  I don’t know why anyone uses them!

Treats come in plastic while she is a puppy.  This bugs me!  I am sure I can discover which treats are suitable for her in the bulk bins at the shops but because she is a wean I don’t want to give her something meant for adult dogs.  When she is allowed adult dog traets though I will always buy from the bulk buy bins in a reusable plastic container 😉  I really want to feed her bones from the butcher too rather than kibble, again in non-recyclable packaging until she is older.

But the worst thing is what she plays with when we are out and about.  Plastic bottles, discarded poo bags, netting, lager tins, clear plastic film…  seeing her find and pick up something like this when we are out on a walk in the beautiful, beautiful countryside around us makes me gnash my teeth.  And do you know what?  I am not a martyr.  Sometimes I just want to go for a walk with my toddler and puppy and stare at the wonder of birds of prey as they glide over the estuary below and NOT have to think about plastic, or picking up plastic, or wishing I had brought a bag to pick up the plastic.  I want to watch Springwatch and not feel desperate at the owl that has made her nest on an old squirrel’s dray lined with black plastic, or hear about the cormorant that had its head stuck in a plastic beer can ring or hear about the school cat whose head was stuck in a crisp packet.

But I am grumpy today.

 

Grocery Shopping #4

I write about grocery shopping the most, don’t I.  That and litter – picking!

Grocery shopping is becoming so political and frought.  I spent a really long time in Sainsburys yesterday looking at whether what I was about to buy was recyclable or not.  A lot of the ready-meal style sauce pouches are NOT (I don’t buy these anyway but wanted to see), including Jamie Oliver’s chickpea daal blardy bla healthy stuff (I do buy these… but not any more).

In fact (start rant here) I am getting really cheesed off with the amount of ‘healthy’ and ‘natural’ foodstuffs that are in plastic wrappers that are not recyclable and litter the streets.  The irony kills me.  Yay for nature!  Love the nature!  Love dates and goji berries, love chickpeas and lentils…  but, well, sod actual nature 🙂 🙂  I tweeted JO about his pouches but obviously got no response.  Feel free to do the same 😉  Nakd bars, Eat Natural bars – the wrappers are bloody everywhere, dropped by the well-to-do-in-a-rush.

So, pouches are nonsense but unfortunately, are also very fashionable.  Avocadoes yesterday where £1.10 singly or £1.40 in a pack of 3 in plastic 😦  ARG.  I wanted an avocado but could buy the single one at that price or the plastic multipack.  I have realised that, as cucumbers wrapped in plastic last 3 days longer than those without, in this instance maybe the plastic packaing makes the avocadoes last longer, therefore it will be cheaper than those that last less time because you can buy more of them with less wastage.  Although, saying that, if you sold the ones that are ripe and ready to eat cheaper then we would snap them up so…  Ok.  There is no excuse.  As per, I didn’t pack any of my fruit and veg in any plastic at all, just had it roaming around in my trolley.  The difference was that I didn’t feel bad or weird about it at all.  Next time I will get a small cardboard box from by the entrance and use that for my loose fruit and veg so it does roll around or spread onto my other shopping.  🙂  Jars of stuff and tins are good, I got lots of those.  I hunted for butter in recyclable packaging but no, it’s all in non-recyclable foil.  Why, I know not.  So I got margarine which can be recycled but isn’t as nice, or natural to eat.

I didn’t buy salad leaves in plastic packaging either, I bought some rocket seeds instead.  We shall see on that front though, green fingered I am not…  I am going to plant them in some UHT milk cartons!  Why not, eh.

Soooooo shopping was a pest.  Is funny though – because I have been doing my litter bladdy picking I have noticed how much litter is PURPLE.  Cadbury’s bladdy choccie bar foil everywhere.  And so it is making me feel cross when I see this purple packaging!  So I steered away from it yesterday.  It makes me mutter 😉  And Macdonalds stuff.  Just litters everywhere.

And, finally, speaking of my litter picking – Channel 4 news last night had an article about litter and the new litter picking brigades popping up.  Not surprisingly the council is keen to help provide these volunteers with their support and equipment.  TBH the council would be thanking their lucky stars – and their pennies.  In a society such as ours the council ought to be cleaning the streets not citizens.  It is a sign of a functioning and politically, socially and economically healthy society that the streets are clean of litter, debris, fly tipped nonsense and human effluent so diseases don’t spread via moulds, rats and riverways.  We pay council tax to ensure this doesn’t happen.  I do NOT look forward to eventually retiring to become a volunteer litter picker.

What can we do?

Well, I do welcome a change in attitude that sees litter as ‘our’ problem.  If you see it, pick it up.  I don’t want to get all hi-vis on everyone, or on a group of nice old people.  Just pick (sh)it up instead of walking past it.  Have the odd inland beach clean.  And write to your council to clean up!  Complain if the bin men are making more mess after they’ve been (ug, my village is gross after bin day, it just flies all over the road and is left by the, er, cleaners…  for the road sweepers?!)  At least the council could print a flyer or two asking people not to dump their rubbish on the floor.  Have an article in the local paper?  Add a couple of bins to new walkways?

It’s not rocket science.  We just need to start seeing it as our problem.  Remember, we are mucky humans.  We lived through an era where it was expected that people would clear up after us, but we can only drop so much before it starts to show.  My countryside is littered with shining, brightly coloured specks of micro-plastic.  We have to pick it up – just one bit each a day would change your world.

Be the change!

Inland Beach Clean #2

We had so much wind and rain over the past week that a fresh crop of plastic rubbish has adorned the trees and verges, gutters and puddles of my lovely rural, Cornish village.  Today outside the school I found this beauty:

A completely random chocolate bar wrapper that had Nov 2014 as its use-by date!  This would have been eaten and discarded (obviously accidentally) before I even had anything to do with the school which is so weird.  It has been blowing about for years, to land at my feet this morning.  The owner may not even be at school any more – they have moved on but left this imprint of themselves, to wash up on me years later.  This really shows how your environment, your personal space and ‘self’ is not contained but is actually MY environment, my personal space, my self.  My habits and sense of responsibility has a direct effect on you if it means that in years to come my chocolate bar wrapper will land at your feet; if it means my discarded plastic water bottle will be in your dog’s mouth; if it means my macdonalds take-away cup is stuck on the bottom of your running shoe.  What was mine long ago becomes yours now and it will tick you off.

So, basically, what I am saying is that when we make decisions about whether to buy a disposable cup over taking a reusable or compostable one; whether to mention to a restaurant that their straws are not friendly; whether to worry too much about all the individually wrapped lunchbox items we buy for our kids; well, the answer is to remember that someone else will be making that decision too and it will affect your life and your kids.  Their rubbish will be what lands at your feet years into the future, when they are long gone.  So make the decision you hope they would make for you.

Just One Letter Can Change Your World

I just have to share this story about Primary School children who learnt about the issues with single use plastic and decided to write to their milk provider asking them not to use plastic straws any more.  And it worked!  Cool Milk for School wrote back and instantly changed how they sent the school children their milk – putting it in bulk bottles to be poured into beakers.  How fab is that?!

This is the story

And I emailed my local district council to say a little about my inland beach clean yesterday (such an exotic way to say I spent an hour in the mud picking out aged pieces of horrid rubbish) and ask if they wanted to meet to deal with the plastic rubbish issue.  I was told about a meeting they are having next week where I can bring this up to the council directly AND the clerk said she will bear the issues I raised in mind when organising catering for their events in the future.  Which is great!  It’s just about encouraging little shifts here and there isn’t it.  As a society I think we are gaining enormous momentum around the use of single use plastics.  I am talking with businesses, council people, teachers and charities and everyone is open-hearted about it all.

Happy dance.

Inland Beach Clean?!

Today is a glorious day.  The sun is shining, it is cool, crisp and bright.  Today was a day for our inaugural beach clean!

Inspired by the folks at final straw cornwall I endeavour to do a beach clean every week throughout 2018.  There is one on Saturday being organised by WAX on Watergate Bay, we shall be going to that – illness and weather permitting 😉  FYI They do a beach clean monthly and you get a free cup of coffee if you collect a bag full of plastic rubbish.  Surfers Against Sewage help organise this one too, which is pleasing.

So, anyway, I decided to go to a nice beach nearby and mooch about with a bag collecting plastic and feeling rather wholesome protecting my beach while also being nourished by its very existence.  But as I walked home from school I saw bits of rubbish so decided to pick up the bits I saw as I went home.  And basically did that for nearly an hour.  In half a mile of lovely countryside I found enough random non-biodegradable litter to fill a big plastic bag!

Spot the crisp packet!

I have said before what a curious experience it is picking up skanky litter in public and it was horrible again today.  It is definitely an odd thing to do by yourself, I felt like the local crazy lady.  (I am really selling this to you aren’t I?!)  But the thing is, by acknowledging it and picking it up am I not the LEAST crazy person in the village?!  Surely it is just no good walking past it.  And I picked up a whole bag full without even looking for it.  But this is the thing isn’t it – we are used to seeing the ingrained rubbish.  To notice it is to feel responsible for it and if you feel responsible then you might have to pick it up.  And picking it up is horrible and weird.  When did we become so disconnected from our stuff?  Our stuff became separated into stuff we want and ‘rubbish’.  And then rubbish became something we put in a bin and let someone else take away.  It became something to be forgotten, someone else’s problem.  And then, somewhere along then way, this forgetting was enough for us to imagine that we are clean and sanitary, thoughtful and civilised.  But as human animals we are mucky!  We leave crap wherever we go and, depressingly, in many places we haven’t even yet set foot.  Being thoughtful is, apparently, leaving someone else to clean the muck we leave behind.  Being civilised is being able to think away our stuff as ‘rubbish’ and when it is taken away, not ours anymore.  As someone who picks up our muckiness I am, therefore, the opposite of thoughtful and civilised.  I am behaving like someone who is dirty and weird, uncivilised and irrational, ergo, crazy.

This perception of us as sanitary humans and of us as ‘civilised’ beings needs to be challenged.  We need to accept that as a species we are mucky.  We need to accept that this is always our problem and our responsibility.  Our rubbish is still our stuff – it’s not the birds’ stuff, or the whales’ stuff, or even my stuff and your stuff.  It’s like when I am telling my oldest boy to clean up the toys.  ‘I didn’t play with that!’ He will wail.  And I will say, ‘But they are all your toys and at other times your siblings will pick up after you too.’  We also need to normalise picking up the muck.  One day, hopefully, I will not be the crazy lady but be just like you 😉

So, despite the beauty of the day we never made it to the beach.  We cleaned our little bit of countryside and that was enough for one day.  However, this was a beach clean of sorts because I picked up the rubbish that otherwise would have been blown into the rivers and the seas to be washed up in a storm and picked up by beach cleaners.

What I really need though is a hoody from Surfers Against Sewage that says #PlasticFreeCoastlines on it for when I am doing my lonesome litter picking.  Then I won’t look so bonkers.  On the outside anyway 😉