My favourite plastic swaps

I have been revisiting blog posts past and I have changed so much!  It is so WEIRD how I have integrated the changes into my life without even noticing.  But what are my favourite swaps?!

1. My ultimate favourite swap of all time is my Lavender Safety Razor for £23.99

I bought this is February from the link above and haven’t given it a moment’s thought since!  It is a total beauty – it is pretty and doesn’t look a day old.  I bought it with a bulk order of 100 double edged razor blades to put in it for £9.90.

For the princely sum of £23.99 I have a razor that will last me forever and TWO YEARS worth of blades for £9.90.

To compare, a venus razor holder costs £7.99 and 4 venus razor blades from Superdrug costs £8.75 – this adds up to £105 worth of blades a year!  This is a difference of £100, straight into your pocket.

And the shave?!  Excellent.  I was careful with it the first few times – it is heavy and SHARP.  But now I am as speedy and confident as I ever was with the venus blades with their protective shields.  The shave is close and clean and not at all irritating.  If you make one swap THIS has to be it!

2. My second favourite swap is my deodorant.

My deodorants now smell lovely and are as effective as I want them to be!  The natural deo co. is my favourite brand although Ihave come so far I can actually make my own now (!!).  They can be expensive at £11 a jar BUT they last about two months and become a special, thoughtful part of your bathroom cupboard, like moisturisers, perfumes and make-up.  Using this kind of deodorant means you are using a totally natural product, it is moisturising, keeps you clean and dry, can be applied with fingers and therefore reapplied when necessary, and is not plastic.  Those little deodorant balls come out of the tubes and get stuck in marine animals’ throats.  And it is obvious that the sprays are full of crap.  Not nice for anyone to smell or be around after the sprayer has long gone 😉

3.  My third favourite swap of all time is my wooden brush scrubber!  You can shop around but I like these – the scrubber lasts for ever and you can take the bristle head off when its tired and put it in the composting 🙂  Closed loop!

 

Plastic Free Hallowe’en

Oh it’s that time of year again.  The time of…  SWEETIES.  Sweeties everywhere!  In little metallic or plastic wrappers.  In cellophane.  And plastic pots for collecting treats, parties with disposable cups and cutlery and plates…  Balloons…

It is a single use plastic nightmare (or hell?!  Or heaven?!)  I cannot in good conscience keep watching blinking documentaries about plastic in the ocean and ignore this in my own life.  Plastic plastic plastic.  Plastic in gullets, plastic in nests.  Plastic in drains, in turtles, in ocean forests, on the ocean floor, in whales.

 

Sometimes I want to forget about it.  Sometimes maybe it has been a week or two since I saw anything that troubled me.  Sometimes I feel unmotivated.  And sometimes I just want my old life back!  The easier one!  The more fun one!  Being plastic free (or at least aware, if not free) can mean feeling like a fun sponge.  It means tutting at things that other people think are AMAZING or LOVELY or KIND or CELEBRATORY.  It means wondering why on EARTH those lovely people are buying plastic cups when they could have bought paper ones; how your friends managed to miss the memo about plastic straws; why your family walk around with takeaway cups of coffee and packet sandwiches.  It also means staring at balloons and just hating them – how grumpy is that?!  It means being agog when people let off chinese lanterns or clumps of helium balloons that will almost certainly litter the ocean until they break up into smaller, more edible yet still indigestible pieces.

Fun sponge.

And now it is Hallowe’en – one of my favourite times of year.  And you know why?!  Those wonderful little individually wrapped chocolates from cadbury’s that’s why.  I LOVE them!  And they are great for trick or treaters!  And I can take the best ones out first and eat them myself in front of the telly later!  YEAH, Hallowe’en!

But not this year, dear friends.  This year I cannot buy these.  They are dreadful pollutants, easily blown away in the wind and made of a material that will never break down, only ‘up’.  So I have not got any in.  Instead I have bought some big marshmallows, dipped them in chocolate and sprinkles and will be handing them out instead.  Of course, there is packaging with this but no where NEAR as much, and it is recyclable or reusable.  This is great for the world!  YEAH!  Imagine how much room in the world those horrible little chocolate wrappers take up between now and New Year?!  Unconscionable.

So, friends, do take a moment to try and think of an alternative to the usual.  Marshmallows are easy, fun, everyone likes them and they don’t leak or melt.  Big packets of things is also the way forward – a single big pack of haribo, for example, would be better than those multipacks.  Until we can all get to a refill store for our treats or pick ‘n’ mix isn’t absurdly expensive we have to make do as best we can.  Avoid the teeny wrapped chocolates (don’t get me started on the new kitkat variety pack being advertised.  What stupid timing to bring out a new individually wrapped single use plastic product!  As if nestle weren’t bad enough.  As if kitkats weren’t my favourite chocolate.  Sob).  Or get big packs of sweets and make twists of them in some tissue paper instead of giving out plastic multipacks.  (It would look more thoughtful too.)

Am hoping that in looking forward to what we can do (and be) we won’t have to keep looking back.  In the meantime I will keep staring longingly at the celebrations and heroes and quality street and roses tubs in the stores, steel myself and walk on by.  I got marshmallows dipped in chocolate at home, s’all good here 🙂

 

Life Hack: Compost

Composting.  It is the easiest, most satisfying thing EVER.

Well, not ever.  But it really is marvellous.  I have been doing it for nearly a year (with nowhere to put my compost by the way or any gardening skills) and I love it.  I was reminded of how much I love it just now as I went to my compost bin and started mucking it all around with my giant garden fork and saw how all the nonsense I have been putting into it over the past few months has turned into lovely, nourishing SOIL.

Now, me being me, it also has lots of tree branches, toys, balls and lego in it.  It also has some of my experiments!  And so let me tell you that:

• Cardboard breaks down a treat
• Leaves and veg peelings rot wonderfully
• Coffee grains?  Gone.

But…

• ‘biodegradable’ vegware coffee cups are still there
• ‘biodegradable’ compostable plastic straws are still there
• ‘biodegradable’ balloons are still there
• ‘biodegradable’ dog poo bags are still there

The plastics have stayed whole (e.g. the cup and straw) or become fragile and holey (the balloon and compostable plastic film coverings for magazines/salads/lily’s kitchen dog food).  These pieces are microplastics.

So what are companies that sell us ‘biodegradable’ plastic doing about this?  What about the Advertising Standards Agency?  Do all companies (some are very small independents) even KNOW that their products are only biodegradable in industrial grade composting machines?  Because this is not making the problem better but (with the bigger orgs in mind) it *is* shifting units.

Isn’t this, at some point, becoming too shady to remain legal?  Can you say that something is biodegradable when it isn’t?  Can you sell a product to businesses that isn’t what it says it is?  We desparately need more nuance when talking about ‘compostable’ and ‘biodegradable’ products.  Because if it doesn’t break down, it is bullshit.

I am going to message a few people.  I will come back with the answers!

Laters!

Life Hack: Cloths NOT Wipes!

This post is about how to swap-in cloths for wipes.  Slowly add cloths to your house in place of wipes and before you know it you’ll be off and running wipe-free!  Why?  Wipes clog up our drains, litter our beaches, and are eaten by sea creatures.  It also talks about greenwashing and microfibres and sponges and the beautiful nuance of choosing the right textured cloth for the right job.  Listen up, people! 🙂

How many wipes do you think you use a day?  One for the kitchen table?  Well, maybe two or three.  One for your face this morning?  A few on your baby’s/toddler’s nappy change.  One to clean that spillage on the floor.  One for a quick wipe around the toilet seat and another for the sink.  Ah, sod it I’ll just pop it in the loo.  Listen, people:  WE NEED TO STOP USING WIPES.  And we definitely need to stop chucking them down the toilet.  Even the wipe makers ask us to do that.  *No toilets for wipes*.  As my good friend who worked in a water company said, wipes don’t go through the filtration system properly.  They sneak through and clog up the filtration, then the pipes that lead out to sea, then the drains and finally, the gullets of birds that pick them up in the ocean.  The national marine and conservation charity, Surfers Against Sewage, have had a particular issue with this over decades: Think Before You Flush!

We DO need to start using cloths!  CLOTHS CLOTHS CLOTHS CLOTHS CLOTHS!

Let me show you how and why.  Cloths are amazing.  You can use them, then wash them in the washing machine and then use them AGAIN!  YEAH!  Now, when I made the switch I had one problem with cloths – I could never find them when I needed them!  But wipes?  Well, I would buy them in their specially labelled packets and scatter them around my house.  Kitchen ones for the kitchen; bathroom ones for the bathroom; dusting ones for the sitting room; floor ones for the floors (lovely apple smell); all purpose ones for anywhere; baby wipes for the babies bum/face/hands; wipes in my bag and fancy face wipes for my face.  That is a LOT of wipes!  Dear reader, I loved them.

But I realised that I couldn’t keep using wipes because they are not at all degradable (see here: Biodegradable? Sort of… Maybe… Compostable? Well, no. Welcome to Greenwashing.)  So I got rid of all my wipes and bought more cloths.  You can get a pack of about 5 BIG cotton cloths for the kitchen from £1 and, as I said, wash and reuse them forever.  Now, cotton is great.  Microfibre is not.  DON’T be tempted to buy ‘modern’ microfibre cloths because these are another form of pollution.  Microfibres break off when washing, enter the water cycle and are eaten by plankton, fish and us!  I know:  Microfibre Bad.  (And, while we’re at it, definitely, definitely never ever buy one of those ubiquitous green and yellow scrubbing sponges.  NO, no, no, no, no, no.  Not only are they criminally ugly they break up into lots of little pieces and never, ever biodegrade.  They degrade, yes, into teeny bits that are ingested by animals and simply pollute the land.  They do NOT ‘bio’ degrade.  Leave them well alone.  For super scrubbing replacements have a look at the home-compostable safix scrubbing pad and wooden, replaceable headed brush (see post: Scrubbing Brush!))

So, *cotton* cloths.  You can buy different coloured cloths for different purposes (like they do in hotels – I was a chambermaid once).  Have one colour cloth for the loo and another for sinks and baths.  Have more for floors (or use a mop.  Or even a steam cleaner – WOO)…

Baby wipes?  You can bulk buy special cloths or re-purpose old towels or flannels for cleaning babies’ bums (that have FAR more traction than wipes and so leave bums cleaner (oh, *and* you can use the homemade, antibacterial but oh-so-gentle wipe solution I use (see earlier post on Bottom Wiping 🙂).  I put the solution in a tub next to the changing area then lay about 10 wipes in it to use as and when – just like wipes.  Dirty wipes go in a mesh bag and at the end of the day they go – you guessed it – in the wash.

You can have beautiful handmade crocheted cloths for the house too (I make these if you want some!) that you can easily learn to make yourself or buy.  Because you will come to appreciate that not all cloths are equal!  (*geek alert*)  You can have knobbly bobbly cloths for cleaning kitchen ovens and hobs.  (Next step: dip into bicarb and grapefuit essential oil solution and job’s a good’un – see post: Bicarbonate Of Soda.) You can have looser cloth weaves with flatter textures for all-purpose cleaning.  You can have a medium textured ‘grippy’ weave for cleaning surfaces and toilets.  And then there are so many colours!    And then when you’re done… you can pop them in the wash.

You can have cloths in the kitchen drawer to grab when you need to clean dirty hands and faces.  No chemicals needed – the action of rubbing with a soapy cloth is sufficiently antibacterial in itself ( see this 2017 cleaning article on usefulness of wipes).

In place of face wipes I have a konjac sponge (info here) that, just like a wipe, needs no soap on it for a quick facial cleanse or refresh with a bit of water.  For more of nighttime deep-clean I have crocheted soft, textured cotton cloths for removing eye make-up, slightly bigger ones for cleansing my face, slightly rougher ones for washing my face and ANOTHER one for a flannel.  It is a lovely set!  I use them a couple of times and then… wash them.  I make these, ask if you want any; but you can also buy cotton cloth style bits like these from the Wise House that are just lovely!

For here and there you can also reuse old clothing for casual cloths.  Use pinking shears to prevent fraying.  Old muslins from babies are fab around the house, knackered cotton clothing, old flannels etc.

The clue is to have LOTS of cloths of all different sizes, colours and textures.  Have a lovely big basket with lots of different types and sizes of cloth in.  Don’t have one or two or you won’t know where to find them when you need them.  Just like wipes you can dot them around the house.  Or hang them up even – my crocheted cloths are pretty and I like to show them off!

So there you are.  Ditch the wipes.  Look around you with new eyes and see CLOTHS in old clothing, in cotton yarn, and from budget shops.  Wash them, pop them in your basket and you’re good to go again.

CLOTHS!

 

Attenborough on Plastic.

Just a wee reminder on why the plastic problem matters from our High Priest of Antiplastic, Sir David Attenborough.

 

 

We Love Him 🙂

Back from my euro-walkabout!

Ahhh I had a WONDERFUL holiday!  We went to Paris – Strasbourg – Black Forest – Luxembourg City – Lille – Bruges – Home over two weeks.  It was fantastic and exciting and our brains are full of new sights and sounds and languages and smells and food 🙂  We have expanded our brains and our sense of who we are – mainland Europe is vast and full of opportunity to access the world compared to our dinky, inwards-looking and defensive island, surrounded by cold, tricky seas and the lands of Other, Foreign People.

We stayed in a few airbnb places, a lovely posh hotel and the main part was a static caravan on a campsite for a whole week with friends in the Black Forest.  So blinking beautiful.  We drove and drove along motorways and autobahns from Le Shuttle in Calais; we stopped at services and roadside picnic stops and sometimes didn’t stop at all. We went on the Paris Metro, saw the Eiffel Tower, the Sacre Coeur, hung out in a studio flat with a secret, vine-filled courtyard in Montmartre, climbed tree top walkways in the Black Forest, walked along the beautiful and carefully tended bridges of Strasbourg.  We saw Gothic cathedrals and exquisite fountains and a lot of scuptural, heavyweight political and religious art from big squares and lawns or parks without spending a penny on entrance fees or tour guides.  We passed refugee camps and roadside settlements, were sometimes overwhelmed by the begging and touting and graffiti, and saddened by stories told on lamp-posts and bridges from the disenfranchised and ignored.  We rode on funicular railways and gasped at scenery: acres and acres of cityscape unfolding underneath us and the accompanying mass of humanity also visiting the Sacre Coeur.  The brash, loud creations of humanity were clearly displayed in this concept of a ‘city’.  Later, more quietly in the Black Forest we were looking at trees for miles and miles and miles on a glorious summer’s day.  That which we neglect was just getting on doing its hundreds of years old thing.

Humanity clearly demonstrates a sense of importance in its cities – past experiences and triumphs are trumpeted right in your face: ‘We did this!’ The noise arguably belies our insecurities and fragile egos.  But in another place a quietly vast sculptural experience in a forest compliments the natural surroundings, making us look up and look down.  Making us aware of how small we can be in our world.  In another place a ‘barefoot walk’ taught us to be calmer and more at peace with our own corporeal animalistic selves, here and now, with a lack of trumpets and triumph but with fun and acceptance.  We are just mortal animals.  To be barefoot and sensual in a place traditionally associated with hardcore hiking boots which immediately separate our selves from the natural place we are visiting was an amazing experience and utterly without any moralistic preaching.  The message was inherent to the walk itself.  But, as this walk demonstrated, we are not visiting.  We are part of this natural world.  We are animals too, like the bears and the wolves and the rats and the squirrels.  Humans.  What is in a name?

I found out the other day that my lovely little goldfish, Devon and Charlie, are not actually goldfish at all but are carp.  I can honestly say that I have never wanted to have carp as pets in my life.  The idea of sharing my home with carp makes me giggle.  But it would seem that my lovely ‘goldfish’ don’t exist.  (And one isn’t even gold any more which should have been a clue.)  We created the idea of goldfish and a whole discourse around them which told us they are small and easy to look after.  This, as the owner of two, is not true.  They are filthy, they poo a lot, they need a lot of room and cleaning and filtration and fresh water and air and food, they need stimulation and they definitely have memories and feelings (mine sulked for days after we came back from holiday).  And we read or watch telly to discover that dolphins talk and Orca have dialects and fish change gender and pigs like problem solving and we are surprised.  Why?!    Because, apparently, nature is so passively dumb and, goddammit, we humans made rules!  Gender is gender and humans speak and problem solve – why, this is what makes us so marvellous!  *pats on back*.  And it makes me wonder – in the end are nature documentaries like Planet Earth helping or hindering these ideas?  Rather than informing are they now serving to maintain a distance between us ‘humans’ goggling at the weirdness of our planetary companions like the social anthropologists did while studying pacific islanders in the 50s and 60s?  Are we perpetuating the idea of our planetary buddies as ‘others’ – animals that are not ‘us’ – not as clever or as creative or as Enlightened and therefore, as deserving of space here?  We are ignoring the fact that we are an intrinsic part of this planetscape we marvel at from our sofas.  And so often what we find marvellous is not that these creatures exist but that we found out about them, with our expensive, fragile submarines and clunking big cameras.  Well, fancy that! *more pats on backs*.

Blue Planet recently broke this fiction by allowing us to glimpse the reality of the production team’s experience – time consuming, obsessive, dangerous and sometimes tedious work to bring us a second of an Orca’s life.  And then there is the other fiction that this world on telly is untouched.  Rather, they confessed, they were surrounded by litter and plastic, by animals dying from eating our human-made debris.  This was a brave, understandably tentative and apologetic break from a traditional, more glossy and romantic narrative.  It was essential to stop perpetuating the idea that nature is always lovely when actually it is being trashed.  By our species.  We had a wee peek through the looking glass.  I picked up straws in Paris; microplastics in the Black Forest; drove past trashed verges and laybys in Luxembourg, walked past overflowing bins being scavenged at by gulls; picked up fag butts and straw packets and takeaway boxes and plastic forks and ketchup packets and coffee cup lids.  It was ugly and distressing and complicated and it showed me that wherever I am the world can never be the same again.  This is a really, really bitter pill to swallow and I am so reluctant to have these memories as part of our family experience.  I am reluctant to talk about the horror of the plastic that was in the quietest and calmest of places because it will ruin my holiday’s narrative and turn it into something ‘negative’.  My husband desperately wanted me to stop being ‘on duty’ but when this is our reality I cannot ignore it and paint a nice, distant picture of an experience that didn’t happen. On the positive side I saw some lovely anti-rubbish, anti-plastic and pro-recycling initiatives that I am looking forward to sharing here and with my local townsfolk.  There are efforts being made.  But culturally I would say that we are still hugely in denial.

Our human rubbish is *everywhere*.

And so onto us as ‘humans’ – as ‘civilisation’ – does this exist?  We are animals, we are earthly, we are not distinct from ‘the natural world’.  Like goldfish that are actually carp, humans are not special or immortal or uniquely marvellous rather we are simple carbon atoms – like the wood of trees, or paper, or diamonds, or the stars.  Just carbon.  We need to understand ourselves more as animals, like those we study in a zoo or a nature documentary.  See ourselves from the outside-in.  We need to change how we see our planet and our place in it.  We are not brilliant.  We just are.

I have to walk my wolf-pet now with my small human beings in a beautiful, quiet field on this planet I am lucky enough to call home.

BYE!

Not Bags: Boxes

The future is in cardboard boxes.  I saw it this week, and it pleased me.

Cardboard boxes are stackable

Cardboard boxes are cheap

Cardboard boxes are reusable

Cardboard boxes can be decorated/branded

Cardboard boxes are easily and widely recyclable

Cardboard boxes are not complicated

Cardboard boxes rarely need any kind of plastic fasteners

Cardboard boxes can have lids

Cardboard boxes can be flatpacked

Cardboard boxes can have holes in or not

Cardboard boxes can be thick or thin

Cardboard boxes can be any size

Cardboard boxes are biodegradable – in the truest sense of the word.

 

Now, I know that cardboard is no good for soft fruit because fruit is largely water and just makes the cardboard all wet and decomposes.  Plastic really is the best thing for soft fruit and veg that needs to last.  If you want soft fruit and veg and to be plastic free the best thing you can do is buy it from your local grocer or farm shop.  Our local corner shop has punnets of strawberries in cardboard…

BUT – is the tide turning?! I see that lidl are now selling off boxes of end of life fruit and veg for £1.50!  Such an ingenious way to combat food waste that supermarkets are worried about!  (Using as an excuse to drag their heels…)  This is really exciting in more than the anti-plastic sense.  It makes varieties of fruit and veg available and affordable to everyone.  There is such food snobbery and fear about different food in the UK.  I think this will do really well to make good food available to everyone 🙂

Boxes should also be used instead of bags for life.  Don’t use plastic bags AT ALL.  Even bags for life are not actually bags for life AND need to be used 144 times to warrant their production in comparison with a traditional plastic bag.  Cotton bags are also intensive to produce and make.  Cardboard can be sustainable.

So I am delighted to see avocados being sold in boxes by Tesco – at an affordable price – and boxes of oranges in Co-op.

Boxes!  Not bags!

 

BAGS

Bags!  They are everywhere!  Plastic bags for everything!  Some of them are reusable bags for life.  Some of them are recyclable with carrier bag recycling at large supermarket stores.  A lot of them are thrown away while new ones are bought for a single Special Purpose.  Let us think harder and stop using flimsy little bags with special names 🙂

What am I talking about?  Well, I am talking about sandwich bags!  Nappy bags!  Dog poo bags!  Fruit and veg bags!  Freezer bags!  Silly bags you usually buy, use once and chuck away.  Let us put our wallets back in our pockets and be a bit more thoughtful about this.

Sandwich bags

Daft.  Save your old bread bags.  Start saving them now if you have kids that need packed lunches in September.  Chop the top off them if you think they are too unwieldy and put that part in with your carrier bag recycling stuff.  Use them, tip out the crumbs and then recycle them.

Nappy bags

So daft.  Even if they are only a quid – seriously, why are you buying a plastic bag for a nappy?  For your nosey?  Fine, I understand.  But hang on, look around you!  If you are as posh as me (!!) you can use that pouch from your fresh coffee to put it in.  Seal it up as when it had coffee in it et voila!  Stink-free, straight in the kitchen bin never to darken a door or olfactory sense again.  Hurrah!  Alternatively, you can use old frozen fruit/veg bags – they are great as they are thick and fold over so again, no stink.  Some even have ziplock tops!  😉  Some thinner, more stretchy frozen food bags are recyclable though so do weigh up what you think is the best use of that bag 🙂  you can use bread bags, plastic cereal inners are GREAT, thick porridge bags also great.  These solutions all work really well as wet bags for reusable nappies when out and about BTW 🙂

Dog Poo bags

UG.  So pointless!  These can range in price from a quid to £7 for fancy ‘biodegradable’ ones (not biodegradable unless composted in an industrial unit).  Don’t bother, crazies!  Answer?!  Poo IS biodegradable!  A) if out and about flick it if it is on a path.  We don’t want to walk in it but I really don’t mind if you flick it into the woods/fields.  Nature will take its course.  Truly.  B) If you need to pick it up, which often we do, use a bag you have already used at home for something.  You don’t need a special bag!  How many poos does your dog do on a walk that you need special rolls of bags?!  A dog may do one or possibly two.  Don’t sweat it.  Use an old stretchy bag without hols in it – lots of veg comes in useful bags for this though so does have holes in so be careful 😉  Or use kitchen roll bags or loo roll bags.  These are all great when out and about too.  These can be recycled so it’s up to you if you would rather recycle these instead of dog pooing them for landfill/incineration 😉  If you want to use stiffer plastics like cereal bags or freezer bags, dog food/treat bags then maybe take some kitchen towel with you to pick it up then pop it in the bag and the bin.

Garden dog poo

Definitely don’t use a new bag for this!  Get a plastic pot/bucket and line it with with a used plastic bag.  This can be any heavy duty bag from frozen fruit/veg/chips or dog food or bicarb bulk package.  Anything.  You will find that you have lots of lovely, heavy duty bags you can roll down to size so when it is done with you simply roll the sides up and ta da!  Pop it in the local dog poo bin or wherever you chuck your normal poo bags.

Fruit and Veg bags

Get little crochet ones and take them shopping with your other bags.  Or reuse any translucent bags you have kicking about (see above).

Honestly.  It is a kind of blindness that we specific uses for specific household items.  but actually, we really don’t!  Get some little drawers – dunelm mill or the range have lots of fabric or rattan or plastic or wicker or metal filing wotnot drawers.  Pop them in your utility room or kitchen and put your used bags in them.  Tip out crumbs etc, flatten them and grade them according to thickness and you are ready to go.  No more buying silly lilttle plazzy bags for no reason other than to chuck ’em away.

Laters!

How Life Has Changed…

OK so I started really thinking about all this in Octoberish last year.  I was struck by a Natural World documentary that I downloaded on Sky where a lovely lady in Hawaii laid out all the plastic she had picked up in an hour on her stretch of isolated paradise.  I remember that she had LOADS of:

Cotton buds

Toothbrushes

Roll-on deodorant balls

Straws

Nurdles

Blister packs from tablets

Bottles and bottles and bottles

Plastic bottle tops

I was really surprised by the deodorant, toothbrushes, straws and cotton buds…  It hadn’t occurred to me that these things were ruining the world.  It moved me so much, I think because I am a mum and because I LOVE the sea and beaches and live in Cornwall.  I see the rubbish around but never connected the dots.  This film made me realise that this problem was MY problem.  Not the local or county council’s, not the person who dropped the litter, not the sea-cleaners (sea cleaners?!) but mine.  And yours.  OURS.

And then it made me realise that this needed a change of what we consider normal behaviour.  Normal behaviour has become walking past rubbish because we know someone else will pick it up.  Normal behaviour has become about convenience and cheapness – single use plastic.  Normal behaviour has become about thinking that recycling works when actually it is riddled with systemic problems and a lack of financial viability.  When actually there is too much rubbish to be picked up and we need to start tidying up after ourselves again.  We need to be motivated to care!

I really liked changing how I did things.  All this time on and I happily use different products.  This has become normal for me and I am so pleased.  I think when you feel lost sometimes it is good to realise how far you have come.  And so:

In the kitchen

We got rid of our tassimo coffee pod machine 🙂  We make filter coffee instead.

I now use wooden washing up brushes with changeable, compostable wooden heads and natural bristles.

I use washable cotton cloths and have crocheted a few of my own with nubs on for funky style and super cleaning 😉

I use compostable safix pot scrubbers, made from coconut husk!  They are marvellous.

I compost my organic food scraps.

I refuse to buy fruit and veg in plastic bags.

I reuse jars and bottles.

I use beeswax wraps to cover and wrap food up in instead of clingfilm.

I use bicarb to clean!  I love it!

I have mugged up on recycling and realised I can recycle a LOT more than I did!

 

In the Bathroom

I have tried various different organic deodorants.  My favourite is from the Natural Deo Company.  Pricey but long lasting, actually works, comes in different scents and strengths and in a lovely glass pot.  I do not buy traditional deodorants any more – they smell toxic and have a weird residue.

I like bamboo toothbrushes.  I am looking for a bamboo head for my leccy toothbrush and need cheaper alternatives to keep my kids in brushes without going bust.  Work in progress.

I use soap instead of bottles of bodywash.

I use shampoo bars instead of shampoo in bottles.

I use my wonderful straight razor and lovely sharp razor blades instead of disposable razors or cartridge razors.

I use crocheted, washable cotton eye make up remover pads!  Totally organic, compostable and colourful – way nicer than a plastic bag of cotton wool balls!

I use crocheted, washable cotton face cleanser pads – ditto above.

I use crocheted, washable cotton flannels.

I use a compostable, organic konjac sponge for cleaning my face day and night.  It has built in cleansing properties so I use this instead of my beloved, super convenient but environmentally nasty facial wipes.

I use washable sanitary towels.  The tampon and sanitary towel industry is a plastic NIGHTMARE FYI.

I use hydrophil’s bamboo cotton buds.  Completely compostable.

I use cotton cloths for cleaning instead of bathroom wipes.

For the Kids

Balloon free zone in the main: although the biodegradable ones I used seem to have vanished in my compost bin!

We have reusable straws.

We have ice lolly molds.

I avoid fast fashion, cut knackered trousers into shorts and sew on funky patches 🙂

I use reusable nappies as much as possible on the baby.

I use reusable, cotton cloths to clean the baby’s bum instead of wipes.  I soak them in a solution of water, olive oil and either tea tree or lavender essential oil from Holland and Barrett.  These clean, moisturise and the essential oils provide an antibacterial clean!  AND they get muck off way better than smudgy wipes do 🙂  And your baby smells yummy.  BOOM.

I try and use bamboo toothbrushes but as my Man does this kind of shopping he tends to bring in normal toothbrushes.  What can I say (I harrumph).

I avoid packed lunches but if we do them I use old clothing for beeswax wraps (Mummy, look!  My sandwich is wrapped in stars!) and takeaway containers for sarnies etc.  I never buy individually wrapped chocolate bars or bags of crisps – I would rather buy one big bag/bar and portion it out into containers if I am going to do this.

They eat fruit by the bucketload (thank GOODNESS!)

I bake biscuits and cakes (at the moment!) so no problem with snacks etc.

I cook lots of food at home from scratch – I like cooking and my Mum cooked for us so it feels normal.  We don’t do ready meals.

We all have water bottles and take water out with us.  When you have a baby/toddler/kid you do this for them anyway so it is an easy habit.

I get them to bin rubbish if they see it around 🙂

 

For the Dog

Free pour dog treats from pets at home

Use poo bags sparingly – if she has gone off the path then am happy to leave it.  Poo is biodegradable – animals LOVE it.  Bags are not.  ‘Degradable’ dog poo bags will NOT become at one with the environment.  EVER.  Plastic is degradable.  In 400 years it will be in microscopic bits, I agree.  But I disagree that this is a good thing!  Degradable poo bags are a greenwashing campaign of nonsense that I would sincerely like to address with the manufacturers…

I have a big ol’ bone that is pulled out of the freezer for a new chomp nearly daily.  Keeps her very busy, cleans her teeth, relieves teething issues and boredom and isn’t vacuum packed or any other nonsense.

I can improve a lot on the packaging of daily food I get her.  As I have her over time I will get better at knowing these things 🙂

 

What a list!  So much more than I realised!  Am most pleased 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eating the Elephant

WAH!

So I have managed to help our wonderful little city get Plastic Free Status after so much focus and drive for the past few months.  And we are the first city to do this – which means the biggest place to date.  Chuffed to bits and incredibly proud to have worked with the teeny little team we were.

But with great power comes great responsibility.  Or, rather, with a moderate achievement comes a small amount of very local social exposure.  Publicity, as it is with social media and the wonders of the internet, can’t be tamed or controlled and for a shy mite like me this can be overwhelming!  It’s great for the cause though and I try and roll with it, but to be honest I find it really scary 🙂  I LOVE to write and communicate but I think that is because writing and publishing is on my own terms.  I also perceive attention as expectation and think I must do something AMAZING now… but have no idea what or where and actually, I have three children and a job to get and I cannot possibly volunteer any more than I have done on this already and, and, and…

So I feel like a failure, like I can’t possibly do what I am ‘supposed’ to do now or be like other wonderful, high-achieving superstars of the ‘plastic free’ movement…  so did I ought to give it up?  Let someone else do it?  Am I failing?

I don’t really know right now which is usually a sign that a step back and stocktake is necessary.  I guess I forget that when you have reached a goal, reached the Pinnacle, it also necessarily signals the end of something.  And, consequently, a period of transition and limbo while you fashion something new: a new beginning.  And humans are not fond of transition phases or limbo, funnily enough, we find them stressful 🙂  So that is where I am at the moment, redefining my mission and goals and shaping these into something I will enjoy and be motivated by.

I would like to go out and meet the people again with a stall…  Maybe talk about recycling – this is SUCH a big deal because actually no-one does it!  Maybe do some web stuff and promoting of businesses and initiatives that I love around my city.  Other people do so well and are so amazing, I would like to help them and stay half in/half out of my happy hole 🙂

And the thing is that I am worried about this, about letting people down and not doing enough, and I am not even paid.  Am completely daft!  I definitely need a job doing this kind of thing.  Spreading the word and enthusiasm.  I would really like to do a big piece of research on recycling and how to make it work for Cornwall.  Anyone?! 🙂

So, I may be laying a bit low while I work through this period of transition…  Although now I know this is what I need to do I feel a lot better!  Hehe.

Laters!