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!

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.

Happy New Year, 2018!

Ug, for me 2017 was just awful.  This year must be better 🙂  Must be!

Generally the end of 2017 saw a fantastic rise in awareness amongst us normal folk regarding the extent of ocean pollution.  This was largely down to the Blue Planet II BBC TV series which highlighted, very gently but firmly, the fact that nowhere in the world was safe from plastic pollution.  Even the outermost shores of Antarctica, an utterly uninhabitable land, and islands and atolls never before explored by human feet were found to have plastic rubbish on them.  Albatrosses were feeding their chicks plastic; whales were found dead with bellies full of plastic bags; the intense depths of the ocean – only recently discovered by submarine scientists – had microplastics pollution floating down into the deep.

The situation is now known to be utterly, utterly dire.

But we can fix it!

I think the ethos that needs to change is one from ‘not my problem’, to collective responsibility.  We are way past the stage of pointing the finger and shouting ‘litterbug!’ and moving onto a new epoch where it really doesn’t matter how it got there, it just needs to be picked up.  By you.  Now.

Seeing someone else’s litter in the street and picking it up is a very humbling experience.  Walking around holding someone else’s skanky crap is of course disgusting and, I was surprised to note, actually quite embarrassing.  You don’t want anyone to think that it’s YOUR skanky crap because it is all muddy and gross – why would you have that?!  You don’t want to be seen pocketing the skanky crap either though, because that is really weird.  And on top of that I really don’t want to be labelled as the Litter Lady.  The one people hide from and talk about as being a ‘busybody’, ‘goody two shoes’ and ‘know it all’ and wait for me to fall on my face.  Into a pile of rubbish.  (As an aside: I think it is possibly a British cultural thing that we like to shame people who have a social conscience or who are too obviously ‘good’ or clever.  We only trust those unquestioning souls in the herd; outliers are to be ridiculed, ostracised and broken.  See also, Colonialism; Brexit; British Class System.)

BUT, at the heart of it all is the message that we ALL need to pick up the rubbish before it gets into the rivers and the oceans.  It needs to become normal to do this, until we reach a point where we, as a society, stop relying on other, invisible forces to clean up our rubbish so much.  I think the concern is that I will just pick up litter in my environs by myself forever.  Constantly cleaning after other people while tutting away to myself.  But then I think, well, we will all be doing this in the future and someone has to lead the way.  We have to make it NORMAL to care about rubbish on the floor, we have to make it NORMAL that, rather than assuming it goes somewhere safe and thoughtful, we think ‘Oh bugger, that’ll end up in some poor blighter’s belly soon enough, I’d better pick it up.’  We have to make it NORMAL that if someone is putting someone else rubbish in the bin we think ‘Aw, good for you,’ and not, ‘Bleugh, you are a skank picking up other people’s crap.’

And so I see 2018 in with a hopeful heart.  I see 2018 as a year in which plastic litter becomes all of our problem; where we all #SeeThePlastic; and learn how to make new, more thoughtful decisions as consumers, citizens and educators.

Courage!

 

 

Our Duty of Care

There is a beach clean at Perranporth Beach in Cornwall on the 29th December.  We shall be going.  By ‘we’ I mean me, my Husband and my three children.  I know beach cleans are not new, but I still want to rave about what a fantastic initiative they are.  It both draws attention to the scale of the problem and normalises the fact that we have to clean up after ourselves – both to adults and their children.

One thing I find most fascinating is how more aware, more passionate and concerned school children are about plastic pollution.  My son is 8 and very educated about the causes and effects of plastic in our oceans, simply from reading (a BIG shout out to whizzpopbang science mag for kids, here), watching telly and school.  His classmate did a presentation on the effect of plastic on marine animals last week and another of his classmates wrote to the Headteacher asking if the school could coordinate a beach clean.  (Incidentally her Dad asked me if I could find out about how to do a beach clean and I said, as Community Leader with SAS I will organise one!  Am excited – I have wanted to do one for ages.  His daughter can be the Student Liason Officer 🙂  This will probably be closer to Springtime so WATCH THIS SPACE!)  The kids KNOW what the problems are.  What we also need to do is to provide solutions and the opportunity to enact them, thereby normalising environmentally protective behaviours.

We have a duty of care to future generations to show them and teach them how to be better than we are.  Our parents generation discovered plastic and we took it to a whole new level with convenience living.  We now need to undo these habits and find new, sustainable, kind ones and pass them on to our children.  I am not saying everyone needs to start making their own clothes and living off the land.  I am sensible enough to know that we will not be able to completely change how we live.  But we can, as citizens and planetary animals, be open to the idea that how we do things needs to be challenged.  We cannot afford to be thoughtless and trusting of the Man who sells our packet sandwiches in non-recyclable plastic.  Instead we need to say ‘Hang on!  There are compostable, plant-derived alternatives you know?’.  We need to say:

Stop grouping fruit and veg in plastic bags for us.

Stop offering us plastic bags for groceries.

Stop wrapping multi-buys in unnecessary swathes of plastic.

Stop putting plastic stickers on fresh food.

Ask your MP:

For recycling and composting initiatives to save on landfill rubbish.

To educate people on the importance of recycling.

To raise the idea of a Plastic Tax for companies who rely unnecessarily on single use plastic.

To highlight the alternatives to single use plastics.

 

We need to make the use of single use plastics anti-social, like we did smoking and dog poo.  We need to show our children by example, how to prevent the mistakes we made.

 

And that can be our legacy.

Courage!

www.vegware.com

I have found a viable alternative to catering supplies that usually rely on plastic nonsense!  I have, I have!  They are called vegware and are AWESOME.  I am going to see if I can get our wonderful PTA at school to use them.  They sell 25 double skinned COMPOSTABLE coffee cups for £5…  this is competitive and significant 🙂  They also sell LIDS for coffee cups!  And cutlery and plates and just loads of fabulous stuff.  They can even print your logo on your cups.

Fantastic!

 

Next Target?

Well, I am off to Lush tomorrow to get a bar of shampoo 🙂  I am unreasonably excited about this!  I am very disappointed with my funkysoap bar, it has no smell whatsoever any more and is running out really quickly.  I think it is definitely a case of ‘you get what you pay for’.  This was budget, just to see how I got on with the idea of soap-as-shampoo and I am really pleased to say that it really has been successful!  So I want a proper bar.

I am interested in testing:

• Smelliness.  Please smell gorgeous for aaaaages.
• Cleaning skillz.  Clean my hair but don’t dry my poor scalp out!  Lush sell different shampoo bars for different hair types so this should be achievable…
• Longevity.  Lush claim that a standard 150g bar of shampoo should last three times as long as a normal bottle of shampoo…

 

In other news, I am going to take a back seat with ‘campaigning’ until after Christmas.  School is gearing up for the frenzy that is Children in Need and Christmas shenanigans, as well as proving to be under such a weight with curriculum demands.  I can’t bring up reusable plastic right now, it would not be welcome!  The local parish is a whole new kettle of fish, as are shops etc and I will sit back and plan my targets and strategy before wading in.

It all feels a bit flat to me at the moment.  I am concentrating on re-using packaging for parcels I am sending to do with Tykki Dew and will look at reusable nappies for the baby.  I am using my soapnuts to extreme efficacy and composting away…  I am avoiding wipes, using natural cleaning products around my house (ecover and method); paying attention to all my plastic to see what is recyclable and what isn’t…  Honestly, at the moment I think I am doing a-ok.  Of course I forget, I walk past rubbish, I am absent-minded, I am yet to do a beach clean.

But I am trying and for me and for you this is in itself commendable.

🙂 Kids bedtime now

Laters!

 

A Week of Success and Small Confessions

Ok, let’s start with the successes.  My lovely PTA gave away free drinks to anyone who came to the Friday tuck shop with their own reusable cup and about half the people did it!  Kids and adults alike held their cups aloft proudly.  Thank you, lovely PTA.  It truly warms my cockles to see how enthusiastic people and kids can be when they are empowered to actually make a change.  Sometimes we just need a nudge.

It also please me enormously to start addressing the gaps in what the children learn at school and what they practice in real life.  They too often come out of school telling me all about what they may have learnt about the terrible plight of our world but then throw plastic in the bin without a care.  The same bin that has apple cores, cardboard and crisps wrappers in (an issue to hopefully be addressed at a later date).  They are #plasticblind: they don’t recognise that they are part of the problem!  This is a huge concern because if they don’t see how their own behaviour is part of the environmental problems they learn about then they will not help solve them – an attitude our generation are so guilty of.  They will see it as ‘someone else’s problem’ or as ‘something to worry about another day’.  It will be ‘too much to ask’ for them to learn new habits.

We have a responsibility to try and turn the tide, to make ourselves and people we influence learn how to habitually incorporate solutions into our everyday lives.  This can be on such a small but practical scale – picking up and tutting over some plastic litter on a walk to school; remembering to take your own cups for coffee/hot chocolates in the park or on the beach; saying no to straws; refusing ketchup packets with your fish and chips…  These are all small acts of happiness.

I also tried to do my grocery shopping thoughtfully and it really opened my eyes to how much of my stuff normally comes in a wrapper I’ll just throw away 😦  It didn’t work, but more of that later 😉

I am composting more and more, as long as I can keep the dog off my compost heap.

I have not bought any new wipes, as I run out so they stay out.  This deeply affects me, I love the convenience of grabbing a wipe that smells wonderfully strongly of lemons and bleach.  It makes me feel comfortable.  I do not like having to use only a cloth and some spray detergent because I have to look for these things and I am LAZY.

I have not bought any coffee pods.  This is really very sad indeed.  I use our coffee filter machine thing instead which is great because I can compost the coffee grounds but is a pain because sometimes I just want to grab a cup of yummy coffee, not make enough for a dinner party.

‘First world problems’ springs to mind… !!  But then again this is my life and what can I say, I am shallow.

Well, I can say that convenience is the nub of the problem.  The core, the nexus, the wormhole, the very eye of the disposable plastic storm.  Everything disposable plastic provides can be put under the heading of ‘convenience’.  Wipes, cutlery, cups, coffee cups, food trays, takeaway lunch meal deals, salads, sushi, crisps, coffee stirrers, fruit packaging, multipacks, hygienic wrappings, coffee pods, sanitary products, on and on and on it goes.  It is about supermarket shopping, takeaway culture, doing things on the go.  But I digress.

 

And onto the confessions…

• The baby kept leaking through her reusable nappies – I think they are too small for her.  Which means a big outlay to buy new ones.  I will hunt some down – I suppose even if I have four it will make a difference (small steps).
• I had a really awful (poopy) load of washing to do and I confess I just sodded it and used the Persil.  I was really tired, it was first thing in the morning and I didn’t want to spread the poo or have a not-clean-enough wash done.  I was mistrustful of my soapnuts!  And actually I regretted it the moment I turned the wash on.  I have washed mucky reusable nappies using them and they have come up beautifully!  Clean and super soft.  I was tired and grumpy and not in the mood for experiments.
• I woke up one morning and felt like a total weirdo and I didn’t like it.  Change is hard and sometimes quite lonely?!  I have my shampoo bar and my deodorant balm, my soapnuts (!), and I have worked hard to change shopping habits to be less plasticky.  I have also come up against some social resistance this week and made myself more visible than I like to be normally.  I have felt like the crazed eco-plastic hippy lady and it was uncomfortable.  I lost the faith.  But I carried on through it because I like my shampoo bar and my deodorant balm – they are genuinely lovely products – and used my soapnuts because they are easier than Persil (I don’t have to pick up the heavy box and scoop out the chemical powder that gets under my nails and stings my hands), and again and again they keep doing the job…  And I feel ok again now.

 

Keep on keeping on… Courage!