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 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

 

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?!

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 😉

Grocery Shopping II

OK so I did an online shop with Tescos this week.  I tried really hard to avoid food that came in plastic wrapping, like grapes etc (ahem, I bought grapes).  I didn’t buy baby tomatoes in a plastic non-recyclable pot.  I didn’t even buy a cauliflower because it comes in plastic wrapping for no discernable reason.  I didn’t buy multipacks of apples but bought them singly so to avoid the plastic packaging.  I didn’t get plastic bags so unpacked it all bit by bit while my baby girl cried in the background.

And how did it work?!  Well, I reckon you already know.

• All my counter bought meat and fish came wrapped in plastic bags.
• All my normal store bought meat came in a plastic tub (as always), and were then wrapped in a red plastic bag.
• Any toiletries also came in their own plastic bags.
• Frozen food came in their own plastic bags.
• My fruit all came in their own plastic bags.  Every mango, apple, kiwi and orange had a sticker on it.

It was crap.  I even said to the delivery guy that there were so many plastic bags and he said, ‘Well, if you will order them with plastic bags that’s how they come!’  And I said, ‘I didn’t though.’  And he said, ‘You did.’  And I said, ‘No, I didn’t.’  And he just made a whinnying noise (which, thankfully, I took as Tesco Delivery Man speak for ‘you’re right’, or we’d have had to have a right ding-dong).  But isn’t that funny?  There were so many plastic bags that were apparently exempt from this government-led eco-initiative to stop us mere mortals from RUINING the environment with our disgusting dependence on plazzy bags, that the Man thought I had asked for them.  And the IRONY ladies and gents is that if I HAD bought plastic bags and the items I wanted in plastic multipacks I would probably have used less packaging in total.  And certainly had less of those damned stickers.  AND on top of that, my plasticked fruit and salad items came in a bag.  A paper bag.  Because Tesco recognise how much we want our fruit and veg to look fresh and natural.  Stupid, stupid, stupid, contradictory, lip-service stupidity.

So there we are.  What did I learn?  Don’t try and fight the system, it is a nightmare.

HAHA!  Not really!  As if – anyone who knows me at all knows I exist to (mostly pointlessly and with breathless rants to lovely friends) fight the system.  So WHAT am I going to do, dear reader?  Well, I will send Tesco a ranty tweet.  YEAH.  I will blog about the irritant that is plastic bloody stickers on all my fresh food.

And I think, mostly, I have to learn from the small but visceral pleasure I got today from buying a cauli for 50p, sans packaging, from my local Spar earlier.  I got my cauli and not only that I got it cheaper, it was locally produced (which isn’t actually really hugely important to me in terms of air miles etc but I do like supporting local producers), and it was just as it was.  No stickers, no plastic wrapping.  And this made me realise the next logical shopping step is almost certainly to get me’sen a hessian bag and head to my local veg market at Carnon Downs Garden Centre.  Buy my own stuff.  Not feel like I am being diddled because some oranges are priced by weight and others per orange (so you can’t compare); not have to contend with stickers; not have to be in a beepity-beep supermarket; not have to be a pawn in someone else’s stupid game.  With MY money.

Oh gawd.  I might as well put on my tie dye harem pants now and be done with it.

OR I could use a fruit and veg delivery company like riverford, able and cole, or cornish food box.  But I do find them quite samey because of their reliance on local, seasonal produce: the fourth week of turnips and sprouts sends me loco and the other food (bread etc) is really expensive.  And guess what salad leaves and non-seasonal stuff is packaged in?!

Laters!

Grocery Shopping: Changing Habits

Oh I am so happy today!

I got my order from Amazon today.  (Now, Amazon are a tax-dodging megolith or a corporation who fleece workers, it’s true BUT they also use cardboard instead of plastic for packaging.  So credit where credit’s due.)  And in it I had:

A reusable wooden brush with natural bristles 🙂  Isn’t it perdy?

• It was £3.78 with free delivery
• The wooden head comes off the metal grips and can be replaced
• The old head can then be put on your compost heap
• The lowest price plastic brush on Amazon is £3.50

I KNOW!  It’s great 🙂   It’s a no brainer as far as I am concerned.

I also got my  soapnuts for washing with!  Here:

Now, these did come in a plastic bag over the bag you see in the photo which had to be thrown away.  Inside they are also in a plastic bag!  But this one is to keep them fresh and is reusable so it’s ok.  I have used them for one wash – some uniform and a skanky dog towel – so we shall see how it all fares as it is currently in the tumble dryer (Haha! See, I am normal!) Now, this is a strange and very novel business.

• It comes with three little hessian style bags to put your nuts in which you then put straight in the drum with your clothes.
• They smell a bit odd but I have a nose for strong smelling detergent and fabric softeners.  (I am a total sucker for ‘black diamond and orchid trellis’ style marketing ;))
• As I posted before here this is a ridiculously cheap option.  Is £8.99 for 1kg of these nuts which will last our family of five about 3 months, instead of £7.99 for a box of family sized Persil which would last one month
• The shells of the nuts are taken out of the bag when done and put in your compost heap.  WOW!

I truly LOVE the idea of these things.  But we shall see how they are when the washing is done…  I am mostly concerned about smelling weird.

And this I guess is a neat place to put my comments about Ecover washing powder…  They were on offer in Sainsburys over the summer so I thought I would try it (again, I stopped because it was too pricey 10 years ago.  In case you don’t know, Ecover are a company making environmentally friendly household products, of which washing powder is one.)  But it has no smell.  No smell!  And I got a puppy over the summer who did (does) smell.  We went on walks that meant we smelt of creek and pond and mud and newts.  And the washing powder seemed to echo this smell and so I went off it straight back to my beloved, but environmentally evil, normal washing powder.

So I am, being a normal person, fussy about smells and smelling.

Which leads me neatly onto my third purchase!  My BIG, glass pot of deodorant balm  🙂  I got this from Amazon too but a cheaper version than my last diddy pot:

• A 6ml pot of my last balm lasted about 9 days so this should last me around three months
• It cost £6.99 which is more expensive than typical deodorants
• It smells really nice
• When you put it on your underarms are immediately dry which is lovely
• There is no residue on your clothes or fingers after applying
• It is completely natural
• So far it has worked a treat.  And I am a very sweaty person 😉

I have to say I wouldn’t generally say I was into ‘all natural’, eco- or organic stuff, I am happy for all sorts of chemicals to permeate my life.  BUT it is really pleasing knowing that all the ingredients are recognisable and simple.  And this one is in a glass pot.

And THEN I did a grocery shop, my first big one after the last one I posted.  I did it online again and it was so tricky!  Last time I didn’t see the plastic on everything until it arrived in my house, this time I saw it when I was trying to buy stuff.  So I had to start from scratch buying a lot of stuff so it didn’t come in multipack plastic etc.  The multipack thing is a total bugger.  Cans of beans – yay, they are in tins, all good – but if you want a multipack they swathe it all in disposable plastic.  Same for fruit and veg.  Want three peppers?  Have it in plastic.  Want 5 apples?  In plastic.  But if you buy the exact same products singly you pay for each individually, costing you more.  This is wrong.  (I feel an angry tweet coming on…)  Anyway, dear reader, I did not buy these things but bought stuff singly.  Am hoping it won’t all come in plastic bags but I think it will.

I generally:

• Swapped bread in plastic for baguettes and will make sandwich bread (?!  Hmmm)
• Avoided fruit and veg that comes in plastic, like tomatoes, grapes etc
• Bought oranges singly so they didn’t come with that stupid plastic tag on
• Said no to the shopping coming in plastic bags even though it is a lengthy nightmare to unpack
• Didn’t buy any disposable wipes of any kind
• Didn’t replenish my Tassimo coffee pod stash.

 

 

I think that I am going to need to change my shopping habits more drastically and actually go shopping myself (clutches face in horror).  Then I can take the plastic stickers off my fruit and use my own market bags for the fruit and veg.

And then I realise that actually I could do with a) going to a market for untainted fruit and veg and b) a butchers for ethical and non plasticked meat.

And then I think…  One step at a time.

But generally I am pleased because with these little resolutions I am making a difference and teaching my children to make a difference too.

Laters!

 

 

Don’t Put Me In The Loo! :(

This is an obvious and yet necessary post about what we cannot put down our toilets here in in the UK.

We cannot put:

• Wipes.  Bum wipes, baby wipes, kitchen wipes, bathroom wipes.  Do not put wipes down the toilet.  Please.  Please.
• Cotton Buds.  These are the fourth biggest polluter of the oceans.  FOURTH!  They are everywhere.  Do not put them in the loo, they go in the bin.
• Tampons.  Wrap it up in some tissue and put it in the bin.  These cannot go down the toilet!
• Sanitary Towels.  These are a nightmare.  They smell yummy and are eaten by sealife.  They are not yummy, they are chemical plastic crap.  Wrap them up in some toilet roll and put them in the bin.  Do not put them in the toilet.
• Items labelled ‘Harmful to Aquatic Life’.  Bleach!  BLEACH!  (Fairy liquid too, but I digress.)  I swear in the future our kids will think we were prehistoric putting stuff like bleach into our ecosystem without a second thought.

 

What SHALL I do then?

Easy Level Answer:  Put it all in the bin instead.

Tricksier, more thoughtful answers:

• Wipes.  Don’t use wipes if you can help it.  Use cotton cloths and put them in the washing machine after use.  I make and sell pretty crocheted ones that are different colours for different jobs 🙂  (See Tykki Dew on Facebook/PM me for deets!)  For babies you can make your own bum solution with olive oil, water and tea tree for antiseptic (see homemade solutions tag :)) and use microfibre cloths or cut up some terry towelling or use flannels.  Is very easy.
• Cotton Buds.  Use wooden ones instead of plastic ones.  Or don’t use them at all?!
• Tampons and Sanitary Towels.  Use a mooncup!  Or buy a magnificently named ‘Jam Sponge’ 🙂  See here: Sanitary Solutions
• Bleach. Use Ecover – it’s in all the stores and made of natural ingredients.  Is £1 a bottle in Sainsbury’s as of last week which is the same price as a bottle of own brand bleach (November 2017).  Also feel free to try Method, they have nice natural products too.
• OR go crazy and make your own solutions with white vinegar, bicarb and essential oils.  I haven’t done this yet but you can buy in bulk for these things off of Amazon – it’s a pretty common thing to do.

Thank you!

SAS: Plastic Free Coastlines

Surfers Against Sewage, a water and environment charity based in Cornwall, are launching a new initiative to increase resistance to the plastic clogging our oceans and feeding our sealife.  They have a two pronged approach – an individual action plan and, if you like it a lot (which I did) you can ask to become a Community Leader – influencing the way your local community uses and thinks about disposable plastics.

You can sign up for the free individual action pack here: Free Individual Action Plan

As part of their campaign they talk about Wasteland:

‘Wasteland is a metaphor for the largest concentration of ocean plastic in the world, the North Pacific Gyre where it has been found that there is more plastic than plankton. We are conceptualising it as a new country that is fuelled by single use plastics in the ocean and will take over the world if we don’t do something about it.’   https://www.sas.org.uk/wasteland/about/

This is an accurate and clever way of getting us to realise that there really is a mass of plastic in the ocean that is growing.  Everyone underestimates how big this is.  THREE TIMES THE SIZE OF THE UK.  Of course it isn’t a land mass or an actual sovereign land but it does exist and it is gross.

What is in the individual action plan?

See it here: https://www.sas.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/PFC-Individual-Action-Plan.pdf

The plan asks you to:

• Remember your refillable
  water bottle
• Take a reusable coffee
  cup and refuse single-use
  take away cups
• Refuse single-use packaging
• Resist a straw; straws suck
• Refuse a single-use plastic
  bag and take your own
• Take your own cutlery or use
  sustainable alternatives
• Avoid single-use plastics
  in the bathroom
• Refuse single-use
  condiment sachets
• Do your own #MiniBeachClean
• Grab a handful of plastic
  pollution every time you
  visit your beach
• Fund the Resistance
  Donate to SAS today.
  Just £5 helps create
  Plastic Free Coastlines

Just doing any one of these things makes a difference and will make you feel good 🙂

Laters!

 

Lush Invented Shampoo Bars

I didn’t know this!

This is a great article on the value of a shampoo bar vs a bottle and Lush’s approach to ‘naked’ packaging:

https://uk.lush.com/article/naked-revolution

Basically the article says:

• Shampoo bars don’t need synthetic preservatives because they are naturally preserving – lasting for ever and ages
• Each shampoo bar lasts on average 3 times as long as a 200ml bottle – so each bar you have saves 3 bottles from landfill
• Shampoo bars can travel easily – they are light and can be put in a tin

 

Not everyone likes Lush – I know sometimes the smells can be too intense.  I do like them though and am excited by their ‘naked’ approach 🙂

Adverts

Oh my goodness I have become a total plastic nerd (not to be confused with ‘nerdle’, micro-plastic scourge of the sea!  Chortle snarf).  Last night I was watching channel four and advert after advert flaunted their wares in disposable plastics 😦  It was so weird, like realising that your beloved mum is a racist or your lovely boss is a perv.  It’s all wrong, all upside down.

As a social and marketing cynic I don’t trust advertising, obviously.  Any medium that thinks I will buy their product because it contains ‘hydrospheres’ (come on) or that thinks telling people to gamble responsibly while selling the addictive thrill of gambling is always going to be unreasonable.  However, it is a medium through which the norms and mores of our society are reflected; it draws on our values in order to get us on side.  This can be seen in the surge of gay couples in adverts and transgender models, reflecting our society’s attitudes towards sexuality and concepts of gender.  The environment is discussed largely in terms of ‘carbon footprints’ and increasingly, diet.  The plastification of the ocean is not yet a Thing.  It is nowhere near being a thing.  The easy acceptance we have of plastic in our everyday lives is an environmental catastrophe but we have not woken up to this yet.  I know why.  It is really, most definitely, completely and absolutely, not sexy.  It is boring.  ‘We recycle, don’t we?  So stop banging on about it and leave me alone…’  I am aware that I am going to be ‘that recycling woman’ who bothers people with my do-goodery and preachy recycling ‘bants’.  I will make people groan with my general presence, much like an anti-smoker in a pub 15 years ago.  People will hide their disposable plastic cups behind flower pots when I turn up at a party; try and explain away that lip balm packaging in the loos.

But I digress.  What I wanted to rant about was the packaging of the products.  One after another, paraded in front of me like it just didn’t matter.  Because we have PlasticBlindness and so it doesn’t!  Ahhh, what beautiful, expensive packaging!  Shampoos – well, hair products aplenty – chocolates in plastic trays, sweets in plastic wrappers, crisps in whatever that crisp packet awfulness is.  In some adverts they even flaunt and sexify the plastic packaging with no thought whatsoever that it is, perhaps (to the more discerning consumer) Totally Not Cool.  Sooo much money is spent on that plastic, getting the designs and attractiveness just absolutely right so we buy it.  But the problem is in the very substance of that package.  Watching families coo over babies in plastic nappies,  singing about Sudacreme in big plastic pots, having family time sharing chocolates in throwaway trays, beautiful people walking along a scenic street laughing with their non-recyclable ‘paper’ cups…  Oh my days!  And the irony of it being alongside adverts for world cruises.  Not a jot of plastic seen on that advert although I tell you, there would be a lot of it 😉

And I know what I sound like.  I know I sound like I am Up In Arms with the neighbours, that I am waving my sandals around in a naked protest and shouting about the whales, the whales!  I know.  And I also know that this approach is naturally offensive.  But these things have to pointed out so we can see them and then make the incremental teensy tweaks to our lives that will preserve our planet.  When you see how bad it is, when you wake up and realise that this cannot carry on as normal because we are choking our oceans with this shit, then you do get cross.  We need to challenge these ideas of ‘normal’ and suggest new ones.  Then society and marketeers and the product makers will follow and we would have changed the world, my friends.

Changed the world.

As you were.

Gift Bags and Guest Blogs

Gift Bags

I am thinking about putting together Little Bags of Loveliness, with stuff sourced from my blog witterings.  I would do different theme bags with sample sizes of products in, so a bathroom one with a little deobalm pot, shampoo bar, a crocheted face cloth, wooden toothbrush, some homemade body scrub etc.  A kitchen one with some soapnuts, coir scrubbing brush and pot scrubber etc; a baby products one with reusable wipes and ingredients for homemade wipe solution etc… (yet to know much about these areas!)  I would like to get it to around £10 but think realistically it would cost around £15.  It would be a great treat to get started with I think… But also they are just lovely things for a present (not just any old tat darlings!)

If anyone is interested or has a product they would like in it pm me?!

And

Guest Blogs

Do you know things?  Are you confuddled, angry or utterly disinterested – and why?  Are you an expert?  Have you a kind product you would like to share?  Would you like to write something for this ‘ere EcoTykki Blog?!  If so, please do!  PM me, yo.

Ni