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!

Bottom Wiping :)

Ah yes.  Bottom wiping; the joys, the fancies, the silliness of it.  And how many ways in which we do it!  We can use loo roll or bidets, our left hand, or flushable (and very often non-flushable) ‘moistening’ wipes.  And our babies!  Obviously in the west we use baby wipes with little variation unless you are a bit alternative.  Which is a gosh darned shame for our lovely oceans!  I have spoken of this before and will again 🙂

So, firstly, the toilet roll.  A peculiar western fancy that is really gross when you’ve travelled around a bit.  It was incredibly strange using water in South East Asia and then again in India but when you think about it we do like to use water to get clean.  We don’t smear paper around our faces to get clean, we like wet stuff.  But with poo it’s ok just to smear paper around and look down on people who use water.  It really is backwards.  A fine example of common knowledge being mistaken for wisdom.  And this is not to say that I use water, I do not, that would be gross!  Ah, sweet Orwellian doublethink – when one holds two contradictory thoughts at the same time, knowing one is more correct while doing the other…  This is how marketeers corner us as a herd and prevent us thinking too much about what we are up to.  We can buy toilet roll that is marketed as environmentally friendly while it is wrapped in plastic…  we can buy food that is organic but not free range, we can buy diamonds knowing they fuel conflict in Sierra Leone while having a monthly direct debit donation to Oxfam  This is how we function as humans – to know and be in complete unison would be absolutely impossible in a busy world, this is why monks and nuns seek isolation: to concentrate and focus and limit the doublethink.

So we use paper in the west, fact.  But how can we buy this paper without the plastic wrapping?!  At the moment I am being marketed at by a lovely looking company called www.whogivesacrap.org.  A fantastic write up of this company’s product is here by myplasticfreelife (dated September 2017, so very up to date, and thorough – checkit! :)) Here she says that she generally used a product called ‘Seventh Generation’ loo roll that came without plastic although sometimes used plastic to post it – but having had a squizz myself this is only available in America anyways.  She moved to using whogivesacrap though, as they definitely did not use any plastic.  We can use them too!  The rolls are 3x more expensive compared to recycled normal rolls at Sainsburys though, so for me they are not an option at the moment.  An interesting point of their business is that they give 50% of their profits to water and sanitation charities that help in the ‘developing world’.  I am not sure about how helpful this aspect is in reality, but for now I’ll leave that decision up to you.

The point now is to contact Sainsbury’s and ask them to stock their toilet paper in cardboard cartons and paper wrapping.

And on to wipes.  Oh, sweet wipes.  Wipes are so convenient!  Wrapped in a waterproof plastic container to keep them fresh; portable; easy to grab one-handed; hundreds in one small packet; and wonderfully multi-purpose.  Snotty noses, chocolatey chops, grazed mitts, and, of course, mucky bums.  And now, the increasingly ubiquitous household wipe.  Cleans your floor!  Your kitchen surfaces – better than a reusable cloth because using a cloth is the equivalent of rubbing raw chicken on your baby’s high chair (really, you know the advert)!  Your toilet and bathrooms!  BUT THEY ARE COMPLETELY ANTI-SOCIAL!  ANTI, ANTI, ANTI!  ANTI!  Anti-actual life, anti water, anti-waste pipes, anti-toilet, anti-landfill, anti-nature.

They get stuck in water pipes from toilet to sea.  They are eaten by birds.  They do NOT degrade, whatever the packaging tries to say.  They contain drying chemicals for bottoms, even sensitive ones.  And this is another example of doublethink:  we are buying chemically composed wipes for our babies that work really hard to boast that they are as cleansing as WATER.  As pure for your baby as WATER.  As sensitive to your baby’s skin as…  WATER.  If only we could actually use this halcyon product, ‘water’!  Instead we: a) buy wipes; b) use wipes that even the manufacturers say are NOT as good for your child as this thing ‘water’; c) throw wipes down the toilet because we are told on the packaging that they are ‘flushable’, ‘disposable’, and ‘degradable’.

So instead of uncritically absorbing marketing claims as ‘truth’ let us unpack what they are really saying a little bit.  Engage brain, AND:

‘Flushable’ does not mean biodegradable.

‘Flushable’ does not mean ‘won’t be eaten by wildlife’.

‘Flushable’ does not mean ‘won’t clog wastepipes that lead into the sea, backing sewage up into rivers’.

and

‘Disposable’ is a joyfully cheeky term used by Wipe-Makers that is actually a myth.  These wipes are the very opposite of disposable!  I mean, anything is disposable – arsenic, battery acid and asbestos are disposable.  Does this mean they should be disposed of, all casual like, in our domestic waste?!  Does it mean that when they can no longer be seen by us, from our houses, that they are benign or, ta-da, ‘disappeared’?  No, of course not.  And the same goes for these convenience wipes.  They are not actually disposable because when they are in the bin they are then taken away and…  they stay as wipes.  In wipe form.  For donkeys years.  In the sea or rivers, in hedges, on verges, in animals (I know it’s emotive, but it is true I’m afraid :()  They are not made benign.  They are not disappeared.  Bamboo wipes, however, are actually disposable.  Cotton cloths are disposable: they are benign and will disappear.  So why don’t we use and throw these away several times a day instead?!  Because we have made them to be valuable.  They are re-usable, they are for a purpose, and so we hold onto them and care about them.

‘Disposable’ does not mean we can throw them away.  It means we don’t need to care about them.  They have no value to us.  Their use, their memory, their imprint, is what is disposable, rather than the physical wipe.  I think we can value what happens to our ‘disposable’ wipes by critically questioning why they are termed ‘disposable’ and, ultimately, reject this term as a marketing myth.

‘Anti-bacterial’ in reference to household cleaning wipes does not mean more sanitary than a cloth and spray.  Using a convenience wipe with anti-flu, anti-norovirus and anti-bac properties is not actually better than using a reusable cotton cloth.  Just like anti-bac hand-wash is only anti-bacterial in the way it is soap that is rubbed over your hands, wipes are anti-bacterial, anti-noro and anti-flu germs in the use of an antiseptic cleaning agent and the action of rubbing or cleaning.  So there are no special properties inherent to a wipe that cannot also be found in an ecologically sound cleaning spray like Method or even kitchen ingredients (more of which later!), and the action of cleaning.  A TV advert disputes this fact by likening the efficacy of a kitchen cloth to that of wiping raw chicken around your child and kitchen.  This is categorically untrue at worst and misleading at best.  This plays on our idea of ‘disposable’ as if we throw germs away.  As if using a cloth is smearing, not cleaning, and reusing is fundamentally unhygienic.  Which it is, if you never wash it.  Which you can do in your washing machine, even after one use.  (Like you do your clothes?!  Is the re-using of clothes, unless you are P-Diddy who apparently wears a new pair of socks every day but is also considered a bit, er, silly, also unsanitary?)

Actually, it could be argued that a scrubby cloth rubs off stuck on stains BETTER and more EASILY than a slippery wipe.  It could be argued that a scrubby cloth can look really rather lovely in a kitchen or bathroom, compared to an ugly plastic pack of wipes.  It can be argued that cloths are cheaper because they are longer lasting than wipes you throw away.  And it can be argued that a cloth used with a naturally made cleaning product is better for your child because it is chemical and bleach free.  Wipe Makers say cloths are gross because they, apparently, harbour germs.  But aren’t wipes unpleasant because they contain bleaches and chlorine that you would never let your child near normally.  But on a highchair it is ok?

And, finally, hold onto your hats,

‘Degradable’ does not mean bio-degradable.  It means that at some point in the future, maybe even a few hundred years away, they will degrade.  Biodegradable means it will easily return to the earth, be consumed by nature in a harmless, eco-sustainable fashion.  We are biodegradable.  Plastics can be called ‘degradable’ – but this isn’t in a good way as we know.  It is marketing gumph, really to make you feel that the wipes you are using are natural, easily gotten rid off, leaving no trace.

This is incredibly misleading.

And so, what to do?!  Well, re: baby wipes, I have written about this before.

I use an old takeaway tub or ice cream box.

I fill it half full with WATER (!!), add a tablespoon of olive oil and two drops of either lavender or tea tree essential oil.

Olive oil is a moisturiser for your baby’s bott and also helps wipe gooey poo off (especially the nightmare that is meconium!!  It is FAB for that :))

Lavender or tea tree essential oils are antiseptic (science fact, not hippy nonsense) and leave a lovely fresh, utterly harmless fragrance.

I then put about 10 or so washable, cotton cloths in the tub to get all moist and ready to use. You can get funky cloths from Amazon, or from cheekywipes:  Cheekywipes have 25 bamboo cloths for £13.50 and free delivery, which works out at about 54p a wipe.  ‘Disposable’ wipes are around £15 for 18 packs if you bulk buy, though you can frequently buy wipes for £1 a pack, making them about 1p a wipe.  Average 3 changes a day, 3 wipes a change = 9p on wipes every day.  So after a week you could have saved the world 60-70 disposable wipes and exchanged them for your first reusable cloth.

After a month you could have saved 270 wipes and exchanged them for the price of 5 reusables.

Upscale this to 6 months and you would have thrown away 1620 wipes.  1620!  Jeez Louise, I can’t believe that.  And the cost of this would be the equivalent of your 25 reusable bamboo (actually biodegradable!) wipes and your essential oil.  And then you’re sitting pretty for the rest of your wipe-using life, which if you have more than one child can last for around 5/6 years.  So your lovely reusables, the (woohoo!) ‘WATER’, oil and essential oil will save you around…. *drum roll please*:

£178 – £250 per child

Which is LOADS on something you don’t need.  Imagine the reverse-marketing.  Pampers are saying to you, ‘WOW!  We have a product here that is not at all biodegradable, cannot be flushed down the toilet or reused, is nothing like water and might irritate your baby’s skin 🙂  A bargain at only £200 per child!’ 🙂 🙂 🙂

So…  Imagine you have to pay this outlay before you even have your baby.  £200!

And then imagine you have to dispose of them in your own garden!

Imagine 18000 wipes ‘degrading’ in your garden!  Per child!  Summer would SUCK.

Alternatively, see your neighbour who relies on reusable, bamboo wipes…  And washes them in the washing machine and so has nothing in their garden but grass.  And they paid around £30 for their lifestyle instead of £200.  Jealous, much?!

So, with that hugely emotive rhetoric I leave you, dear friends!  And I implore you from the bottom of my heart to leave the wipes on the shelf and make yourself a tub of actually water-based, reusable, BIO-degradable, earth friendly, bamboo wipes for your baby.  And tell your friends.  And show off the funky designs on them.  And then, when your babies are grown you can use them to clean your bathroom.  And then, when they are old and need retiring they will go back to nature, naturally.

I know it hurts to hear that wipes are, er, crap.  Big hugs.  And actually, it is ok to use wipes if you need to.  I do, because, like you, I am human.  I use my bamboo as much as I can but sometimes I fail, or need a pack of wipes in my bag when I am out or need a quick clean of my bathroom because I don’t have my cloths quickly enough to hand.

I get it.  I just want to share information, for knowledge is power 🙂

xx

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!

 

 

Email to Sainsburys

So I sent my first badgering email 🙂  I brought up:

• Unnecessary packaging on the multipacks
• Plastic bags for loose fruit and veg
• Plastic on netting

I didn’t get space in the form to talk about the eco-aisle!  But they responded and, while not really committing to anything new they do show willing.  I’ll take that for now :).  Here is a copy of their response:

Dear Dr Srivastava

Thanks for writing to us about your concerns surrounding our environmental policies. We’re really passionate in our approach to this issue, particularly as one of our key corporate values is respect for our environment.

As part of our company values, we’re committed to sourcing the products we sell in a sustainable and responsible way. Our scale means we can make a massive difference by embedding ‘Respect For Our Environment’ in our decision making. We aim to be the UK’s greenest grocer, not only by reducing our impact on the environment but by engaging our suppliers and others to do the same. You can find out more about this by visiting http://www.j-sainsbury.co.uk/responsibility, including our sustainability plan, our comments and stories on food donation, healthier baskets and waste less, save more.

I’m sorry you’ve had to query our approach, and I’ve dropped a copy of your email to our Corporate Affairs Team. They’ll be able to use your comments to help them with their continual updates on our environmental policies.

Thanks for taking the time to get in touch and I hope you’ll feel happy to shop with us soon.

Kind regards,

Aaron Podesta | Sainsbury’s Careline
Sainsbury’s Supermarkets Ltd | 33 Holborn, London | EC1N 2HT
customer.service@sainsburys.co.uk | 0800 636 262
twitter.com/sainsburys | facebook.com/sainsburys

As you can see above,  if you would like to email them with your concerns too their address is:

customer.service@sainsburys.co.uk

This is a template for an email you can send, if it helps:

Dear         ,

I am sure that you are increasingly aware of the international concern with plastic pollution and that consequently people do not want to purchase unnecessary plastic with their groceries.  I wish to draw your attention to the superfluity of single use plastic in your stores so you can hopefully change your policies to be more protective of our environment.

First, in your stores consumers are incentivised to buy products in unnecessary plastic packaging in the form of multi-pack buys.  Products from fruit and veg to tins of beans, soups and fish purchased in plastic multi-packs are consistently cheaper than when bought loose.  This is both unnecessary and harmful plastic waste and financially demotivating for consumers trying to make ethical purchasing decisions.

Second, the netting for food like oranges has unnecessary plastic tags on it, while loose fruit and veg has non-degradable stickers on.  These could be made from biodegradable materials.

Third, your consumers are encouraged to put these items in flimsy single use plastic bags when you could easily change this to compostable netting; desirable, non-plastic market bags; or paper bags.

Finally, it is essential that online shopping is delivered in a more customer-friendly manner.  It is currently challenging to receive a large family shop without using plastic bags to help speed the unpacking from the lorry.  I would suggest lining the stackable plastic crates with a cardboard box taken out of the crate by the door for easy unpacking.  These can later be returned to you or recycled.

These issues can arguably be addressed immediately and result in a positive, ethical move for your brand.

Thank you for your time.

Yours sincerely

…..

I also like to add the following because I like these ideas 🙂

There are longer term issues that can be changed.  Elsewhere in the store the issue continues as breads and cereals are swathed in plastic – even fresh bakery items are sold in paper bags with plastic windows.  Refill bins for popular brands could be introduced.

I would also like to suggest the development of an eco-aisle of ecologically sound, compostable or biodegradable alternatives to common household products.  (This is distinct to products that promote themselves as ‘organic’, ‘natural’ or ‘local’ while using non-recyclable plastic packaging.)  Rather, they are products which are easily recyclable, reusable or refillable.  Your store already has plenty of these products but they are hard to see among the regular brands.  An ‘eco-week’ could be arranged, promoting your support to ecologically aware brands.  You could trial and demonstrate the efficacy of bottle refills for household cleaners; install bulk buy refill bins for cereals; deposit and return systems for plastic bottles and even trial and promote alternative products like shampoo bars, simple hand soaps, reusable products over disposable ones (e.g. kitchen cloths, baby wipes and nappies) and windowsill salad gardens.  It would be possible to market these as aspirational and desirable lifestyle changes, as fun and simple ways of ‘being’ along with the current trend toward the concepts of hygge and mindfulness.

I sincerely believe that immediately addressing some of the above concerns while also developing a longer-term, ecologically motivated anti-plastic campaign could only be a positive move for your brand.  I hope that you agree.

I hope they do agree!  Anyway, there isn’t going to be much choice soon, the Government seem to be on the case – more of which later 🙂 🙂 🙂

Am off to wrap my pressies – using recyclable wrapping paper (not the shiny plasticky stuff!) and either pretty yarns, string and twine to wrap around it in a bow 🙂  I then reuse lovely cards from last year’s crop as gift tags.  It is surprisingly effective and very pleasing!

Big loves y’all

Ni

 

 

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This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the system manager (postmaster@sainsburys.co.uk) and delete it from your system.

Sainsbury’s Supermarkets Ltd (3261722 England)
Registered Offices: 33 Holborn, London, EC1N 2HT

Sainsbury’s Argos is a trading name of both:
1) Argos Limited, Registered office: 489-499 Avebury Boulevard, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom, MK9 2NW, registered number: 01081551 (England and Wales); and
2) Sainsbury’s Supermarkets Limited, Registered office: 33 Holborn, London, EC1N 2HT, registered number: 03261722 (England and Wales).

All companies listed above are subsidiaries of J Sainsbury plc (185647).

---

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!

Holidaying

Ah the joys of holidays!  We just came back from a joyful time at Center Parcs (a review of which will follow later but they get 4/5 stars from me for super environmental awareness)!  Main disposable plastic ishoos when travelling I found were to do with toiletries and washing powder.

Holidaying is a time for indulgence and not having to worry about real life.  And this often goes for our toiletries etc too.  Little travel size wotnots, 2 for the price of 3?  YEAH!  I love them, I really do, they are so cute.  But, no.  These disposable, easy chuck products are completely not cool.  Instead:

• use the toiletries stolen from previous trips away, as I think a lot of us do.
• Keep any travel sized shampoo bottles and fill these up again with your own shampoo and conditioner.  (I use these for showers after swimming too, hacve lasted forever.)
• Pop your shampoo and body soaps in their little travel tins and away you go 🙂  You can get these for a couple of quid from Lush OR simply use a small chocolate/biscuit gift tin.  If you do the latter then you’ll be able to pop in a flannel/exfoliating washcloth too and put both soaps in the same tin 🙂

What I found completely awesome was taking away my washing powder.  Normally when self-catering or camping you have to sort of decant some powder or liquid or buy new stuff and it is a chemically dodgy nightmare.  But with Soapnuts it was fantastically easy!  I just put some in their little cotton bags and popped them in my suitcase!  They were all ready to pop in a washing machine if I needed them, and once done with I could just chuck them away anywhere…  All nature-friendly!  Complete guilt-free wondrousness 🙂

And another note about Soapnuts – my Husband of Fastidious Cleanliness asked me when I was going to use them.  I said I have been using them for over a month now, for all the washing…  ‘Oh!’ Says he.  So the blind testing worked, hurray! 🙂

Generally your attitude while on holiday is influenced by the place you are at.  In this respect I found Center Parcs to be great.  Bins were omnipresent and split into general waste and recycling.  This was encouraged in the cabins too, serving to normalise behaviours that protect our environment.  We were given toiletries which looked like they may have been refills (but I am not sure, I plan to write to them and find out) so we didn’t have to take our own single-use travel nonsense.  Free liquid soap was dispensed at the pool for guests to use, again negating the need for any dinky plastic toiletries.  Cafetieres were available at the chalet so if you had your own travel coffee mugs (which of course we did!) you could fill them at home and take it out to warm you while the kids played at the parks.

Sadly, plastic pollution was still everywhere.  The knackered old frisbee in the duck pond, the gaffer tape bundle that was used to temporarily fix something and discarded in the forest, the teeny bits of plastic from food wrappers, coffee cups and plastic bags.  They are everywhere, once you start seeing it it is hard to ignore.  My son and I tried to clear it up as we went along but it was so prolific that we would have turned into litter pickers all holiday.  It was all small, flyaway bits that are dug into the earth and stones so we would have needed gloves etc.  It showed the severity of the problem, but also how we *don’t* see it, or really mind.  It is part of the landscape.*  I think Center Parcs is a very clean and environmentally responsible place, and yet they can’t get on top of it.  It is sad.  Now, what would be ideal would be if travel coffee mugs and water bottles were supplied with the accommodation, or put on a deposit and return scheme, then disposable plastic cups/bottles can be made superfluous to requirement.  Guests can be encouraged to pick up larger bits of litter – just one a day – in which case they/we will feel less keen on dropping it.

It is getting that balance between wanting to protect your money maker, your USP – in this case the environment – and normalising protective behaviours without being a total holiday fun sponge.  I think it can be done though.  I will email Center Parcs and give them an opportunity to reply on this blog 🙂

Laters!

*By the by, I find it interesting that we are repulsed by the idea of a dog pooing in the wilds.  We insist on policing dog poo with fines and plastic bags to clean it up, but are happy to swim around in plastic pollution and take walks in forests with human-made crap all around us.  Poo is natural and won’t last long but the plastic is, as we are all aware here, a bloody nightmare.  The social hatred toward poo and tolerance of plastic pollution is arguably nonsensical.  Only a few years ago we could let our dogs poo anywhere.  Now, not so much.  Which is fine and dandy by me, and when people say that having your own mugs and bottles to fill when you go out won’t ever catch on, I beg to differ.  If we can remember to take out poo bags for our dogs when we go for walks and then hold onto that poo bag until we find a suitable repository then we really honestly will be able to put a travel cup/bottle in our bag for a nice drink.

Courage!

 

 

 

My Locale

Oh MAN!  I was walking my pup around the 1.5 mile school route and wooded areas and came across a crisp packet, two water bottles; a very very very old sandwich packet, a recent selection box packet, shoes, beer bottles and tins, binbags of flytipped rubbish, about 6 little kiddy ride-on toys that have been dumped, random clear plastic bits, a few dog poop bags, straws, fast food cups…  and this is just what I remember.

And while this could be a rant about how gross and uncaring we all are, it is definitely not because this is in what actually looks like a lovely, clear and all natural patch of English woodland.  Sheep graze nearby, the hills roll in the distance, the squirrels and foxes are in abundance, skylarks sing over the recently seeded wheat fields.  It is beautiful.

But if you look, you see the critters.  And it is depressing.  We are people – animals – like the stink of fox or the nut stashes of squirrels we are bound to make imprints both positive and negative on our environs.  But plastic is a total bastard to get rid of.  Every time we use something plastic, for the few minutes that is in our hands, it will leave us for a journey that is hundreds of years long on this earth.  Whenever we see plastic on the floor, on the beach, in a layby it is ours.  I never think it is mine.  But every time we see the increasingly iconic pictures on the telly of a bottle bobbing in the ocean this was once in a human hand.  My hand?  Your hand.

We made the mess and we need to clean it up.  Every bit of plastic picked up helps remove it from other animals’ habitats; stops birds picking up colourful, shiny tidbits of crisp packet and silly dogs playing, chewing and eating bits of plastic bottles.  And it is so BORING – no-one likes tidy up time!  So I think I am going to try and propose, somehow, a local clean up in exchange for a bit of good feeling and a free coffee for whoever wants to join in.

Cleaning our local areas, like the well promoted and heeded ‘two minute beach clean’ (https://beachclean.net/) is going to have to become something we ‘do’.  And as we have to start tidying it up I think it would spur us to not actually drop it in the first place 😉

Laters!

Recycling Plastic

I have been so completely crap I did not realise that the council these days recycles an awful lot of different plastics.  Yoghurt pots, butter tubs, shampoo bottles AND the lids are all widely recycled.  So it is worth having a look at your plastic items before putting them in the bin!

And a useful nugget of knowledge is that if your plastic has a number 5 on it by the recycling logo then it is not recyclable.  No ‘5’ numbers are recyclable.

I actually found myself choosing between two products (butter I think) the other day according to which was commonly recycled 🙂  See, it’s all about mindset.  If you start to pay attention it just becomes part of what you do and who you are.

Awesome.

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!

 

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!