I’ve been a bit quiet over the last couple of months. I mean I’ve been a bit quiet on here – disappointingly for my husband it’s generally difficult for me to be anything other than loud in every day life. My eldest daughter has recently found her chatty voice and my goodness it is like a reflection of myself. I can totally see why I am super annoying/embarrassing sometimes/always.

Anyway, I’ve been a bit quiet. The reason being that December and January are pants. Like proper baggy knickers-on-their-last-legs pants. You have that glimmer of hope in December with Christmas, but then you hit January and you lose all hope that life will ever be the same. We all become hugely melodramatic and start hating on Jeff who somehow wangles two weeks in the sun. And I’m not saying February is much better, but now I’ve seen some daffodils come up and the council have starting mowing the lawns around where we live. So I’ve declared it spring and now I feel much better.

Being Eco

I’ve been wanting to chat about the eco train for all of the above quiet time. What do you think about it all? I’m thinking most normal people would agree we all should do our bit to help the obvious creeping disaster that human driven climate change and generally ridiculousness will bring. It really does get my goat when I am forced into some encounter with a stupid person whose convinced the American orange man is right and ‘climate change isn’t a thing we’ve done.’ They are like the anti-vaxxers, can’t reason with them and it’s just going to cause more stress for you to try. Incase you’re interested in the evidence that human driven climate change is a thing, I think the best reads are from the IPCC – The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That and listening to anything David Attenborough says, because he’s a legend and ever since I saw the Orangutang quite rightly going mental at a digger trying to destroy his home, I spend far too much time checking everything I buy has sustainable palm oil.

Which brings me to my blog question: given you aren’t a stupid person/orange president, how do you think we should all go about saving the planet in our day to day lives? Most decisions I make could involve a more eco option. And should I be joining an eco group and going on these protests?

Let’s think about things we could all consider doing. Interested to hear your thoughts on anything obvious missed here.

The more obvious choices

I wanted to quickly throw out the stuff that I feel has been on our radar for a long time. I’m talking about how much we use cars, particularly diesel engines, and making more eco friendly travel choices. What a hugely positive decision to bring forward the diesel and petrol car ban. There is the ongoing dilemma of where we source our energy from. While most of us don’t like the idea of burning our way through fossil fuels, how many of us would be ok with paying a premium to have a renewable energy option from our suppler? We switched recently, and it means making sacrifices elsewhere. Huge disclaimer: I’m in no way a climate change saint. I have a GTI and love it, and probably partly hope that haemorrhaging money to our renewable energy supplier may mean I won’t be condemned to eternal damnation.

Moving on from afterlife contemplation, reducing paper usage is another known eco biggy. These days we have the choice of using technology for eco friendlier options here. Back in the day, you had to have a paper ticket entry to the cinema, now the cool kids swan on through cinema control effortlessly flaunting the QR code on their iphone. And don’t be sitting there thinking you’re totally onboard with the new age techno, I know you too have no idea what QR stands for.

Reduce single use

We are surrounded by single use things, and stuff we don’t even think about. I think most people would agree it was a good move having shops move away from plastic bags – and now I think about it, isn’t it pretty outrageous we lived quite happily for so long with this being the norm?! I think a couple of great examples of our tendency towards huge single use plastic crap comes from Christmas and Birthdays.

Christmas

Christmas. How much single use stuff do we all happily invest in year after year? Buying multiple presents, because Bertie may be offended if you dare turn up with one. My beef with present and card buying is buying them both just for the sake of it. I personally love getting a card when I know the sender has bought it because they know I’ll love it, it’s funny or it has some meaningful message written in it. But why do we bother spending the time, effort, energy and resources on a card of generic genericness, and write ‘to you, from me’ in it? And equally, but in my opinion worse, do the same for presents? I’ve become a huge fan of buying experiences for people. One of my best friends announced we are going to do a girly spa day this year as our Christmas presents for each other – who doesn’t win from that plan? Well, my husband doesn’t because he has to look after the kids. But otherwise, great. Then there’s buying second hand. There are some super deals I’ve got from facebook marketplace from clothes to dolls houses. Why do we feel like we have to give something to someone in ridiculous packaging for it to be worth anything or to show someone we care? We shouldn’t. And if the recipient of said pressie only values packaged gifts, I suggest maybe re-evaluating your relationship with them. No-one likes a spoilt little Bertie. It goes without saying that with gifts comes wrapping paper. If we need to wrap, it doesn’t take a great deal of effort to get the stuff that can at least be recycled.

Then there’s the Christmas tree. I’m not sure it’s a smashing idea to be getting the cut-your-own Christmas tree. You’re cutting down a tree, and then shipping it off with the garden waste after a month. Surely it’s better for the environment getting a plastic tree you bring out every year? The last few years we’ve tried to get onboard with a local rent-a-tree scheme. From an eco perspective this has obvious upsides to the cut-me-down, just don’t let any small people become attached to the tree you get every year. Ours took a turn for the worst so Chris-the-Christmas-tree looked suspiciously different in height, width and species last Christmas.

Then there’s the crackers (argh, so much plastic tat), the throwaway polyester Christmas jumpers, the mountain of wasted food. The list is really pretty long and depressing for waste at Christmas. I’m not being captain Scrooge, I just think we all need to consider not being so ridiculous. The plastic 5cm ruler in the cracker doesn’t make Christmas, it’s family and friend time that does. It’s so cheesy I’m cringing writing it, but I honestly think we lose sight of that so often. I would genuinely much rather someone make the effort to see me, buy me a coffee and talk to me than send me a generic card with generic present. Also, I like karaoke. Bonus points if we go sing instead of coffee.

Birthday parties

My daughter turned 2 a couple of weeks ago (poor little tyke has January birthday, Mummy will forever feel bad), and we had a party with over 30 kids. Yes, it was impressively awful at some points BUT the sum total of rubbish thrown away was one dustbin liner. I hired out a local ‘party pack’ for £10 – someone had put together all the crockery and table linen you could want (found on facebook, lots of places have someone going them now). I bought a personalised fabric birthday banner from one of those online fancy places – we can hopefully use it for many years to come, or until someone vomits on it. I didn’t do party bags because, let’s be honest, you only shove any rubbish you can find at short notice in them, and I would have had to re-mortgage our house to fund the lovely eco friendly ones. And I encouraged everyone not to buy her presents. Please don’t be thinking she went without, even before the party she’d been overwhelmed with family presents, to the point that her cousin helped herself to the opening of many. I found one today she is still yet to open, how is that possible.

Other single use stuff

I’m trying to move away from buying any plastic water bottles (what a scam in the first place, well done capitalism), and using reusable coffee/tea cups. I’ve invested in some silicon based washing up brushes – there are lots available if you google that, they’re great and easy to shove in a dishwasher cycle to clean. I’m looking into getting onboard the beeswax wrap for food, having previously invested in stretchy lids – they’re great but found they can’t cover everything. I’ve invested in bamboo reusable make up pads (not that I now have time to don such luxuries), reusable sanitary wear (yes, I said it boys), and am currently dabbling in using shampoo soap bars. The dabbling soap bar usage and the stretchy lid dilemma bring me to an important point – things aren’t as easy as they seem sometimes. The limited stretchy lid use means I still have to use clingfilm, and the last load of soap bars I had came wrapped in plastic.

Shopping

The plastic wrapped soap bar moment brings me to chats on our general shopping. As I tuck into a croissant that I almost certainly shouldn’t be eating, I am reminded that this joy is not only bad for my mum tum, but also comes with an almost bewildering amount of packaging. For my sanity I’m trying to organise my main shop by click and collect at our local Tescos, but this is coming at an obvious downside that I have no option to use more eco friendly packing options. The single garlic clove comes in a plastic bag. If I was to do an in-store shop, I try where possible to get unpackaged stuff, and to take my own bags to anything loose.

And this is where my eco thoughts start tipping over into stress. I genuinely want to try my hardest for the planet, but I also need to get food in for my children and be sane enough to live. If I forget my bottle at the gym, is it ok for me to buy a plastic bottle so I am able to quench my thirst during fitness yoga? Or should I suck up that no bottle means no water, almost certain distress for most of the class, followed by oasis-in-dessert crawl to water supply at the end? How far should we all go down the eco train without losing ourselves in it? Or is it right that an eco-life should be the very focus of all our lives now? I don’t pretend to know the answer, but I do know how stressful modern life is, and to live a as eco as I’d like to would take more time and effort. I would love to source all the fruit and veg I could from my local farm shop, but the truth is I don’t do that every week because I prioritise some other chore (or, heaven forbid, a break).

There is also that obvious mine field of what we should be buying. The mass production of clothing is a huge environmental burden. Our fast fashion culture swallows more water than most of us can imagine. So obvious answer here is to buy quality that will last longer. But what about washing clothes? I’ve recently started to throw away the occasional heavily soiled toddler clothing because I figure it would take more resources to clean it than to buy another pair of trousers. Is that right? Thinking back to the orangutang, is it right that we buy sustainable palm oil or should we boycott it? Would it be replaced with something far worse if we tried to boycott it? We know all of the cows everywhere is bad for the environment, so everyone goes vegan and starts being hippy with their avocados, soy and almond milk (me included) – all of which are also bad for the environment. Do we have to live in a mud hut, wear one piece of organic clothing our entire life, eat the occasional fly that comes by and ease off on the kid production to call ourselves a true eco warrior?

I’m being facetious. My point is once again a little cringe – I believe that if most people made an effort within their means to make eco friendly choices, big impacts would follow. I don’t personally believe that getting on-top of a train at Canning Town is how to win the fight against climate change. I get there are people who are really quite miffed at state of affairs, but stopping Dave getting to work is just annoying. I believe that if most people prioritised more eco friendly choices in their lives, then politicians would be forced to make it big policy, energy companies would be forced to offer renewable options as standard and producers would be forced to offer sustainable options. But there is no incentive for the big people to make changes whilst we all are happy with not accepting responsibility for our every day decisions.

Little people, big changes

I passionately believe it is the little man or woman who can make the tide turn on this. It has already started happening. But how many more years are our kids going to have to hear the statistic ‘we lose a football pitch of rainforest every minute’? It’s not solely the guy in digger’s fault for taking away the Orangutan’s home, he may only be doing what he can to provide for his family because me sitting in my first world sofa would like that particular sliced wholemeal bread wrapped up nicely with a use by date of next week please.

So let’s all try to make better choices. Talk about all of this more. Share ideas. It’s good for the environment and I think good for the soul – how many eco friendly choices are also good for our health aswell? That’s not a coincidence. There’s no need to go full on no-cow if that’s not what you want, you don’t need to lose yourself and become a scrambled mess of climate guilt. Just a need for awareness, shift in priorities, balance and sensible decisions.