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Stop Taking Plastic Bags From Shops
134 is the number of plastic bags produced each year for each person, in Britain. Add them together and you have eight billion plastic bags produced a year. And hardly surprising – they are a brilliant invention – lightweight, strong, waterproof, cheap, accessible. They make life so much easier. In fact, since they overtook earlier carrying devices – the knapsack, the string bag, the paper bag, the cardboard box, the little-old lady, tartan box-trolley – we’ve become a plastic-bag planet. Americans use 100 billion plastic bags a year – 99% going straight into the rubbish after one use. Which helps explain why the entire world is tangled up in the things. In South Africa the plastic bag is known as ‘the national flower’. In North America it’s called ‘urban tumbleweed’.
And every time one of these hi-tec innovations is thrust at us by an unsuspecting shop-assistant we make a choice, however subtle, about what we think of our planet and those we share it with.
A plastic bag can be a matter of life and death. One Indian state is banning them after floods left a thousand people dead. Plastic bags had choked the drains. You see…. the wonderful strength of a plastic bag is also its fatal weakness. It will hold all your shopping all the way home … but it will also take a thousand years to disintegrate. And if we use them as if they have no environmental implications, then manufacturers will keep making them – there is no pressure to switch to bio-degradable versions.
So it’s time to ditch the placcy bag – to buy canvas bags or use ‘bags for life’ instead. To take your rucksack with you when you go shopping or load up small children – excellent exercise.
The Aussies have got some great ideas
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Turn Off The Tap When Brushing Your Teeth
Did you know that turning the taps off when you brush your teeth, can save up to 5 litres a minute? If the entire adult population of England and Wales did likewise, this could save a total of 180 mega litres a day – enough to supply nearly 500,000 houses. Saving water at home, in the garden or at work takes very little effort, but makes a surprisingly big difference. In general, this involves simply cutting out the amount of water we are wasting through our day-to-day habits.
It’s about consciousness – the more we become aware of our ordinary everyday actions, the more we can choose to modify to look after God’s good world. Even when cleaning our teeth.
There’s more on saving water at home at the Environment Agency.
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Unplug Your Chargers - reduce your emissions
Did you know that 95% of the energy used by the UK’s mobile phone chargers is wasted energy? Only 5% is actually used to charge phones, the rest is used when the charger is plugged into the wall but not switched off at the socket.
That’s over 50,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions that could be avoided if we all just unplugged our chargers after use.
Amazingly, this is the equivalent of almost 500 football pitches’ worth of forest every year. Incredible!
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Use your LOAF at the shops (Local, Organic, Animal-Friendly and Fair Trade)
When food shopping, try to adopt the LOAF principle – that’s local, organic, animal-friendly, fair-traded. For more information, go to www.Christian-ecology.org.uk/loaf
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Give Your Unwanted / Unworn Clothes To Charity
Go through your clothes. No, really, you can do it! Pull out the items you don’t wear – not just the ones you will never wear. Most of us have a few too many jumpers or blouses, t-shirts or trousers. Someone else will value your cast offs.
There are around 6,500 charity shops in the UK. The re-use and recycling aspects of the work of charity shops often goes unrecognised. For many years, charity shops have been recycling in large volumes, ensuring that large quantities of clothing and other goods are re-used which is good news for people who rely on charity shops for their clothing – and good news for the landfill sites.
An alternative to charity shops is organisations working with refugees, homeless people or victims of domestic violence many of whom are grateful for donations of clothes and in some cases household goods.
Shouldn’t be difficult to find an outlet near you.
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Sign Up Online To Become An Organ Donor
More than 5,500 people in Britain are waiting for an organ transplant that could save or dramatically improve their life. Most are waiting for a kidney, others for a heart, lung or liver transplant. Transplants are one of the most miraculous achievements of modern medicine – but they depend entirely on the generosity of donors and their families who are willing to make this life-saving gift to others.
The more people who pledge to donate their organs after their death, the more people stand to benefit. By joining the NHS Organ Donor Register each of can help make sure life goes on for others.
You can sign up to the NHS Organ Donor Register or call the NHS Organ Donor Line: 0845 60 60 400.
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Compost Your Leftovers
Composting is great because it is fairly simple and is a direct way that we can have a beneficial effect on the environment.
On the one side, we are rapidly running out of landfill space and soon organic materials will be banned from landfill sites altogether. On the other, these materials are too good to be thrown away and the most responsible thing to do is to treat them as a useful product rather than a waste. If you need any other reasons: it can be a community building enterprise; it can teach your children about the world in their back garden; and it can be a source of worms if you are feeling very hungry.
Put simply, what we are doing by starting a compost heap is like creating an incubator for all the helpful bugs in our garden. So we need to ensure that we keep them happy.
So, there are only really two things to remember about composting. First, keep it aerated. The bugs need to breathe, so make sure there is lots of air mixed in. The two ways of doing this are ‘turning’ and ‘adding big bits’. Turning is the technical term for mixing with a fork. Adding big bits is the technical term for adding big bits (sticks/logs). These will take a long time to disintegrate, but at the same time will allow the air to get to the rest of your compost.
Second is a bit more technical. The bugs need the right balance of carbon and nitrogen. ‘Urrgggghhhhh…’ I hear you cry, ‘I hate chemistry’. So this is all you need to know: brown things have lots of carbon and green things have lots of nitrogen. If you have too many green things in your compost bin, it will go manky. So for every handful of grass, vegetable peelings or green leaves that you bung into the compost bin, try to put some cardboard (torn into little pieces), card egg box, thin sticks chopped up finely, dust from the vacuum cleaner or a bit of newspaper. Garden composting is an inexact science, but if you are using a lot of fruit, all grass clippings, have lots of flies, or it is all looking chocolate brown and slimy, you need more carbon.
Then, probably a couple of times a year, you will end up with nice, crumbly, dark compost to spread on your prize geraniums. There are other things that can be done if you do not have space for a large composting bin, by the way.
Almost the whole known world will be falling over themselves to tell you about home composting. Local councils love it (it saves them a whole lot of trouble) so a good place to start is to talk to your local recycling officer and/or look at their website. You might even be able to buy a nice shiny plastic composting bin at a special knockdown price (depending on where you live).
Otherwise, the Henry Doubleday Research Association give good general composting hints.
If you are really keen, my friend Nicky Scott has produced a very readable booklet called ‘Composting for All’ published by Greenbooks for a few pounds.
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Switch To Energy Saving Lightbulbs - perhaps set a target for your home this year
Most of us use light bulbs designed about 100 years ago, which produce nearly as much heat as light. And with the heat comes the carbon dioxide, further raising the global temperature – tho’ you might not notice it!
In most homes lighting accounts for 10 – 15 per cent of the electricity bill. UK households use £1.2 billion worth of electricity on lighting every year. Electricity consumption by domestic lights and appliances has nearly doubled since 1970. And it’s set to increase by 12 per cent by the end of the decade.
By buying an energy efficient lightbulb you can cut energy wastage by over 75 per cent. That’s around £7 a year on the average energy bill or £65 over the bulb’s lifetime.
It has been calculated by someone that if every house in the UK fitted three energy saving bulbs the energy saved could light all our cities at night. Plus you get lower bills.
How about switching six over in a year?
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Give Thanks Before A Meal
OK, many of our meals are rushed; many of them take place while other things also demand our attention. Many times we are with people who might not fully recognise what saying grace signifies.
But taking a moment of quiet around the table or with some simple words of thanks, reminds us – and those we are with – that life is a gift and not a race and that what we eat is often provided by people who have very little compared to us.
Might be silent. Might be from a book of graces. Might be very short.
Making time to give thanks reminds us of all we have forgotten to be thankful for.
If you know of some good resources to help with this – even some collections like the recent one from the Iona Community – add them to the Comments below.
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Shower More, Bath Less
Take one less bath a week
According to the Environment Agency, a 5-minute shower uses about a third of the water of a bath – can save 50 litres every time. (Although power showers can use more water than a bath in less than 5 minutes.)
