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Shelve The Bottled Water
Ok, so we’re not fundamentalists and we’re not talking never buying a bottle of water again. But how about not resorting to bottled water so often, how about thinking ahead and filling up from the tap before leaving home. Why? Here’s a few reasons.
- It costs 10,000 times more to create the bottled version than it does to produce tap water, according to the scientists.
- Drinking a bottle of water has the same impact on the environment as driving a car for a kilometre.
- A litre bottle of Evian or Volvic generates up to 600 times more CO2 than a litre of tap water.
- Research commissioned by a Swiss-based conservation group (in 2001) indicates that bottled water is often no healthier or safer to drink than tap water.
- Huge resources are needed to draw it from the ground, add largely irrelevant minerals, and package and distribute it – sometimes half-way around the world.
- The plastic bottles it comes in take 1,000 years to biodegrade
Can we live without it? Without the water no, without the bottled version, yes. Try and take a bottle of tap water with you when you go out if you might need a drink. Put it in the fridge overnight to keep cold! Calculate how many bottles of water you buy every month-work out how much you’re going to save. Dream a dream about how to be ‘generous’ now you’re going to be loaded.
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Give A 'Good' Gift
How about giving to someone you’ve never met – via someone you love! A goat to a family in Bolivia for example.
There are various ways to attempt this: by ensuring that every present you buy is a fairly traded item, by using fair-trade foodstuffs where available. Or by sending a Just Gift.
Just Gifts are the idea of Christian Aid, and other development agencies run similar schemes. They are presents that will make a real difference – buying goats in Bolivia and crutches in Bethlehem, among other things. Starting at just £7, they make ideal Christmas gifts for those friends and family members who seem to have everything. The agency receives your donation, and your loved one receives a card telling them precisely what the money has bought.
Get your Just Gift catalogue from Christian Aid.
You can also try
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Have A Fairly Traded, Ethically Sourced, Especially Tasty Dinner
Try to source all your food – and even your table pretties – from fairly-traded and/or organic outlets. Order your meat (if you’re having meat…) from a soil association approved local butcher. Get online and see what a great selection of fairly traded table trimmings you can get from Traidcraft Shop. And rather than feeling ill by the end of the evening, feel better about what you’ve chosen to do.
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Buy Ethical Palestinian olive oil
If you like cooking with olive oil, order some from Zaytoun, an ethical business set up to help Palestinian olive farmers sell their goods in the West. The minimum order is about 25 bottles for around £120 – maybe there’s a bunch of you that could get together to make an order. The quality is excellent, and the bottles are well packaged with a label which explains the ethos behind Zaytoun’s work. A great idea for presents – as well as a nice bottle of olive oil, you’re bringing vital trade to people in a poor community. The Israeli occupation has devastated the Palestinian economy, including the olive oil dominated agricultural sector which supports over 65% of the Palestinian people. Over half the olive oil produced in Palestine is thrown away due to a lack of access to international markets. Even so, Palestinians continue to harvest their crops, as otherwise, under Israeli law, unfarmed land is confiscated by the state. Since the start of the second Intifada, the proportion of Palestinians living below the UN poverty level has reached almost 75% . Zaytoun oil is grown and harvested free of pesticides using traditional farming methods. The process is underway to have the olive oil officially certified as organic & Fair-Trade.
Zaytoun (Arabic for Olives) is an ethical business to import olive oil from Palestinian farmers at Fair-Trade prices. Zaytoun invests 100% of its taxable profits to help create a sustainable future for Palestinian farmers. Their olive oil comes from some of the oldest olive groves in the world - with some olive trees dating as far back as 1500 to 2000 years.Link: check out www.zaytoun.org for further info and to order your first batch.
Related actions: Buy Presents That Make A Difference Have A Fair Trade, Ethical Celebration Dinner Give A ‘Just’ Gift At Christmas Try To Shop Local, Organic, Animal-Friendly and Fair Trade
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Buy Nothing on Buy Nothing Day (In November)
Buy Nothing Day is the self-proclaimed festival of frugal living, a culture jammers jamboree. It’s a day where you challenge yourself, your family and friends to switch off from shopping and tune in to life!
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Use 'real' nappies
There are eight million disposable nappies thrown away in the UK every day – which is an environmental stinker. ‘We do not know how long it takes for the plastics in disposable nappies to decompose but it could take hundreds of years.’
Home laundered nappies could save you around £500 on the cost of keeping a baby in nappies. And while disposable nappies are made of superabsorbent chemicals, paper pulp and plastics, real nappies are mostly made of natural fabrics.
But you do need to have the time and energy to go green on the nappy front, It’s not an easy choice – as this article makes clear.
If you want help or advise in thinking aboiut this action, try The Real Nappy Helpline – 0845 850 0606 – which gives callers details of their local cloth nappy contacts whether they want to buy them to wash at home or use a laundry service.
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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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Shop Small (Buy local, Switch from the Supermarket)
If you do a lot of online ordering from multinational books or CD suppliers etc, see if there’s an alternative local supplier you can order from. Buy online and then call to collect, and while you’re collecting chat to the staff.
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Buy Presents That Make A Difference
Why not broaden the impact of your gift giving to include the producers, the environment and those in need more than we’ll ever be.
How about making the remit for your purchases cover some or all of the following:- Fairly Traded – buy from the wealth of catalogues and websites who promote equity in what they produce, especially supporting those in developing countries
- Recycled or secondhand – look for items that have been recycled, perhaps give something that you don’t use or need anymore or buy secondhand – charity shops can be a grotto of fantastic items at fantastic prices and your helping others at the same time. You could even make your own – dressing up clothes for kids or jam for example
- Sustainable – think about the source of your gift – did it come from a renewable source – or does it counter balance carbon emissions for example
- Organic – buy items not drowned in chemicals harmful to us or the planet
- Independent – buy handmade gifts from small or independent producers – know where your gifts have come from and support traditional methods of making things from art, to food to clothing
- Donations – Many charities offer the opportunity to give a donation as a gift (the recipient will receive a card detailing what they have bought). You can purchase all sorts of specifics including goats, chickens, education, water and so on. (More on this in Goat action below.)
- Time – Instead of disposable gifts, buy gift vouchers for the theatre, concerts or ‘experience days’ or take the person out for a meal or to see a film – spend time with them.
Christian Aid and Oxfam have more ideas.
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Buy A Copy of Change the World for a Fiver
Buy a copy of Change The World for a Fiver – and give it to a friend.
This brilliant new book offers a list of friendly, accessible ways in which all of us, everyday, can begin to change our world for good. (They were thinking the same thoughts as us and we never knew it. In religious language, this is a ‘sign’. For the rest of us, this is very cool!). Anyway, we think their cracking little book deserves a wide audience, so we recommend that we all buy one or some and then give/sell them to our friends. Let us know how many you distribute!
See their website for more on their deal and to buy the book.
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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
