for I have sinned. One week ago today I passed my driving test! To say I am happy would be a major understatement.
Do I feel guilty? Just a bit. One more car on the road, less walking and less public transport use is just not good for the environment. But I have put it off for 34 years so I feel I have paid my dues and I was becoming increasingly annoyed at the un-reliability of public transport and the cost. If the government really want us to see public transport as the easier and cheaper option they have a lot of work to do on the transport infrastructure of this country.
So you might be thinking I will be getting a nice electric car or maybe a hybrid, I wish. Unfortunately my budget only stretches to a ten year old one litre Suzuki Alto with £20 per year tax. It certainly isn’t a gas guzzler and was classed as one of the more emission friendly cars at the time it was made. But by modern and my increasingly ecolass standards it is not the most eco friendly option.
I did have a look to see what was available and I found some smart forfour Cars close to my budget which, with some basic research seemed the only eco-ish option I have at the moment. But the only one actually available was just not suitable in the end.
Why a smart car I hear you cry? I know many people just don’t like them, I personally think the fortwo ones are cute but I need a five door to get my daughter in and out of the back easily and we are a family of three, although seeing my six foot two inch husband squeezing in the passenger seat of my Alto is amusing. The smart forfour is more practical but the older ones close to my budget are just ugly.
Like I said doing some very basic research I was pleased to find out a bit more about the eco benefits of a smart car. Most of my information came from an article written on treehugger.com, from 2011. Now I used an old article so I knew that the information applied to their older models. You can get plenty of information on the new models from the smart website, including their electric cars.
What I love is that smart are thinking about the materials and methods used in construction, as well as the end of the cars life. They are not just thinking fuel consumption. Two main points for me is that 85% of the car can be recycled and the paint is sprayed without solvent.
Once I have been driving a while (and saved up), I am really hoping my options become a lot more eco. If any car dealers would like me to test their brand spanking new eco vehicles I would be more than happy to do a review, just let me know (shy bairns and all that).
One thing I can control is my driving. It is important to try and drive in an eco friendly manner, the main suggestions below all reduce fuel consumption:
accelerate gently
break slowly
higher gears are better for cruising
don’t get weighed down, clear out the car
plan your journey so you don’t get lost
But as I have said in a previous blog get walking! You do not need the car for every journey, get some fresh air, I shouldn’t need to preach the benefits of out doors exercise but it is good for mind and body. I am more than aware that the already over weight me is really going to need to keep this at the forefront of my mind, as prior to driving I averaged ten thousand steps a day and it was the only regular exercise I got, but driving does now allow me more time to complete dedicated exercise.
Now another way I am hoping to counter act some of my eco guilt, is to make worth while journeys. Driving means I can access shops easier that I know sell eco products or I can visit some of the vegan cafes popping up all around Newcastle. I also want to attend some local beach cleanups and with less travel time I have been able to volunteer to help with reading at my daughter’s school.
Looking at my usual criteria deciding to drive was easy, it is way more convenient, the cost is around £40 per month more but worth it, I will try to make it as eco as possible and hey I might be able to get a dog, now I can get home so much earlier (blatantly my main goal all along).
Please leave me some comments on driving! Especially if you have an electric or hybrid car, I would love to know the pros and cons from some one who owns one.
Wow really? Yep even more nostalgic than a milk bottle a good old fashioned handkerchief. These are not new ideas I am spouting here just sensible ones that were common place before the convenience of products such as paper, one use, tissues.
Now my memory of a hankie was getting them for Christmas off a relative. They were usually white with a pink trim and my initials embroidered in the corner. I hated them. However for the benefit of the environment I decided to give them another go.
Now you might think a paper tissue isn’t that big a deal in comparison to a plastic bottle and you would possibly be right. But it is still a wasteful, one use product that can be easily replaced with an eco version. You also need to think of the environmental impact of their production, making anything requires energy and getting it to the shops requires transportation and they can’t be recycled once used. The cardboard carton can be recycled and you can buy tissues made from recycled paper but those are end solutions dealing with a waste product. We need to think about reducing demand What can be even more annoying is if you bulk buy your tissues they often come in a plastic wrapper keeping all the boxes together.
I use a lot of tissues so I knew this might be a challenge for me. I have a hearing and pressure problem which seems to also mean a frequent runny nose. Now before this turns into WebMD, yes I have had it checked out by my Doctor and no it isn’t allergies or hay fever.
The solution? Hankies. So I took to my favourite app Pinterest, I live on this app. It is so easy to create boards about anything and pin pictures, web pages, blogs articles etc and save them for later. I find it both practical and inspirational. There are a lot of clever people out there and Pinterest helps me keep their ideas organised.
Now the results were extensive, I saved around 10 and had a good read. And this is what I learned. There are many ways to make a hankie both for show and actual use, they can be very fancy or very plain. They are easy to make yourself but also easy to buy. Prices vary wildly.
The hard part here is material. If you really want to start getting your head around eco choices or eco alternatives you need to look at what it is made from, where it comes from and how it is packaged.
If you regularly buy from the internet you will know that many cheap items come from China. And if you are willing to wait a while and often receive your product with a customs checked tag then you probably order from there a lot. I used to.
But if you are trying to replace something for eco reasons then don’t counter act your effort with emissions caused by transport. Look closer to home, help out the UK economy and believe in the good old Royal Mail.
Most of you probably know some one who can sew, it might be worth asking if it is something they could make for you. However be kind and bear in mind the time it will take them and the cost of the materials, re-pay the favor or pay a fair price. It would probably be best for you to source the material then you get to choose what it is made of and the print. You never know you may inspire them to start a cottage industry such as Hilda’s Hankies.
Another reason to make them yourself or buy local is the packaging. A while ago I ordered some 100% organic cotton face clothes off the internet and was really annoyed to receive them wrapped in a plastic envelope. If you do order them see if the seller provides packaging information, if not, contact them and ask if you could receive your order in something kinder to the environment such as brown paper which can at least be re-cycled. Also they are quite often the kind of thing you would find at a local craft fair.
It was a no brainer for me to try to make them myself, although my sewing skills are limited I figured a hankie is about my level. I also keep a stash of material in the house that I have picked up over the years. Unfortunately most of it is without labels so I am guessing at the make up of the material itself. But I was in luck with a couple of sets of fat quarters I bought from Aldi because I liked the prints, they had the label attached and said 100% cotton.
In an ideal world I would have chosen 100% organic, fair trade cotton and looking into the eco cost of printing the pretty patterns onto my material, my mind was blown regarding how complicated and harmful that side can be. So I think plain not dyed would also be the most eco option. Getting the ideal eco material is most likely going to cost more, but like anything you pay for quality.
When I started this journey I set myself some criteria, I am not aiming to be zero waste, I am aiming to be low impact. Make changes where I can and be in it for the long game. I knew a sudden and expensive culture shock was not going to make this easy and like a diet I would be much less likely to stick to it. My journey needs to be sustainable too.
So my criteria is set out like the table I used for my milk bottles blog. I look at the cost, convenience, eco impact and other benefits. I also decided that if making something and I already have the materials/ingredients available then I don’t see the point in wasting them to buy new eco versions. Throwing out all of my material doesn’t make sense, the production has already happened, binning it doesn’t reduce the demand and I won’t send something to landfill until it has been thoroughly used.
You can’t use any material however, for the practical purpose that it needs to be kind to your nose, easy to wash and durable. Cotton is a natural product, totally biodegradable and can also be put into your home compost system. I have a home compost bin but when I had a good think I realized the thread I have in is most likely acrylic (a type of plastic), the thought of having to pull the thread out of one every time I wanted to bin/compost was not appealing. The solution came when researching wax wraps (separate blog to follow). I noticed some people were not sewing there’s but using pinking shears to cut out the material. Now for those of you who don’t sew your material would fray at the edges if not sewed or edged.
Pinking shears are a type of scissors that instead of a straight edge they have crocodile teeth and create a zig zag pattern, which prevents fraying. Light bulb moment. This would be perfect for my hankies, I picked up a pair whilst at Hobby Craft buying my milk crate, this is the product link. They cost £6 but I know they are going to be great for a lot of projects.
Before you start you need to wash and iron your material, this makes it a lot easier to work with. I wanted to waste as little material as possible so looking at my fat quarters I decided one of them split into 4 would be about the right size. I used tailors chalk and a ruler to measure and mark where to cut. I then cut round all the edges to stop them from fraying. And that was it, job done and I actually think they look very simple and pretty.
I made a smaller version for my daughter out of some left over material I had from my wax wraps. Left over material from other projects would make great hankies.
I put my scraps straight into my compost bin. They will take 5-6 months to break down.
Now as it happens whilst in the process of making these I got a stinker of a cold (obviously psychological) and it became quickly apparent that these hankies were great for keeping in my bag for every day use but were not fit for purpose for a full-blown case of the sniffles.
I remember as a kid my Mam cutting up old sheets to make super soft hankies for when your cold had your nose looking like Rudolph, so I dug around my supplies and found an old jersey cotton sheet from my daughters cot bed. Jersey cotton is basically cotton with elastic in it and most elastic is made from rubber which is a natural product but again I don’t know if that is the case with the sheet so I wouldn’t risk it in my compost. I brushed it against my face, it was so soft and I knew straight away it would do the job.
I didn’t have the patience to measure it and cut it up pretty and due to the elastic in it there is no risk of fraying. So I took my fabric scissors to it and roughly chopped up the sheet into tissues sized pieces. I ended up with a nice pile. I used these a lot over the next few days, and all I did was chuck them in with my normal washing and as they were small they didn’t take long to dry. The best bit is my nose didn’t get sore like it normally would with paper tissue.
They are now washed and put away ready for the next unfortunate family member who gets the serious sniffles. These are now affectionately referred to in our house as snot rags, I felt the need to differentiate between the two types and my daughter thought it hilarious when I referred to them as snot rags so the name has stuck.
So in conclusion have I stopped using paper tissues? In a word no. I feel like this is a bad habit I need to shake. They are convenient and sometimes it feels easier and less yacky to use it and bin it. However I have definitely reduced the amount I use, quite significantly. Especially for out and about because I keep the cotton hankies in my bag. I didn’t need to buy any extra tissues when I had my cold and they no longer need to be added to the shop every week.
Now for my first give away! I obviously want people to adopt these ideas but I think that often requires people getting the chance to try it out for themselves without too much commitment or cost. So to the first person to like and comment on this post, I will send them a set of four cotton hankies. UK addresses only I am afraid. And you even get to choose your print from the two pics below. So comment with your choice. I will contact seperately for your address.
Don’t forget click follow on here to make sure you don’t miss out on any future blogs.
So for my first specific post I thought I would start with an easy and obvious one, glass milk bottles.
My parents went back to using their local milk man a years ago and I will be honest I viewed it as quaint and maybe a bit retro. It made sense, they no longer had me or my brother at home and so did not need huge flagons of milk on hand. But I know my Mam was also conscious of the plastic waste. I think they wouldn’t deny though that they enjoy knowing their local milk man and when he knocks on a Thursday evening they jump up with money in hand and get ready for a nice chat. And there is something about the dairy orange juice, just tastes yummy.
However it is something I have only just got round to sorting out myself, I have been focused for the last couple of years on moving house and now we are in, what is hopefully our forever family home, I want to put down roots. I want to be part of my community and support local businesses.
How I got started- First I went out to the locals on my Facebook page asking if anyone knew who my local milk man might be and how I could contact him. The reactions varied, some people thought it was funny (partly because I live next door to a Premier Shop) and others didn’t understand why I wanted to do this. I explained I was wanting to switch to glass bottles to reduce our one use plastic, most interest ended there.
I suspect my blog and other parts of my ‘eco journey’ will elicit a similar response but awareness is half the battle. Creating the blog though is a way of people accessing it if THEY want, I have learnt many times that preaching something often results in resistance rather than compliance. People need to want to do it for themselves, some times doing it for the rest of the world is not enough.
A fellow friend on a similar journey told me about the website Find Me A Milk Man, and hey presto after entering my post code a slightly confusing list of dairies and suppliers appeared. I suppose expecting it to say Bob from down the road with his telephone number was a bit un-realistic.
Rather than ringing round the list of telephone numbers provided, instead I went on the website of the top search result and based on their location and website information I e-mailed with a general enquiry. I asked do you cover my area? Do you provide Skimmed milk in glass bottles and if so how much is it?
How I got on- I got a response 3 days later with everything I needed:
– Name of my milk man (I am sure there are milk ladies too)
– Days of the week he delivers to my area and the time
– A list of products available and prices (eggs and orange juice included)
– Information on payment options and time scales (including bacs online woo hoo)
I replied with my full address and order. On Friday, as promised we woke up to 3 glass bottles of cool skimmed milk. It was nice seeing how excited my daughter was to open the door and see if the milk man had been. I think she enjoyed her cereal a bit more than usual.
We have opted for the bacs online option, as much as I would love the social interaction my parents get from the milkman calling for the money, for us it is just not practical. We both work and it is unlikely we would be in when they called and it is very rare we have actual cash in the house.
I mentioned it to a friend of mine and she signed up too starting on the same day. Unfortunately they did get her order slightly wrong and neither of us have had the actual bank account details for the bacs payment. I intend to chase them up for the information if not received with my next order. She was panicking slightly, as she doesn’t like owing money, she prefers to pay upfront. I laughed, I suspect the worst they might do if we don’t pay is egg the house?
Helpfully the use by date is printed into the foil lid (which can be put in your normal recycling).
My husband pointed out we should probably get a milk crate to stop the empties rolling away etc. I saw that as the go ahead to google milk crates and had my heart set on a £30 vintage metal one. That was immediately shot down, I decided instead to purchase a wood one from Hobby Craft for £7.00 product link. It is described as a wooden bottle holder. I wanted this rather than a crate as I like the handle for carrying the full bottles into the house. So of course this is now my next craft project. It needs a couple of holes drilled in the bottom for rain water and the plan is to paint it in outdoor paint to weather proof it a bit.
So there we are, reasonably simple to do. I am sure each person’s experience with this will differ based on where they live but so far so good for us. Int Milk Brilliant! Click for some 90s nostalgia
I am going to attempt to do a review for each new thing I try based on my own personal criteria, I will write a separate post with more detail on this but below is the one for glass milk bottles.
Leave me a comment, I would love to hear how you found your milkman!
Eco Lass 