Plastic Free July!

It is currently July (this year has gone by so fast!) and so the Plastic Free July has begun. 

This is where you either reduce your plastic intake or completely get rid of it throughout July. There's a different thing to do everyday, for example today it's 'choosing plastic free laundry products'. I've already written a post on some if you don't know what sort of things to buy, and you can read it here. Some other examples of ideas they've given us are: buying local, switch to plastic free stationary, use what you have.

This challenge provides ideas and resources to help everyone reduce single-use plastic everywhere you go. 'Our movement has inspired 100+ million participants across 190+ countries', as it says on their website. You can take their 'pesky plastics' quiz to see which plastics you should reduce and what you should start doing. They have all sort of different situations you can help in like your work, school and community with different ideas for each one. The things you do don't have to just be reducing plastic - you can also spread awareness. This could be having a movie night and watch a plastic-related documentary or do what I do and write a blog :). 

One of the things that interested me was making plastic free decorations because all you need is a bit of creativity. You may have heard, I have in someplace or another, that you could make confetti out of dried leaves by just hole punching them. They sort of look aesthetic which is nice. You could buy reusable bamboo sets instead of using plastic cutlery (I also use my bamboo cutlery for lunch at school). This just shows you can use anything reusable in any situation. 

Thank you for reading! See you in my next post!

Violet

             xxx 

Trees!🌲

500 trees a second - that's how many trees are cut down (a study from 2020 shows). It's the equivalent of 30,000 a minute, 1.8 million an hour, 43 million a day, to come to an overall 15 billion in a year. All the positive effects they have on people's lives and the entire world, and we cut them down. Crazy.

Yes, they are useful for energy resources because they can be carbon neutral.  But it's only carbon neutral if you replant the trees, because it is estimated that 15-20% of greenhouse gas emissions are produced by deforestation.  This is because trees emit the carbon dioxide they store when they are cut down (see below) - as long as a tree lives, the CO2 it stores stay safely within it.  

There are so many advantages to having trees in our lives, whether that be social, environmental or economic. 

• Socially, there are scientific studies that show that trees have a positive effect on mental health - they can lower stress levels and make people happier.
• Environmentally, they take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen during photosynthesis and so are one of the main factors in lowering man-made greenhouse gasses.

I'd definitely recommend reading The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohllben to learn about trees because he explains the lives of trees so well. 

I got all of this from the video: What if Everyone in the World Planted a Tree? which, as the name says, also gives the impact it would make if everyone planted a tree. It's only three minutes, I'd recommend reading it for even more information.

I'm doing a bit more research on this, as there are some other viewpoints on planting trees that are also important to think about.  Watch out for a future blog! 

Thank you so much for reading!! See you in two weeks.

Violet

         xxx

World Ocean Day!🌊

On Wednesday 8th June 2022, last Wednesday, was World Ocean Day, where we celebrated the beautiful blue part of our planet and pledged for what we can do to help. 

The action we want to take is to protect at least 30% of the oceans, waters and lands by 2030 (30x30), because certain parts of our planet are huge sources of biodiversity, and they're being destroyed right in front of our eyes, in the space of a lifetime! Over 90 countries have committed to this action, but there are still more who could help. Right now, less than 17% of land is protected, and less than 8% of the ocean worldwide is protected too. All you have to do to help is sign the letter to the nation's leaders who haven't committed to the 30x30 goal (click here to see the World Ocean Day website). On their website, they even have a whole part dedicated to youths, how there's even a Youth Advisory Council (created in 2016) and there are currently members in 40 countries. 

Some things that you may or may not have heard of that you can do to help the oceans are:

• Pick up any rubbish you find when you're at the beach. When I go to the beach, there are these fun sand dunes but you are able to see some but of plastic anywhere you look.
• Eat less fish. I was pescatarian for around 5 years, and then I turned vegetarian September 2021. The overfishing that takes place is endangering all the marine animals because we are taking other animals' sources of food.
• Avoid microplastics. These tiny plastics poison the oceans, and they're in so many of the products we use.

Thank you so much for reading. See you on the next post!

Violet

         xxx

The Big Plastic Count Part 2

Like the last post, this one is also about the Big Plastic Count, but after it has happened. My family got our results back when we finished, so I thought I’d share them. We were not perfect, and I’d like to compare it to others too, but here is some of the information we got:

• We used 97 bits of plastic in one week

• This is equivalent to 5044 bits of plastic in a year

• If all households were the same as ours, the UK would use 141,736,400,000 bits of plastic in a year

• 32% of it was hard plastic

• 68% was soft plastic

• 9% of it was recycled in the UK

• 12% exported to other countries

• 28% put into landfill

• 51% of it was incinerated

Obviously every week is different depending how many plastic products you finish and throw away etc, but, as a family of four, those were our results. It is shocking to know that only 9% was recycled in the UK, because every other way of getting rid of plastic is terrible for the environment. 

The Big Plastic Count not only helps investigate the national usage of plastic, but also helps you realise what things you personally need to do. For example, I know that my family needs to reduce how much we use soft plastic because it is much more difficult to recycle than hard plastic. Only 1 in 10 local councils collect soft plastic to recycle. Anyway, the national results will be released mid-July, so I’ll have to wait until then to compare results. 

The Big Plastic Count has a “Living with Less Plastic” Handbook, that I thought I’d mention. It contains how to reduce plastic in all aspects, and talks about how it's okay to not be able to help if you're unable to for any reasons, because plastic products can really improve anyone's life if they have accessibility issues. It's more of a 'do what you can'. Other things you could do though are: sign petitions, write to local MPs, join in with like-minded people... It's so easy but then it's so complicated.

Thank you for reading this week's post. See you in the next one!

Violet

xxx

The Big Plastic Count! 🛍️

This is a bit of a short notice, but from tomorrow, the 16th May 2022, to the 22nd May (over the week) the Big Plastic Count is taking place. It's a huge event, that has got over 150,000 participants, all of whom are schools, communities, businesses, families etc. They are striving to get to 200,000 people! It's an investigation that counts the amount of plastic we use and throw away in a week and it's the UK's biggest national investigation, brought together by Greenpeace and Everyday Plastic. The goal is to make the government reduce single use plastic by 50% by 2025. 

To take part all you have to do is go onto their website and sign up. Then you get to tally (which you can download and print off or do online) of the types of plastic you use that week. After that, you will get your 'plastic footprint' and with the national results they'll try to push the government into action. Click here to get to the Big Plastic Count website. 

We need to reduce plastic waste because recycling things isn't gong to do the entire job. Reducing plastic helps to reduce pollution because we're using less raw materials (which are bad because they result in biodiversity loss, soil degradation etc), saves money because, for example, you're not buying a plastic bottle everyday when you have a metal one, and, of course, reduces the amount of waste going into landfills and incinerators. Different types of plastics decompose at different speeds, but it could take from 50-600 years to do so, but we just keep buying and throwing away more and more (over 90% of it isn't recycled) because it's just a cheap and comfortable thing to use. Click here to find out more. 

Thank you so much for reading this week's post. I hope I can go back to weekly posts, but for now it might just be fortnightly. See you next time!

Violet

         xxx

The Little Things You Can Do!

In today's post, I'm talking about some little things you can do to have a green life.  You may have read a few of these in other posts, but it's always good to have a reminder! 😀 

To reduce food waste: 

• Eat your leftovers for lunch. Yesterday, I went to a football match with friends and afterwards we went to a chip shop to get chips, and the portion sizes were huge! I could hardly eat half of it - so I saved it for my family the next day and for lunch the three of us split it and each had a substantial amount.

To reduce clutter: 

• 
  Borrowing and gifting old things. I've been having a huge clear out the past week and and I've got heaps of things I don't want anymore. My mum put them in the local online swap-shop and they were all gone in a few hours!
• Think before you buy.  There's a hierarchy (or a buyerarchy) of what you should do before buying something.  In order of least to most of what you should do it is: buy, make, thrift, swap, borrow, use what you have. 
  

To change habits:

• Swapping from non-eco-friendly to green things. It's easy to make small changes, like plastic bottles to bars of soap, making sure things are cruelty free, even non-eco-friendly to recycled toilet paper.  For example, we use Serious Tissues. 
• Buy fewer books, go to the library; unplug anything you don't use often; use a watering can instead of a hose; have a shower instead of a bath.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you did something for Earth Day last Friday - and commemorated the life of Stephen Lawrence too. 

Thank you for reading!

Violet

         xxx

Fast Fashion: The Companies👚

Before I start on the post, I want to mention that I missed last week's post (after over 2 years of never missing one!) because I was doing a city break where I decided to skip a week because we were out and about on our holiday.   My posts may be fortnightly, depending on how busy I am.

Also, I'd like to say Happy Easter! Feel free to read my Happy Easter post (that was over a year ago!), where I talk about how to tell whether your easter egg packaging is recyclable or not and give a few statistics. 

Anyway, back to the actual post. This is basically a part two to the Stop Fast Fashion post which gave an overview to the situation - in this post I'll talk about companies that you may be familiar with which are contributing (or trying to prevent) fast fashion. The Guardian recently released an article about Shein and what they're doing, and this is what my post will be based off of. 

Shein has very recently come to the forefront of the market, but already have controversial practices, even when you take away the environmental aspects. For example, they are accused of ripping off smaller brands, the times where they put a swastika necklace on their website, or  selling a Muslim prayer mat as a decorative rug (before quickly removing them and apologising) or their suppliers terrible, sweatshop working conditions. 

Anyway, demand for their products means they produce 10,000 new products a day, which is astonishing. The process of "testing and repeating" is a method that Shein use which is basically where they produce a small batch and send it out - if it does well they basically mass-produce it, and if it does badly, they forget about it... Shein send products out to 250 countries which produces such bad product miles, without thinking about returns. Because it costs more to put a returned item back into circulation than to just throw it away, returns mostly end up in landfill.  It is one of the worse examples of fast fashion.  

However there are lots of companies who are trying to help. For example, H&M now have H&M Conscious, where they use more environmentally-friendly materials to make their clothes, and stores where you can recycle unwanted garments.   And if you bring a bag of used clothes to an H&M store they will give you a thank you voucher that gives you money off your next purchase, which is great.  Read more about that here. 

The difficulty with specifically eco-friendly fashion is that it's incredibly expensive. So, if it is something you'd be unable to afford, I'd recommend just shopping greener: in charity shops, websites where you can swap/buy clothes or making sure you don't get rid of something in a bad way.

Thank you for reading this week's post. I hope you had a good Easter, and a good upcoming week!

Violet

         xxx