Green Metropolis

 

I love books.

It’s been one of my oldest dreams to have a room in a house with wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, crammed full of my books.

When I lived in London, I would get through about two books on my weekly commute alone, and I’d look forward to holidays because it meant that I could splash out on several holiday reads.

But there was a big problem with this love of mine. Every time I bought a book I’d get a little zing of happiness, a rush of serotonin straight to the brain, but each time I was zapped with this happy vibe, so too would one of the tenter hooks tug gently at my conscience. All those trees felled for all that paper for books that would mostly only be read by one person. Was I doomed to feel guilty every time I bought a new book?

I worried about this for quite some time, but luckily for me, one day I stumbled on Green Metropolis, an ethical website which enables people to recycle their books by buying and selling them on the site. Of course you can still donate your books to charity shops but if you’re looking for something in particular Green Metropolis has a brilliant catalogue of books current and not so current. Books cost only £3.75 to buy and if you want to sell your books then you will get £3 for every one you sell. But what’s more, Green Metropolis works in conjunction with the Woodland Trust, donates 5p of every sale to the Trust, and also allows customers to cash in the money they make from the sale of their books to plant even more trees.

So it seems that there’s no need for me to feel guilty about buying books anymore. Thank heavens for Green Metropolis!

Great little ideas # 1 - Little orange bags

I don’t think there is any excuse for not using your council’s doorstep recyling service. It really doesn’t require huge amounts of effort, and it can reduce your weekly household waste by about 50% if not more. This in turn means a reduction of waste going to landfill, and a step in the right direction for safeguarding our environment and a greener future.

But what about those problem items that may not be accepted by your recycling scheme?

Well the other week I was in Sainsburys and I noticed these little orange bags.

These bags enable customers to recyle their spent batteries and printer cartridges. Once they’re used up, you place them in the bags, seal them and post them (freepost), then Sainsburys ensures that they are recycled.

What a great little idea.

Plastic not-so-fantastic

When I was little I would go shopping with my Ma for the weekly food shop and we would alwyas take our own bags with us to carry our purchases in. Re-using plastic bags was second nature to Ma, who having grown up in a poor, developing country was used to hanging on to bottles, jars and plastic bags and re-using them as much as possible.

 Thankfully I inherited this green habit of Ma’s and whenever I go shopping for food or clothes or indeed anything, I take a bag or two with me. This is not so that I can feel smug or self-righteous, but because the statistics on plastic bag (ab)use absolutely terrifies me:

• Every year, an estimated 17.5 billion plastic bags are given away by supermarkets
• This is equivalent to over 290 bags for every person in the UK
• We produce and use 20 times more plastic today than we did 50 years ago!

The majority of these bags get thrown away and end up in landfill, and guess what? THEY DO NOT DECOMPOSE. This means that they sit in our earth taking up space and never disntegrating.

A few years back the Government in Ireland decided to introduce the PlasTax which essentially meant that retailers had to charge customers a nominal fee if they wanted a plastic bag for their shopping. This initiative has been hailed a success due to the fact that it has lead to dramatic reductions in the numbers of plastic bags used in Ireland.

More recently, San Francisco became the first city to ban plastic bags. Now everyone is watching to see who will follow in their footsteps.

Over here in England our efforts have not been as bold or as urgent as those of Ireland and San Francisco, but some retailers are making efforts to reduce the impact of plastic bags by switching to materials that actually degrade (although not that fast), or by introducing schemes that promote awareness of the issue by rewarding customers who re-use their bags. Ikea even introduced a fully compostable carrier bag made from corn starch and charged customers 10p per bag.

But while these efforts are encouraging, are we doing enough? I mean, have you ever wondered what will happen when we’ve used up all of our landfill sites? Will we start losing our parks and green spaces to the disposal of reuse?

It’s a sobering thought isn’t it?

So if the whole issue scares you as much as it scares me and you’d like to see the plastic bag banned in favour of more environmentally friendly alternatives, then please sign the petition here.

And in the meantime, in the very least, please take a bag with you when you next go shopping.

It all began with Lucy Siegle

Once, if you’d told me that I could invite 5 people of my choice, living or dead, to a dinner party, my choices would have no doubt been teenage crushes and pop heroes/heroines. Keanu Reeves, Joshua Jackson of Dawson’s Creek fame, Madonna maybe.

And while I still have a great interest in pop culture and I still have some crushes on celebrity pin ups, I have developed more of an inquisitive mind, more of a conscience and most importantly, the desire to do some good in life.

So if you asked me now, my choices would be different. Of course being a woman, I would probably agonise for days over my invitees but one thing’s for sure, they would definitely include Sir David Attenborough (my all-time hero - more on him another time) and more recently, Lucy Siegle the ethical living correspondent for the Observer Magazine.

In the past I’ve known about the threats of global warming and pollution and the effects that humans have on our precious environment, but like millions of others I’ve always taken that approach…you know…what’s the point? What good will one person do?

And then one Sunday I read an article that Lucy had written and one fact punched me in the stomach, shook me around by the shoulders and scared the living daylights out of me… “a conventional showergel takes 800 years to fully wash away”

Since then I’ve decided that I need to start doing my bit and that means that wherever possible I will make the environmentally friendly, ethical choice. I may merely be one person, but if one hundred people like me start making tiny little steps and then another hundred and another, well, that will be worth it won’t it?

I promise not to preach or resort to those tactics used by zealous fanatics trying to convert everyone they bump into. Instead I will try to keep things simple, informed and humourous where possible. And if you think that I’m writing about makes sense, then perhaps you could join me too on my journey of fair green steps.