Today
is Easter. A time where we renew our faith in both the natural world (spring is
here and we watch Mother Earth renew herself) and for all my Christian friends,
a time of renewal of faith in the church (with the resurrection of Jesus.)
It
is a time for renewal and re-evaluation.
Ever
since my trip to the US, I have been reevaluating my relationship with waste. I
spent two weeks in Louisiana and my home town STILL doesn’t recycle.
In 2018.
Does.
Not. Recycle.
Other
towns do. But not Alexandria. I was incredibly wasteful while I was there,
going through single use plastics like water. In fact, many of them contained water. In the UK, I would rarely if ever buy a plastic bottle full of water,
but where my daughter lives the city water is not great and the pipes in her
house were old and made of lead, so they drank bottled water.
I
drank four 500ml bottles of water every day for two weeks.
That’s
56 plastics bottles just from me. That does not include other members of her
household.
It
made me want to cry. I suffered noticeable panic attacks having to throw things
away or whenever a cashier tried to give me a single use plastic bag.
I
was so relieved to get back to the UK. I could not live like that.
But
the whole time I was in the US, I kept thinking “at least you can recycle all
this when you get back.”
But
coming back, I started to reflect on how much we do for the environment and how
much more we could do. I looked at old blog posts about our plastic usage which
you can read {HERE} and realised that our plastic usage has increased since we
moved to Wales.
Hitchin
was a market town and had a huge fabulous food market twice a week. We got 90%
of our fruit and veg naked there with no plastic packaging. The food was also
really cheap—like a heaping bowl of 10 apples for £1 or 1 kilo of mushrooms in
a paper bag for £2. These days, we have nothing like this near us. There is a
tiny overpriced veg stall on the Wednesday outdoor market, but all their food
is pre-bagged in plastic. I spoke to the man last week saying, “If I wanted to
buy these apples, would you pick me out a kilo and put them in my cloth bag?”
And he replied, “Here they are, love. Already bagged and ready” as he tried to
hand me a plastic bag with apples.
These
days, as we live on considerably less income than we did when we lived in
England, money must be a consideration. The cheapest produce comes from Lidl
and is almost always pre-bagged. We have looked at naked produce at Tesco, but it
costs more. Considerably more. And prices have been creeping up since we began
our ill-advised journey to BREXIT and so our £30 a week for food doesn’t go as
far as it should. That means plastic bagged produce for us, sadly. Which means
I must start looking for other ways to cut back on rubbish to compensate for
this.
I
am also more and more convinced that we need to recycle LESS. I know, I am
horrified that Alexandria doesn’t recycle, but we can’t just keep buying all
these single use plastics and pop them in to our blue bags feeling all virtuous
and never wondering what happens to them. Or (God forbid)find out that they are not
even actually being recycled at all. I really think we all need to eliminate
(as much as possible) our use of single use plastics and THEN recycle what is
left.
So,
I have been looking at other ways to reduce our waste in other areas. Ways to
always have reusables on hand and completely sever ties with single use
plastics.
For
the next few weeks expect some blog posts about ways that we are doing this.
I
hope you’ll join me.
Yes, I am looking forward for what you find!
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