Fran’s School of Hard Knocks

Live local

If we want to live sustainably, we can increase our efforts to live local.

Wherever possible – in other words, without going fifty miles out of our way, spending a whole day driving around in the car trying to find something, or parting with an overdraft-crippling amount of cash – as a household we try to avoid air-miles and motorway-miles in the sourcing of our food. We also try to avoid and reduce our use of palm oil, refined goods, soft drinks and plastic-wrapped produce. And generally to reduce our reliance on those things that we think we need, but which, actually, are surprisingly unhealthy, un-necessary and expensive. Personally, I do try to avoid refined carbs, sugar and caffeine but I can’t realistically place such restrictions on others: I simply recognise that, as the main cook and bottle washer in our house, I can certainly influence what we purchase and eat.

It is ironic that, whereas a hundred years ago, a diet of wholemeal bread, brown rice and cabbage was seen as crude and primitive, nowadays plain, whole, home-produced food is seen as highly desirable – think of artisan bakeries and health food shops – and comes at a premium both in terms of cost and the time and human labour expended in producing and sourcing it.

In “living local” I also consider alternative modes of getting around: the bus instead of the car, the train instead of the plane. I have reason to be very grateful to airlines – and I do sympathise with their plight in the current economic slowdown – but without them, I’m sure that alternative arrangements would have been possible and I would have been reconciled to travelling less. As an easily accessible way of getting from A to B, I have made use of flying, which for longer journeys is often less expensive than train travel. With flying falling slightly out of favour, might rail fares reduce?

A recent and peculiarly disjointed news bulletin has me thinking with fresh urgency about the difficulties that arise in making consistent, national policy decisions in response to the climate emergency. Three headlines, all delivered without any ironic inflection, the first about the battle to construct a third runway at Heathrow; the second, about the impact of the coronovirus in shrinking the global economy; and the third, about the likelihood of further flooding in areas of Britain already metres deep in water.

Since it appears very challenging for national agencies to come up with a clear, co-ordinated policy to tackle climate change, once again, the onus falls on consumers to vote with their choices. Let’s hope that our choices, and our voices for change, can make a difference.

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Get milk delivered

We get milk delivered. And have been doing so for so long, that I can’t quite remember how we got started with this. Hubby and I come from the generation who remember the milk delivery from the milk float to almost every home in our street: glass pint bottles left on doorsteps, used, washed collected and re-used, with minimal wastage of resources.

When I realised that a milk delivery in the locality was a possibility, I mentioned it to my husband and we set it up. Yes, it is more expensive per unit – this tends to be a recurring theme in living more sustainably – but our household waste no longer includes plastic milk cartons, which require to be rinsed, flattened and put out for collection, and which tend in the meantime to leak their milky residue everywhere.

We do have marauding seagulls, cats, dogs and foxes hereabouts, but we deal with them. A seagull was piercing our milk bottle tops and smashing the glass, so now the delivery chap leaves the bottles at the top of our internal staircase for us. We have cats, but food waste recycling left out for recycling is, if double-wrapped, almost impenetrable to them. And we have foxes, who particularly covet chicken remains. Instead of trying to fend them off – they will find their way to food waste with unerringly accuracy – we now simply take our finished chicken carcass – and I mean finished! – to the foot of our hill out the back, where doubtless the local wildlife fall upon it gratefully. A bit unorthodox, perhaps, but then, all of “ethical living” might be seen as an attempt to refute our current orthodoxies for more sustainable, long-term solutions.

A thing done once is seen as challenging and daring, unusual. A thing done twice becomes easier, and a thing repeated becomes part of a new, emerging orthodoxy which will, naturally, have to be modified with time. The trick is to start somewhere and keep trying to make a difference.

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Our use of the kettle

Continuing our look at kitchen economies and the environment, I am rather exercised by our use of the kettle every morning.

Typically, hubby will get up before me, put a lot of water in the kettle and boil it up to make himself a cup of tea. And that uses a lot of electricity. (I’m reminded of the story of the national power outage when everyone went to make cups of tea during the running of the TV series, “The Thornbirds”.)

I now get up rather earlier, chat to hubby and daughter, and, while the first boiling of the water in the kettle is still hot, pour most of the surplus into a thermos flask. Which has several obvious advantages. During the day I don’t have to boil the kettle so I save a bit of time, and steam, and I don’t scald my mouth from sipping hot beverages. I experiment with how long a standard thermos keeps water hot and am often surprised. It’s actually really easy to set this up, and quite fun to notice just how much electrical power we waste by not planning a little ahead.

In my grandmother’s day, when the kettle was boiled on the gas stove, this was never such a big deal for me. Gas is a relatively cheap, primary source of energy. Electric kettles, on the other hand, use secondary energy generated from another source: gas, coal, wind or solar.

I like hot water as much as the next person, but do we really need to boil the kettle all the time? To give another example, I used to boil the kettle before our evening meal – it was just a habit I got into – before realising that actually, we drink cold water with our evening meal – we have excellent fresh water on tap, so we can do that, here – and often, we didn’t think of hot drinks until much later in the evening. So I bought a jug for the table and filled it with cold water instead.

It’s interesting to note how often we do a thing without thinking about it…

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Reusing plastic bags

We hear a lot about plastic waste, and I am evolving strategies for reusing all kinds of plastic bags and wrappers to limit the quantity of small plastic particles that end up seeping into the environment.

At the kitchen sink, I have a small bowl which I line with a thin plastic bag, the sort that is used to wrap bananas or bread from the supermarket. Ideally, of course, we should do without this plastic wrap altogether, and I’m working on it. Meantime, I put single use plastic wrappers to good use by re-deploying them to collect small and friable plastic pieces – tags from clothing, crisp packets, the wrap from supermarket meat packets, the plastic netting around satsumas…– that would otherwise leach into the environment and be especially hard to recover. Having a small tub on the kitchen counter next to the sink also means I’m not constantly having to go beneath the counter into the main dustbin.

There are supermarkets that now sell products without plastic: we can take our shampoo bottles and detergent bottles and obtain refills of the main eco brands. We have three such retailers in the neighbourhood – within five miles of our home – and while I have only explored one, I do intend to visit the others. I don’t rush this process of conversion from single, repeated purchase to re-use, partly because it takes time to organise it and assimilate, and also because I’m aware that conspicuous buying is not really the idea.

For example, I do love the idea of spreadable butter, but dislike the idea of having to buy a new plastic pot every time. So now I wash the pot – actually, it’s best to wash it twice, because butter products can otherwise go rancid quite quickly – and reuse the pot with a pack of standard butter, which can stay out of the fridge.

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Ten things I can do.

We all know how perilous the situation of our planet is right now. And it’s tempting to pull the blinkers on, pull the bedcovers over our head and ignore the issues that challenge us all. But our young people are leading the way in tearing our blinkers off, while reminding us that there are things we can do. So here is a list of ten things I can do to make a difference. And I do most of them, most of the time, so that they form part of my daily routine to which I now give little thought.

As a general rule, changing the way we do things can take between six months and two years to embed itself, especially as the conditioning we receive when young tends to stick around: It’s hard to change the way we do things unless we can see an immediate reason to do so, and standing at the sink brushing my teeth, there seems to be no obvious reason why I should change the habits of a life-time.

But we can and we do, because the things we can do, make a difference.

Water

Water is infinite. It circulates around our planet endlessly, solid, liquid and gas. So, living in a northern, dampish climate, it can be challenging to notice the need for care.

Fresh water is precious and – to put it bluntly – I have never felt comfortable using drinking water to flush the toilet! That seems like a ridiculous laziness that sooner or later must end; until I can afford to install grey-water systems, or until I can convert my usage to a composting toilet, meantime I prioritise my use of water, without skimping on hygiene standards. And there are some really simple things we can all do to use less fresh water.

~ Put the plug in.

In the kitchen, before preparing a cooked meal, put the plug in the sink and add a small amount of water and detergent. Rinse hands and dishes as you cook. Putting in the plug helps to keep hands and surfaces clean while I cook, saves water and switching taps on and off. Since I use an ecological detergent, there is less need to rinse dishes after washing them: If the fishes don’t have the choice to get away from my suds, why should I? The solution seems to be to make fewer suds…

In the bathroom I put the plug in while washing and brushing. I turn off the tap while brushing my teeth – in fact, I use hardly any water now, when brushing. I don’t rinse after brushing either, which helps to keep the fluoride in my toothpaste working for longer. Also – I confess – I no longer spit in the sink, as this then needs to be rinsed away, but I spit into the toilet bowl, which is nearby. I figure, at some point I will flush anyway… There are lots of ways that we can stop needlessly wasting fresh water. Experiment with some and see what suits you best. 

(To be continued.)

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