Charity Shop Chic(k)

I have two children, and children are constantly growing out of clothes, toys, books, games. I take all the grown-out-of goodies to my local community shop. This community shop gives out grants to various organisations. In the two full years that it has been running as a community shop it has given out £14,000 each year to local organisations such as the pre-school, the school, the Brownies, the cricket club, the playground, and many more. It is a fantastic resource for our village.

I have been making environmentally conscious decisions about what I purchase for a while now. Like most people, though, I feel I have been taking it a step at a time. I decided that over the coming year I'm going to change the way I shop for clothes. I felt that I hadn't really, up to now, checked out the ethics and sustainability of the clothes I buy. Time to change all that. From now on, I will make a point of thinking about where clothes have travelled from, what the lives of the people who make those clothes are like, who benefits from my purchase and who and what suffers from it.

I was out for the day with a friend in a nearby town last week and strolling down the quaint high street we spotted a shop called 'Resource'. The name caught my eye and we had a look. The shop was a 'fifty/fifty' style second hand shop where you can take along your quality second hand clothing and if the shop can sell the item they give you fifty percent of the sales price. I parted with twenty pounds for a lovely designer skirt. I'll admit I have no idea who benefitted or who suffered from the original purchase, but I did feel that as I was reusing resources it was a move in the right direction.

A skirt needs something to wear with it and a rummage through my wardrobe came up with nothing, so the next time I was out on an errand I checked out the nearest charity shop. For the grand sum of £3.75 I bought two designer label tops to go with my new skirt.

As my attention had been turned to charity shop clothing I decided it was time I checked something out that had been at the back of my mind for some time. I remember seeing an advert in the window of Oxfam advertising that they'd give you a £5 Marks & Spencer voucher if you brought in a bag of clothing or soft furnishings (towels, sheets, curtains, etc) containing a Marks and Spencer item. Sounds great, doesn't it. So what's the catch, I thought? I had several bags of children's clothes to take to my local community shop. However, there is an Oxfam in my nearest town, so I kept one bag back which contained a Marks and Spencer children's dressing gown amongst other bits and pieces and I took it along to Oxfam today. It was gratefully accepted and I was given my £5 voucher. The voucher can be used on clothing, home and beauty products when you spend £35 pounds or more. Fair enough, I thought. However, it is only valid between 1^st and 30^th of September 2009. Well, a fiver won't even cover the bus fare to my nearest Marks and Spencer and as I don't have a trip planned before the end of the month it is most unlikely I'll get to use my £5 voucher. Ah well! There had to be a catch.

But of course, forewarned, you'll know to hang on to your charity shop bag until you know what you're going to redeem your voucher on and when (or you could just enjoy the satisfaction of knowing that your unwanted items are being given a new lease of life and helping relieve poverty – there's no catch to that bit).

Where do you recycle your printer cartridges?

According to the Centre for Alternative Technology's July bulletin, printer cartridges account for about 15,000 tonnes of waste plastic and metal in the UK. Many could be recycled and reused, reducing landfill, saving raw materials and minimising CO2 emissions

They say that if you would like to help, you can send your used ink cartridges and mobile phones to "Centre for Alternative Technology, Empty Printer Cartridge & Mobile Phone Appeal, Freepost Nat 16879, Po Box 575, Ipswich, IP8 4WR" or call them on 0845 330 4593 to receive some Freepost envelopes.

 

You can also recycle your printer cartridges with the RSPB here or with Traidcraft here or with the RNIB here to name but a few. Why not check out your favourite charity to see if they do a recycling scheme and then set up a recycling box at your school or workplace.

Of course the other side of the equation is buying recycled printer cartridges. So, where can you do that?

Lasertech, a UK printer cartridge manufacturer, reuse the outer shell of their printer cartridges saving on landfill and saving on raw materials. They have a returns facility for empty cartridges.

Choice Stationery send a recycling envelope with all their cartridges and ask customers to return their empties to them.
They also supply 'Think' Inkjet cartridges which are recycled. These are available for Epson, Canon, HP, Lexmark, Brother, Dell and Xerox. I've used these myself and they are 100% guaranteed. inkcycle also offer a 100% guarantee and take back the cartridges.

 

So next time think before you order your ink and let's try to reduce the estimated 30 million empty inkjet cartridges that get thrown away into landfill every year in the UK alone.

 

 

 

 

Does excessive packaging affect your purchasing decisions?

Yeo Valley Organic
claims to have saved 109 tonnes of unnecessary packaging from its products in the 12months from January 2008. They have reduced the amount of plastic used in their pots, increased the amount of packaging which is made from recycled material and removed all avoidable cardboard sleeves. Read more.

I have recently bought the Waitrose organic natural live bio yoghurt which does have a removable cardboard sleeve which is recyclable and the pot and lid are stated as recyclable too. This is certainly a move in the right direction, for people like me who are obsessed with reducing waste, particularly waste that gets sent to land-fill. According to online industry magazine DairyReporter.Com a spokesperson for the group suggests that the future of its ongoing green commitments may lie beyond pack reductions, particularly in development of compostable alternatives.

Do excessive packaging, recyclability or compostability affect your purchasing decisions?

At last an eco tip that saves effort too!

Here's the kind of handy hint I like. Reading the Homeserve customer magazine I came across this:

"Don't spend ages washing paint brushes if you're going to be using them again tomorrow. Just wrap them tightly in clingfilm so they don't dry out and carry on with the job the next day."

Well, I wouldn't use clingfilm personally, as I feel that is using new resources needlessly. But a bit of plastic film packaging that, hard as I try, I don't seem to be able to avoid, did the trick perfectly well, even though it was quite the next day that I went back to the painting. As I paint today with my unwashed brushes I think of all that water and energy (I mean my own) that I've saved. So what am I doing writing this, when I should be getting on with the decorating? Well, you know what they say about watching paint dry....

Be Nice to Nettles

Hey folks! It's 'Be Nice to Nettles Week'. Well, in a way, I'm being nice to nettles this week as I'm decorating. That means I haven't got time to go out into the garden and wage war on all those nettles that are taller than I am. I'm always relieved to hear people say how important it is to keep a patch of nettles in a garden as nettles are so vital for a range of wildlife, but in my garden most of the time the word patch would better describe the nettle free zone. I do have the odd patch of garden that nettles have not yet taken over.

It was only recently, however, that I found out about 'Be Nice to Nettles Week'. There is a wealth of information about these useful plants at http://www.nettles.org.uk/. I'm going to celebrate 'Be Nice to Nettles' week by trying out nettle quiche.

After the feast

My blog has been sadly neglected of late, due mostly for the need to meet the deadline for my latest university assignment. But that done, I have no excuse for not getting down to the other neglected task of late... the housework. Uhh!

Task number one was to take two bulging bags of too small clothes (not mine – I haven't had time to eat Easter Eggs) to my local community shop. Task two, to take another two bulging bags – this time Tetrapaks – to the Tetrapak collection point in the car park near the centre of town.

Task three is to tackle the pile of packaging produced from this year's Easter Eggs. Before Easter I was pleasantly surprised to read about the efforts some companies are making to reduce packaging. But after the feast I find that this is by no means universal. I noticed that Nestlé's Smarties egg (211g) proudly announces the 'Same size egg, 25% Less packaging, No plastic' which gets my vote, but then why couldn't they do the same for their After Eight egg?

I popped a Cadbury 'Creme Egg' 197g on my kitchen scales to find it weighs in at 264g. Of the 264 grams, 24 grams is the moulded plastic insert, 40 grams is the cardboard box. I'm guessing that makes 3 grams of foil. When it is all packed up, you can barely see what you are actually buying – the Easter egg inside. I estimate that of the 26 cms in height of the cardboard box at least 6 cms of that is just air.

But really, the worst thing about the abundance of packaging was, for me, summed up when I asked my children why their Easter egg chocolate hangs around for so long.

    "It's not that nice. It tastes of plastic."

I'm sure quality control is of high importance to chocolate manufacturers, and taste must surely be top of the list. But do they ever bother to taste their products after they've been in their packaging for a few weeks? I guess not.

Put your drains on a diet

I went to meet a friend at a café today. She asked me why I always took my napkin with me. Well...

Some time last Autumn I remember reading about the millions of pounds water companies are spending clearing sewers blocked by fat, oil and grease from cooking. In the article it suggested wiping grease and fat from pans before washing them. So, thinking that I'd rather have those millions redeployed for flood defences, river de-silting, ditch clearance and general improvements to the infrastructure I decided to do my bit to make sure I wasn't adding to the fat problem.

It is good for the compost to add paper products regularly, so after spooning out any hard fat to put out for the birds, I would wipe round the pan with kitchen roll. I also started saving paper napkins that we sometimes use - rather than throwing them in the compost, I put them into a basket at the side of the compost and so I generally had one available when I needed to wipe the grease off something. This saved on kitchen roll, but we don't use napkins very often at home.

When out and about I started to take napkins home with me if they were barely used – or even there just to look pretty! What's going to happen to it when they clear your cup / plate away? It will probably be thrown in a bin. So I think it is good to make your napkin work a little harder.

Okay I will admit to a few blushing moments when going to retrieve something from my handbag and finding the last lot of napkins still in there!