Muses on happiness

I haven’t posted for quite some time, but I’m back!!! Hopefully with renewed energy. I have decided that 2008 will be the year in which I will make a REAL effort to be more ecological in as many ways as possible. I know that I’m not going to be perfect and that along with my attempts to be more ecological I will be committing many sins, but if my small effort is added to other people’s small efforts we really can make a difference. I have in the past sometimes thought, what’s the point of doing such and such if I’m the only person I know who does so… but there IS a point, every little effort helps, I really believe that!!

So, my mission this year is to stop using plastic bags. I have read that on average we each get through 300 plastic bags a year, that’s almost one a day.. and they are not biodegradable so they just sit there, possibly for ever, in the environment, polluting, filling landfill and killing wildlife.

According to the Whale and Dolphine Conservation Society

“Globally, an estimated one million birds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die every year from entanglement in, or ingestion of plastics.”

We’re responsible for that…

It really isn’t that difficult to get into the habit of keeping a fabric or wicker basket by the front door so you remember it. I’ve ordered some re-usable net bags for putting fruit and veg in at the supermarket to avoid having to put them in plastic bags to be weighed. We’ll see how the local shops accept that ( or not)!

I’ve bought some biodegradable bags for taking out with the dogs too. They mainly do their business in the open land around here so it doesn’t need picking up, but I always like to have a few bags on me just in case they don’t make it to the woods in time! It seems silly to tie up a biological product in plastic poop bags, so I thought it was time to do something about it.

For birthday presents I thought it would be nice to make people patchwork shopping bags to encourage them to give up plastic bags too.

I’m aware that I’m not going to be 100% consistent on my mission, but I reckon that even a 50% improvement  will be far better than nothing!!

More of my ideas to clean up my act a bit will appear soon! Watch this space