It's Fairtrade Fortnight at the moment, until Saturday 10th March. You'll probably find lots of Fairtrade produce on special offer in the supermarkets until then.
Buying Fairtrade sugar, tea, coffee, chocolate, bananas and other fruit, flowers, cotton, or anything else is a way of helping the people who produce our food and other things we buy to be paid enough to live on. In some countries ordinary working people aren't paid enough to feed themselves and their families properly never mind provide a decent home, clothes, healthcare or education and the state doesn't provide them. Small producers around the world are at the mercy of market forces that are stacked against them
Fairtrade was set up to provide a more level playing field for small producers and to help them get a better deal. Paying producers a fair price means they can stand on their own feet in normal circumstances. Buying Fairtrade products is not charity. Fairtrade is necessary because normal global trade cheats small producers.
If you care about what's fair look out for the Fairtrade logo:
I'll be looking at Fairtrade again in the future, but if you want to know more now take a look at the Fairtrade Foundation website.
It's not just plastic bags that are causing problems though.
Plastic is extremely useful, but when we throw it away it starts to cause problems and because we're using so much of it and have used a lot of plastic for decades, the plastic we're throwing away is becoming a huge problem.
Our oceans aren't just full of plastic bags, they are full of plastic particles from broken plastic bottles and all sorts of things. People searching British beaches are finding particles of broken plastic as well as nurdles, which are the small pieces of plastic used by manufacturers to make plastic products.
These tiny pieces of plastic are being eaten by fish and other edible sea creatures and so are finding their way onto our plates and into our bodies.
As I have already said, plastic if very useful and sometimes it's important to use plastic. However, a very wasteful and damaging way to use plastic is to make plastic bags, bottles, cups and straws etc to be used once and then thrown away.
I looked at plastic bags in my last post, so today I want to look at plastic we use when drinking, and in particular plastic bottles.
Bottled Water
I have to confess to being a fan of bottled water. When I visited people in France and Germany as a teenager they all drank bottled water telling me their tap water was poor quality. In those days most of the water came in glass bottles. I have a well developed sense of taste and I often find tap water tastes unpleasant. Chlorine isn't at all pleasant, but perhaps sometimes I just need to get used to water that tastes a bit more of iron than I'm used to.
I've been very resistant to changing my bottled water habit, especially in Summer, but I have recently started thinking about the damage I'm doing.
Perhaps I've been able to think about changing my habits because I'm less stressed just now. Over the last several years we seem to have had one elderly relative after another in a nursing home or needing care, but we don't just now. If you've got a lot of stress in your life I don't want to add to it, but the health or our planet depends on us all using a lot less plastic bottles, so I hope you'll feel able to think about doing that.
This video from the Story of Stuff might help you think about drinking less bottled water. I know it's made me think.
So now I have bought myself a reusable plastic bottle to carry around, especially in the summer when it's warm and I might get thirsty. I had bought a stainless steel one earlier but even an aluminium bottle is heavy to carry around and the water can taste metallic, although you'll probably get used to that. The downside of plastic is that it is very absorbent, so it's important to wash and dry it properly to remove germs. It's not the best thing for carrying milk or any strong flavoured liquid around as it absorbs flavours.
With care my plastic bottle should last me years. I'm filling it with water from glass bottles than has travelled from Scotland at the moment, but after watching the Story of Bottled Water I can see I should probably start using tap water, or move to Evian where you can fill your own bottles and jugs as much as you like with mineral water straight from the mountains for free.
There is a wide range of reusable drinks bottles on the market so you must choose which one suits your needs best. If you've found one you like already please leave a review in the comments telling us what you're using and why you like it. If you're aware of any downside or why it might not suit some people please tell us about that, too.
Do you have any tips for remembering to take your bottle with you whenever you need it?
A More Sustainable Pinta
While we're on the subject of bottles have you considered milk from the milkman? If the extra cost puts you off could you manage to buy half your milk in glass bottles from your milkman? Even one pint a week would be a bit less plastic over your lifetime.
To stop using single use plastic entirely would be the ideal we could all aim for, but I know it's not easy, so using less of it would be a wonderful start. Once we're aware of ways to avoid single use plastic it should start to get easier to use less and less.
We were getting three pints from our milkman three times a week and buying the rest from the supermarket. Having recently become more aware of just how much damage plastic is doing I've upped it to four pints each delivery and sometimes order a fifth pint on a Saturday. That's as many milk bottle as will fit in our fridge door and we have a small fridge as it is, so I still need another litre of milk in a plastic bottle to see us through until the milkman comes again on Tuesday morning.
Do you get milk from a milkman? Tell us how it's working for you.
Fizzy Drinks
If you're a fan of fizzy drinks buying them in cans would mean you're not wasting plastic. If your health is as important to you as the health of the planet then you might want to cut down anyway. I used to enjoy a drink of Cola until I heard about the way the Coca Cola company uses excessive amounts of water in countries where water is scarce and also that pollutes water. I've avoided any of their drinks since then and now rarely have a fizzy drink. If you do a Google search you'll find several articles like this one: Coca-Cola forced to close India bottling factory over excessive water use, pollution.
While they might not be our biggest problem plastic bags are starting to become a real danger to animals and they are killing and harming sea life around the British Isles as well as in the rest of the world.
The problem of plastic bags is also an easy problem to fix. It's not difficult to stop using disposable plastic bags. Other kinds of disposable bags aren't a great idea either because paper, for instance, needs much more energy to produce than plastic, so it's worse for Global Warming, which is an even bigger problem than plastic.
There is a variety of alternatives to disposable carrier bags.
Most supermarkets now sell strong jute bags with a plastic lining that will last for years. These are useful if you need your bag to be waterproof in case of leaks and spills. They aren't ideal from the environmental point of view because bits of that plastic lining will find it's way into the environment eventually, but they can last 10 years or more, so you're saving a lot of single use carrier bags including the strong ones. You're also saving the energy that would have been needed to make them.
If you're not sure you need this kind of bag wait until you do need one as they should be easy enough to buy when you're in the supermarket. Some other shops also sell them.
If you want to have a carrier bag to hand at all times a small, light foldable one might be the best thing for your requirements.
About 10 years ago there was a campaign to ban the single use plastic carrier bags and Onya bags, made from parachute material, which was strong and lightweight. These are hard to come by in the UK now. They are still available in Australia but are now made from recycled drinks bottles.
Buying bags made from recycled material is probably the most environmentally friendly thing to do, so long as the bags are fit for purpose and you will use them. It also makes recycling worthwhile.
Cotton bags aren't such a good idea as they are heavier, less water resistant and growing cotton uses a lot of water in countries where water is in short supply. If the cotton isn't organic a lot of chemicals are likely to have been used to grow it, which probably contribute to pollution and may be a health risk for those who grow it. If you already have a cotton bag it might be just the thing for buying and storing bread without using plastic.
There is a wide choice of foldable and other reusable bags available.
Ethical Superstore have a good selection of foldable bags, many made from recycled materials.
Look for eco tote bags on Amazon.
Little drawstring net bags can be useful for buying fruit and veg as well as bread rolls and small loaves. This one was made by Onya but other makes are more readily available, unless you live in Australia.
Remember, buying so much as most of us do is one of our biggest problems, so don't rush out and buy anything just yet. Use up the carrier bags you do have first. Think about other bags you already have. Look around for the most sustainable choice of suitable bags while you're doing that.
Did I forget anything important about we should think of when choosing reusable bags? Let us know in the comments section.
Next time I'll be looking at other single use plastic items that are easy to do without.
Collection point for plastic carrier bags, when they can't be used any more.
Hello again. It's great to see not only people from the UK, US and Canada are reading this blog, but also people from France, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates and Brazil. It would be lovely if you could leave a comment telling me a bit about yourself and what you find interesting or helpful.
This week I shall be thinking about plastic waste and possible solutions.
You may have watched the final episode of Blue Planet II and been among the many people who were shocked to see albatross parents unwittingly feeding their chicks plastic and mother dolphins potentially exposing their new-born calves to pollutants through their contaminated milk. You may only have heard about it, but since that episode was shown everyone seems to be talking about the huge problem that plastics are causing in our oceans and elsewhere.
In many ways plastic is a marvellous material with so many uses. It's strong, waterproof, harder to break than glass and can be flexible. Unlike metal containers it can go in the microwave. As a rule it's cheaper and more environmentally friendly to produce than paper and metal products.
Plastic is causing problems because it lasts for a very long time.
Another part of the problem is that so much plastic is now being produced for containers and wrappers that will only be used once and which some people simply throw away.
In some parts of the world there are no waste collection services or recycling systems. Some places are too remote to be reached by such services if they did exist in their country.
The volume of plastic produced is making it hard to cope with. China doesn't want any more of our waste plastic, so we must find ways to cut back on the amount we use. According to reports there's already a backlog of plastic waste building up at UK recycling plants and the same will be happening in the US and many other countries.
To stop this becoming a continuing crisis we must do everything we can to avoid single use plastic where at all possible. Avoiding waste of any kind is usually a good idea.
Step One is to reuse any plastic bags we already have until they are no good.
Step Two is to recycle all our old, normal plastic carrier bags. Most supermarkets have a collection point for carrier bags. Branches of Sainsbury's and Waitrose near me do.
Bags that can be recycled in this way might have this logo on them
Step Three, when we've used up our stash of plastic carrier bags is to consider how many reusable bags we might need and what is best for our purpose. I'll look at that next time.
Many Christians all over the world are now observing Lent. Traditionally Lent was a time for fasting, especially going without meat because meat was in short supply at this time of year. The Church turned this into a virtue saying that going without was a way to learn self-control and instigated a 40 day period of fasting to correspond to Jesus' time of fasting in the Wilderness, which in turn reflected the 40 years the Israelites wandered in the Wilderness after fleeing Egypt.
Lent is 40 days plus Sundays. Sundays don't count as fast days because Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead on a Sunday, so that is always a day for rejoicing. In church today our vicar suggested that the Sundays in Lent could be seen as a glimpse of Easter to come. She also suggested that rather than use Sunday as a day to over-indulge if we've been struggling to keep off chocolate, biscuits, alcohol or whatever all week, we might do better to reflect on how we'd been doing in the week, where we might have struggled and why, so that we could consider how we might do better next week.
So I'd like to encourage you to join me in taking a little time on Sundays to take stock by reflecting on how well we did at fighting Climate Change in the last week and how well we managed to live in a way that did as little harm as possible to anyone or anything. Hopefully we'll also manage to have a positive effect on the people around us and maybe our environment as well. These are all things I hope to look at over the coming weeks.
We need Climate Champions with green carbon footprints to save the world!
So, we've seen that scientists have established that Climate Change and Global Warming have been caused by people, people like you and me who are just doing what everyone else is doing without realising the harm they've been doing.
If we have caused it, we could stop it, in theory. In practice we would have to make some very serious changes to our lives to stop Global Warming entirely and most of us might find that too difficult.
If Global Warming were a dangerous wild animal running towards us some of us would be running away as fast as we can and others would be standing their ground preparing to fight and kill the animal.
Global Warming is not such an obvious threat or so easy to see. We could try to imagine Global Warming as a gigantic dragon curled around our planet. Think of Smaug in the Hobbit, lying asleep on the dwarves' treasure hoard. Every time we fly or travel in our car we feed the Global Warming dragon encouraging it to breathe fire and cause droughts and wild fires, or to thrash its tail and cause severe storms, hurricanes and flooding.
Global Warming is like an invisible dragon threatening our world
Now we are aware of the threat Global Warming is to the world as we know it, surely we want to do everything we can to fight it by reducing the amount of CO2 we produce and thereby shrinking our personal carbon footprint.
We live in an age that needs heroes and Climate Champions to join in the fight to protect our beautiful world for our children and our grandchildren. We have to stop feeding the dragon!
The most effective way any of us can reduce our carbon footprint is to fly less often. If everyone took fewer flights, airline companies wouldn’t burn as much jet fuel, so they'd send tons less CO2 into the atmosphere.
Today I want to give you the main facts about Global Warming as that is what is causing Climate Change. I shall try and keep it short and simple, too.
Climate Change is caused by Global Warming and Global Warming has come about because too many Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) have been into the atmosphere. People burning fossil fuels like coal and petrol have been responsible for the increase in GHGs, which scientists tell us has been happening since the Industrial Revolution.
Wind turbine near Wellington, New Zealand, February 2014
Renewable energy is important if we want to stop Climate Change
Climate change is real and it is quite possibly the biggest threat to life as we know it. However it’s not inevitable. If we really want to the world’s population can slow Climate Change down and even stop it, but we will need governments, global industries, multi-national businesses and everyone else to pull all the stops out.
So, this week I want to take a look at Climate Change and first of all I want to look at what Climate Change is and why it’s a bad thing.
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth", or so the first verse of the Bible is often translated and this has been the dominant rendering of Genesis 1:1 since the Greek Septuagint, the first major translation of the Hebrew Bible (into Greek), produced by Jewish scholars in the third century BC. There is now some debate as to whether this is the best way to understand precisely what the original words would have meant to their first audience, but that isn't relevant here.
If all the Christians and Jews the world over believe God made our world, whether they believe in a literal six day creation or that there was a certain amount of divine intervention in the Big Bang and the formation of our Earth, I would also expect them to believe our world is a pretty special place and so we should all be doing our best to look after it.
A box of organic, locally grown veg can help to reduce your carbon footprint
We all need to eat to stay alive. Food is nourishing, pleasurable and something we enjoy sharing with family or friends. However, the choices we make about food can make a difference to the world around us.
Green Christian suggests we follow the LOAF principle when deciding what to eat, if we want to make ethical and sustainable choices about our food. LOAF stands for
Locally produced
Organically grown
Animal friendly
Fairly traded
Buying as much locally produced food as possible will reduce the amount of CO2 emissions produced by the food we eat, because the fossil fuels used to transport our food are creating serious problems for the Earth's climate, which is vital to the well being of us all.
Few of us are able to grow all our own food. Most of us drive to the supermarket for most of the food we eat. That food was transported from where it was grown to the supermarket. Often it has travelled in the opposite direction to be washed or processed in some way, sometimes it travels from one side of the world to the other side before it reaches us. Transporting our food creates a lot of CO2 emissions, so buying as much unprocessed food that has been grown as locally as possible will reduce our CO2 emissions and probably be healthier for us, too. Transporting fertilisers and animal feed adds to the carbon emissions resulting from the way our food is produced.
There is strong Scientific evidence that a marked increase CO2 emissions and other Greenhouse Gasses is seriously contributing to the increase in Climate Change in recent decades. This briefing from Friends of the Earth goes into more detail about the impact our food production has on Climate Change. I shall take a closer look at Climate Change next week.
Here is an article from Green Eatz which gives the carbon footprint (the amount of carbon produced in a lifetime) of some common foods.
If you have a farm shop near you which sells food grown on the farm or from other local growers buying as much locally produced food as you can from them will help to reduce your carbon footprint, i.e. the amount of CO2 emitted to fulfil your wants and needs. Buying food grown or raised as close to you as possible will also mean it should be fresher and more nutritious.
If you don't have a nearby farm shop selling local produce a veg box scheme, such Riverford Organic Farmers, is a good way to buy organic, seasonal, locally produced fruit, veg and even meat that haven't been air-freighted from around the world.
In later posts I shall consider the benefits of organically grown food, the importance of animal friendly choices and why fair trade is important, amongst other things.
"The earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed." - Gandhi
To live is to consume. We need air, water and food to live. We need fuel to keep us warm. If every person in the world lived very simply we'd still do some serious damage to our environment because there are so many of us. However, most affluent people in the world today are consuming with no thought for the future, or what their actions could be doing to people less fortunate than themselves.
If you're wondering if you count as affluent the answer is probably yes, especially if you are reading this on your own computer. It's worth bearing in mind that if there is food in your fridge, if you have shoes and clothes, if you have your own bed and a roof over your head, you are wealthier than many people in the world.
It's OK to consume, but our consumption is out of control. Our over consumption is damaging our environment and putting lives in danger, including our own.
Our actions can be like far reaching ripples on our global pond
Human beings don’t always realise it, but we are fragile creatures living on a fragile planet.
While the very earth beneath our feet may seem solid, the rock on which it stands is only a relatively thin crust covering a molten centre that occasionally erupts through volcanoes. That seemingly solid crust is itself made of “plates”, which are continually shifting causing earthquakes when they collide.
In recent decades we are becoming more and more aware of how human beings are causing untold damage to the environment that sustains us, not only putting the survival of other animals at risk, but threatening our own survival too. We have learnt how our actions can be like far reaching ripples on our global pond.
