As I'm sure you all know by now, I like to respect our environment. I try to do what I can to look after it. Unfortunately over time, I've learnt that a lot of the things that I thought to be environmentally friendly aren't as good for the environment as they seem.
Take for example, recycling your plastic waste by placing it in the council provided recycling bins. It seems great until you dig a little deeper and you realise that western governments ship the plastic for recycling over to countries like Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam etc, where a lot of the plastic is illegally dumped and inevitably a portion of it ends up in the sea (the countries we ship our recycling plastic to, have the worst track record for creating marine plastic pollution).
Then there's the 'biodegradable' food waste bags that councils provide us with to put our food waste in. The bags are made from so called 'biodegradable plastic' which isn't actually biodegradable at all. It just goes into millions of bits of micro plastic faster, which in turn is consumed by fish etc and then by humans!
So what can we do? Here are seven simple things that we can all do to help out our amazing planet:
1* Boycott buying plastic products as much as possible. There are lots of products that are available in paper or glass packaging instead, like milk, yoghurt etc. No one ever needs to get fruit or vegetables in plastic packaging, they're available loose! It's simple, if people stop buying plastic products, the companies will loose profit and be forced to find alternative packaging and less plastic will end up in the sea.
2* Buy local produce as much as possible. That mango may be tasty, but it's travelled from the other side of the world, creating pollution along the way!
3* Have a look at your toiletry products. You can buy all of them without plastic at places like Georganics. The picture at the top displays non-plastic shampoo, dental floss, toothbrush and tooth paste.
4* When you think a carrot has gone bad (and other root vegetables), because it's gone limp, try putting it in a bowl of water and be amazed when it returns to the condition in which you bought it in! You don't need to throw it away anymore ;)
5* Buy beeswax wrap or vegan wax wraps to replace clingfilm.
6* Have a dog? Pick up its leavings with paper bags (they do actually work), a scooper etc.
7* Buy secondhand and recycled plastic products! Humanity has unfortunately created lots of plastic products, if everyone throws out all of their old plastic products due to the current anti-plastic movement, it would be a disaster! The plastic exists, we should make use of it, as otherwise it'll end up in a landfill or the ocean. The goal is to reduce demand for new plastic and to stamp out single use plastic.
Above all, be creative! There are plenty of inventive ways to cut down our impact on the environment!