Me, who I am, what I'm doing

Welcome to my blog, thanks for being here!

I am a mid-twenties overthinking, good-hearted but neurotic British girl.  I care about the environment.  This is my story of my very imperfect efforts to lessen my environmental footprint.  I hope that my my hours of mulling over and wondering what’s what, synthesised into bite-sized blog posts, may help someone in their own journey.

I was jobless for the first months of 2016, so had a lot of spare time to mope around think about what was important to me.  I found myself on Youtube at 1am watching videos about the Zero Waste movement, and gradually learnt about people who try to buy things with no packaging at all.  The trademark thing of theirs seems to be whether they can fit one year’s rubbish into a Mason Jar (Zero Waste people are in love with Mason jars).

I must say, it was pretty interesting stuff.  I watched and read all that the headline Zero-Wasters (Lauren Singer and Bea Johnson, both based in the US) had published online.  Some didn’t appeal - the bare minimalist apartments, the scarce possessions (Bea’s possessions proudly fit into one carry-on suitcase.  It’s what floats her boat but not what floats mine).  Some of it certainly rang true and stuck.  There are the small things like the home made cosmetic products.  Then there is the big stuff, and really, the biggest thing of all - respecting materials and possessions.  Not getting stuff in order to chuck it away, and not buying and using stuff thoughtlessly.  Now that was Pandora’s box.  Cue months of floundering around, seeing what would make me feel like I was living by these virtuous new morals.

Not all of this is an epiphany of this year.  The following were already true: I try not to put artificial rubbish on my skin, I don’t shop at Primark because I refuse to buy such poor quality clothes, I bring my own bags to the shops, I am conscious of wasteful and non-recyclable packaging, I carry a reusable coffee cup so I don’t use disposable takeaway ones.  I was not environmentally ignorant, but I wanted to do more.

A non-exhaustive list of the things I have done, which I may go on to write about in detail.

Spent many, many hours watching Youtube clips.  I’ll recommend my favourites in future blogs.

Learnt to sew, and made (amongst other things) lots of reusable cloth products to replace disposables (much more on that later)

Attempted, in an ad-hoc way, to buy far less stuff in plastic.  I have a long, long way to go before I could even associate myself with the holy Zero Wasters.

Made deodorant (fantastic success)

Made body butter (pretty good)

Made laundry detergent (rubbish at washing clothes, great at cleaning pans, hey ho)

Started washing my hair with baking soda and vinegar

Started using bar soap and a flannel instead of bottled shower gel

Used unpackaged items from Lush for things I couldn’t make myself (e.g. face moisturiser)

So in this blog, I will share the highlights of my accumulated dither and bumble to make environmental choices.  Horray!  If you have anything in particular that you might like to know about, let me know and I can write about it.  

See you soon :)