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Eco-Friendly Easter Ideas

Hi guys!

With Easter just a week away I thought I'd give you some quick ideas on how to keep things green and save money. :) The activities especially are either very cheap or free!

Easter Eggs:
1. Buy easter eggs with as little packaging as possible.
2. Try to buy fairtrade/organic wherever you can.
3. Make a list of everyone you're buying for and get them all at once to save on transport costs.
4.  Buy the eggs on your regular food shop to save an extra trip to the shop.
5. Keep the plastic packaging from the inside as moulds so you can make your own next year!

Activities:
1. Why not try using natural dyes to create your own coloured eggs?
2. Organise an Easter Egg Hunt for kids or even adults!
3. Bake your own Easter Biscuits.
4. Make an origami rabbit!

Some friends are coming to stay at the weekend and their little boy is 3, so I'll definitely be trying some of these ideas myself. :) I'll make sure to take pictures and post the results!
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Recycling: For Children

Hello!

Who's enjoying this fantastic sunshine? It was so nice being able to leave my coat in the car today, even if it was a bit chilly in the shade! Today my post is all about the next generation and how we can inspire them into a greener way of living before they even learn the bad habits we have!

My generation grew up in a world where consumerism wasn't a problem that had to be tackled - it was openly encouraged. There are so many new inventions, clothing trends, gadgets every single day - the world has more and more to offer in the way of entertainment and we are taught to reach out and grab every opportunity we can and there's nothing wrong with that. I encourage you to experience all you can and reach for the stars in every cheese-filled moment you have on this planet. Just make sure that as you do so you think of all the generations that will come after you're gone and make sure that opportunity will still be there for them when the time comes.

Todays' generation is growing up in a world of conflicting attitudes - the one I describe above, but also the new eco-friendly attitude. We're realising that we can't sustain our current habits indefinitely. More and more people are waking up and trying to stop all the damage we're doing. The best thing we can do for our children is to educate them now, so that it becomes natural by the time they're adults.

There are a number of ways you can teach your children about recycling and it really varies on their age. Young children will learn best with fun activities such as making a parachute out of recycled materials whereas older children are more likely to enjoy making their own recycled paper or invisible ink!

It's also a really good idea to get them involved in your recycling efforts around the home. If you have different bins for each item make sure they understand the difference and get them sorting their own rubbish - with a little help of course! It might also be helpful to have pictures on each box with examples of what to put in, so they get to know the less obvious items that can be recycled too.

If you have a compost bin get them involved there too. If you don't already do it, then get them to help you set up a compost bin. You'd be surprised by all the things you can throw in a compost heap and sharing the learning opportunity with your family will be a fun activity that everyone can take part in.

The most import part of all this is that you explain why you're doing it at every step. Children are sponges and if you teach them the habits now the planet will have a whole generation of eco-conscious adults in 20 years time.

What eco-activities do you include your children in?
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Recycling: By Numbers

Morning!

Sorry about the no-show yesterday, I was really ill through the night and used the morning to sleep in before work! Since I've still been catching up on sleep I've found some nifty (yes, I just said nifty!) little inforgraphic images for you today that show some amazing facts about the cost difference between recycled and virgin materials.

The first one gives facts about the average UK home - what we waste and the difference that we'd make if we changed just one habit. It also mentions some good eco-friendly cleaning products, some I've mentioned in the past and others I can focus on in another post if you're interested. :)





This next one I found really interesting because it includes facts like how many times a certain item can be recycled and how Eurpoe's recycling efforts compared to America's in 2010!



Hopefully some of those facts will get you thinking about how you can step up your recycling efforts!

Tomorrow I'll be looking at the next generation and how we can teach and inspire them to create green habits now that will last for life. :)
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Recycling: Your Food

Good morning!

So far my recycling series has focused on big things you can do; donating to worldwide charities and looking at recycling on a national level.Today I'd like to look at the recycling you can do at home, specifically when it comes to meal times. There are a few simple steps you can take to ensure very little (or nothing at all) gets put in the bin when you prepare a meal.

Save the bits you wouldn't eat.
They may not be good enough to eat, but they're not without their uses. Vegetable peels and meat bones still contain a lot of flavour just waiting to be utilised. Collect all the leftover bits from your ingredients through the week and keep them in a bag in the freezer. Once the bag is full it's time to make stock! Throw it all in a slow cooker or a giant pan, fill it up with water, season it and just leave to simmer for a few hours. The water will absorb all the flavour, creating a nutrient rich stock ready for making soup another day. When it's done, strain the liquid to remove all the bits and chuck all the leftover 'stuff' on your compost heap. For those who want a step by step guide I plan to write one in the coming weeks.

Jazz up your leftovers.
Even the name leftovers sounds unappealing - no one wants to eat what they didn't want last night! But with a little thought and preparation you can completely transform your meal.
- Most leftovers will keep for 2-3 days depening on the ingredients, so there's no need to have the same meal the next day. As long as you keep track of when the meal was made you can leave it a day or two before eating them.
- Another trick is to add fresh spices and herbs to the leftovers when you heat them up, to revive the flavour that has been lost over time.
- Some leftovers lend themselves as an ingredient in another meal. For example when Tom and I make chilli or bolognese there is usually leftover mince. We freeze this and next time we're having pastabake for dinner (which in itself is pretty boring) we defrost the mince and add that in to give the meal some extra flavour.

Start a compost heap.
This is a great tip for reducing your waste in general, not just when it comes to food leftovers. You'd be amazed at just how much you can throw on a compost heap, from leftover veg and cardboard to wine and even human hair! You do have to put a little thought into it, making sure the pH level stays balanced and there's plenty of air in there (this will stop it getting that nasty smell), but overall it's a really simple way to reduce the amount of rubbish you throw away.

Recycle and reduce the packaging.
The easiest way to do this is to buy things fresh; from the butcher, the veg shop, your local farmers market, anywhere that sells fresh produce will already be limiting the packaging they use. When buying fruit and veg from the shop try not to use the free plastic bags if you don't need them (for example bananas, oranges and apples already come with a protective skin - they don't need a bag!).
Any packaging that can be recycled should be - glass jars, cardboard sleeves, plastic trays - there's no need for them to go in the bin. They can be reused (glass jars are great for storing things) or put in the recycling. Just make sure to wash them first - especially if they've been in contact with raw meat.


The great thing about looking at your meals from an Green point of view is that you find you reduce your food bill as well as your rubbish output. You find yourself only buying the amount you need (I've started weighing out the actual recommended amounts of rice and pasta instead of cooking 'what looks about right'.) and finding unusual ways to reuse your leftovers rather than bin them.

Could your meal habits do with a revamp?
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Recycling: Unusual Things

Hello again!

I'm really enjoying this new routine of blogging each morning. It gets my brain working and I feel like I've had a productive day before I've even started!

Today I want to highlight some of the things you can recycle that maybe you hadn't thought of. Everyone knows about the obvious; glass, cardboard, plastic, paper etc. but did you know about some of these:

Glasses
Why not donate yours to Vision Aid Overseas and give someone else the gift of sight!

Batteries
Batteries are one of the most toxic items of household waste, so if you recycle nothing else please recycle these. I know Asda stores have a recycling point and so do many other big supermarkets.

Empty Make-Up Containers
Stores like Lush and MAC let you take back your empty pots so that they can recycle and then re-use them. Lush will give you a free facemask for each pot you take back and for every 6 items you send Back to MAC they will give you a free lipstick!

Cleaning Supplies
Many shelters and charities are grateful of anything you can donate; including cleaning supplies you're not going to use! Contact your local shelter to find out what kind of supplies they need.

Packaging Materials
Everyone should keep their bubblewrap, packing peanuts and boxes for sending gifts etc. but if you don't, UPS accept packing materials.

Bras
Give your ratty old bra to Oxfam instead of throwing it in the bin and know you're helping a good cause!

Shoes
Nike have a fab scheme that turns your old shoes into running tracks, sports arenas and playgrounds! A quick google will show you loads of different places that will accept your shoes.


I've tried to just include things you can recycle in this list, rather than things that can be donated to charity or re-used. (Although the items in this list can often be re-used too!) There'll be another post focusing on re-use ideas later in the series.

Can you think of any other items that most people wouldn't think of recycling?
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Recycling: The Snowball Effect

Good morning!

As part of a re-vamp for my blog I'm going to be doing a series on different aspects of recycling - some of the topics will include unusual things you didn't know you could recycle, where your recycling goes and todays' topic: the snowball effect.

Lately I've become a huge fan of The Simple Dollar, a personal finance blog written by a guy in America. He's got tons of great ideas on frugality, ways to cut down on bills, free activities to do etc. and I really reccommend it to people looking for some fun ways to cut back. :)

Recently I read his blog The Snowball Effect: How Little Moves Can Create Huge Effects Later (he's a fan of long titles!) all about how a habit that saves a small amount of money when done regularly can add up to a large amount of money in the long run. It's a concept I think about often but struggle to convince others of, so I was really happy to find a blog that showed just how big a difference it could make. I got thinking on how I could relate this to other areas and did some number crunching of my own to relate it to recycling. I've focused just on plastic water bottles so it's easy to demonstrate.

Tom takes 2 plastic bottles of water to work with him every day and he works 4 days a week. That comes to 400 empty plastic bottles going to landfill or 7.6kg every year if you don't recycle.

We try to re-use the bottles where we can - some are put in the fridge/freezer to make them more efficient, others I re-use myself as I'm fine with tap water. One or two are used to make the toilet flush more efficiently.

Tom regularly asks me what's the point when I'm trying to save just a few bottles, so to save you asking here is the point:

I save approximately 50 bottles from various re-use ideas a year. That's 950g of plastic - 1/8th of our yearly use.

950g isn't very much you might argue, but lets look at it on a national scale. There are 25 million homes in Britain, so let's make a low estimate that 10% of those homes have a similar bottle usage to us:
That's 2.5 million homes throwing out 19,000 metric tonnes of plastic a year. If each of them could save just 950g a year, as a nation we'd be saving 2375 tonnes. That's a bit more impressive isn't it!

To look at it from just our personal perspective is very narrow minded - when I find a new use for a bottle I'm not thinking "Great, I've just saved 19g from landfill." I'm thinking of all the bottles I'll save in the same way for the rest of my life. If I save 1 bottle from landfill a month I will save 720 bottles in my lifetime (assuming I live to the average life expectancy of 82). If I continued re-using at my current rate and never found another use for a bottle again, I would save 3000 bottles or 57kg of plastic. That's almost my own body-weight in plastic.

That is the point.
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Hibernating

Hello everyone!

Sorry for my recent absence! Instead of giving the usual excuses of life being busy and not having time for blogging, I'll give you a real explanation.

I can't remember if I mentioned it at the time, but I went on a Spiritual Development Retreat with a fab group of people in October. Whether it's your kinda thing or not, don't worry I'm not gonna start trying to convert people or writing long winded posts about spirituality! Haha. Since then I haven't really felt any different, if anything I've been a little more volatile than usual if you ask me! But now I've had a chance to let it all 'settle in' as it were and reflect back I can see the differences. Mostly quite subtle ones, which is nice - I didn't go wanting to change radically overnight.

As I look back now I feel like I've been hibernating, strange as that may sound. I've always understood the cycles of the seasons and how others liked to follow them, but I've never been one to follow them myself. When Winter comes around I want to be out doing everything I can to not succumb to the Winter Blues. Tom will tell you how annoying I can be trying to get him to join in too! Even this year I've been struggling against sitting at home relaxing, to the point that I went out and made a snowman in the dark because I'd missed the daylight hours working!

But despite my resistance, I've noticed a definite change in my approach to Winter this year. Although I did do a lot and get things done, I also did a lot of nothing at all. I slept loooong long hours, struggling to wake up in the morning and more than once rolling out of bed and into work still half asleep. I wrapped up warm instead of defiantly refusing to wear a coat even in freezing temperatures. I gave up on the diet, wanting that extra protective layer from the cold. And funnily enough I ended up losing weight anyway, so I think my body was grateful!

At the time I thought it was my body's way of recovering from a long year of constant illness, taking time out to get back to normal and forgetting what it's like to be constantly bouncing from 'under the weather' to completely bed bound on a near-weekly basis. And in a way I suppose it was, but more importantly I think I was giving in and following the seasons like we used to. Back before technology gave us not just a City That Never Sleeps, but an entire world that doesn't sleep.

If I'm completely honest, despite my protestations and constant attempts to do something, I'm really glad I was defeated. That sounds really negative, like I've given in, but I don't mean it negatively. The defeated side was the 'modern me' that is always trying to work harder, do more and bend time to my will in order to get things finished. The new me is happy to just kick back and relax, knowing that I'll be more productive if I'm well rested and in a much better mood to boot!

So onto today; what made me realise all this was that now Spring is starting to poke its nose above the ground and say hello, I'm doing the same. I'm reconnecting up with friends I haven't seen for a while, working on new projects at work and preparing to jump back into this whole 'diet & exercise' thing I've heard so much about! In addition to all that, I've just passed 10,000 views on this lovely little blog I set up a year ago now and I think it's time I celebrated by getting back to posting regularly. :)

I've got one or two posts in mind for you already - this weekend I'm making my first attempt at making a Spelt & Honey loaf which I'll be taking plenty of pictures of for you! But I'd really love your input too - what do you want to see more of? How To Guides? Tips on money saving and frugality? More serious things like my blogs on Renewable Energy etc? All with an eco-friendly twist of course! Let me know in the comments below. :)
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