How green is your personal lifestyle

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How green is your personal lifestyle
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Florence

Joined: 15 Mar 2025
Posts: 619

Posted: Wed Dec 03, 25 12:58 pm Post subject:

Do have a way of buying less plastic for the house supplies. I'm part of a Suma home buying group. Suma is a workers' cooperative which can make it interesting sometimes.

So long as we can order Â£376 between us we get it delivered free. Group has declined in numbers over the years and only one member is of long standing. We had to have a reboot after one of the known home group splits.

However it works. Well till it doesn't.

For me, things like shampoo, conditioner, washing up liquid, toilet cleaner come in 5 litre containers and contents are decanted into collected bottles for use thereafter. Some of the group buy dried pulses in quantity and such as well.

Mostly the prices are wholesale. Can be as green, ethical, vegan, vegetarian as you choose. Daughter and husband have left the country (England) and moved to Scotland so the system no longer works for them as it's the usual charge more for delivery to Scotland.

dpack

Joined: 02 Jul 2005
Posts: 44876
Location: yes

Posted: Wed Dec 03, 25 2:30 pm Post subject:

i do not know

as far as possible i go for the low impact, low energy, re-used options

however i eat meat, have gas heating(and good clothes to reduce it), need taxis to get to places(some are electric), need assorted meds and often decide that cleaning plastic to send it to "recycling" is greenwashing

over 4 decades i might have been more green than not green, whatever green means

risking life, limb, liberty and sanity to protect places and critters , planting a temperate rain forest etc probably counts

not for me to decide

ps showing the food bank folk where to harvest "wild"(old planted and moved on from) apples was rather satisfying, is that green or community?

Mistress Rose

Joined: 21 Jul 2011
Posts: 17235

Posted: Thu Dec 04, 25 9:10 am Post subject:

Probably a bit of both Dpack.

I am currently using shampoo bars, but have yet to find the right one. I want something that just cleans my hair but ideally doesn't contain certain ingredients as I have developed a mild sensitivity to some things shampoo contains, apart from the plastic containers.

Talking of greewashing. It seems that a certain company are selling ladies underwear as 'compostable' even though they contain elastane. They are also made of Tecal which is a type of rayon, but uses a 'closed' system so the solvents don't get out much, unlike traditional rayon which uses some rather nasty solvents that aren't recycled. I will be writing an article about it for our coppice group newsletter, but that will be in the spring, as I already have one technical article about biochar, and I think 1 technical article per newsletter is quite enough for most of our members.

Mistress Rose

Joined: 21 Jul 2011
Posts: 17235

Posted: Thu Dec 04, 25 9:11 am Post subject:

Mistress Rose

Joined: 21 Jul 2011
Posts: 17235

Posted: Fri Dec 05, 25 8:32 am Post subject:
Although I know our lifestyle is far from as green as it could be, if everyone took the same view as most of us, there would be a lot less food waste, single use plastic and general poor lifestyle than there is now.

Florence

Joined: 15 Mar 2025
Posts: 619

Posted: Mon Jan 05, 26 12:47 pm Post subject:
Does the junk food partial advertising ban work towards green living? Or would a lot of people know how to budget without junk food or what its implications for the planet are?

Mistress Rose

Joined: 21 Jul 2011
Posts: 17235

Posted: Mon Jan 05, 26 4:46 pm Post subject:

It may help a bit, but sweets etc. were advertised on TV, and we ate things like sugar puffs without any major problems. I think lack of exercise is one problem, and probably an increase in the proportion of unhealthy food eaten.

Low income can be a problem and those on low incomes often have associated problems such as lack of time, depression, stress and other difficulties which make it difficult to cook healthy meals for their children. I know a lot of the things we gave out at a food bank I helped at didn't help, but they were all we could give people. I still give donations to the food bank and try to put in things that at least can make healthy meals like tinned meat in the least processed form.

Lack of education can also contribute. Although I went to a grammar school, we had to do PE and also did domestic science for one year. The teacher and me were glad to part at the end of it, but I still use some of the recipes I got then. My mother also taught me to cook. I am glad to say that our son can cook, and he had to do home economics or whatever they called it, so I went though some of the things like making pastry with him. He now sometimes gives me recipes. He was telling me how to cook a curry the other day, but it was rather wasted as I don't have half the ingredients. Reminds me; I must try a stir fry again one day.

Florence

Joined: 15 Mar 2025
Posts: 619

Posted: Sun Aug 23, 26 12:53 pm Post subject:

I've just binned a book on cheap cooking for one picked up from a charity shop. The recipes the author had priced up at Â£1 or under - well some years ago but you know we can look even so.

However some of them wanted half a tin of tomatoes or half a tin of chick peas. And some of the recipes started out with "heat the oven to 190 degrees" and you were going to use it for 15 minutes cooking for one. For one meal.

Anyway it was a charitable donation of the low cost of the book to Oxfam. Their local bookshop is good. Sometimes.

Mistress Rose

Joined: 21 Jul 2011
Posts: 17235

Posted: Sun Aug 23, 26 4:37 pm Post subject:

Yes, you have to be careful about books like that. I copied some recipes years ago from a book called 'Left over for tomorrow', who's author escapes me. The things you added from your 'store cupboard' certainly weren't the sort of things in mine; far too expensive or exotic. You can use half a tin of something and put the rest in a sealed container in the fridge then use it for something the next day. I tend to make enough for 2-3 helpings for the 2 of us and freeze the remainder in servings.

Florence

Joined: 15 Mar 2025
Posts: 619

Posted: Sun Aug 23, 26 5:02 pm Post subject:

Certainly when it comes to cheap but fresh meals, the internet does do 7 day options which include buying items that can be used up for more than one meal over the week (pick weight loss or whatever suits your search). And usually without things that 'd never dream of having in the stores.

Rather more practical than that one book. On the other hand, the local Oxfam shop has turned up some really good cookery books that have produced some long standing recipes that use things from family store cupboards.

Mistress Rose

Joined: 21 Jul 2011
Posts: 17235

Posted: Mon Aug 24, 26 9:09 pm Post subject:
I am afraid I don't do internet shopping. Husband deals with things we need, which are mainly to do with electronics or the business. I prefer to go to a shop and see what I want after, in the distant past, having a few bad experiences with catalogue shopping, which is the old internet shop.

Florence

Joined: 15 Mar 2025
Posts: 619

Posted: Tue Aug 25, 26 11:49 am Post subject:

Groceries are easy if you know your supermarket and can opt out of substitutions. Mind I only do tins, packets and frozen vegetables. Wouldn't trust them with fresh stuff.

But that's because I don't drive and am not into hefting heavy shopping on the local rural buses.

Shoes I have to shop online as there's only one shop in the country that does ones which fit. And it's well off the beaten track.

Mistress Rose

Joined: 21 Jul 2011
Posts: 17235

Posted: Tue Aug 25, 26 5:10 pm Post subject:

I am fortunate that I have a car available to drive, so can do a shopping trip every week. Combine it with delivering charcoal and sawdust if I can to save fuel. For things at the local shops I walk, but they are at the bottom of the hill and we live at the top, so can't manage too much. I tend only to buy milk, fruit and veg there though. For shoes, I like to try them on. My feet are more or less a standard size, but do need to try as some are more comfortable than others.

gz

Joined: 23 Jan 2009
Posts: 9693
Location: Ayrshire, Scotland

Posted: Tue Aug 25, 26 10:37 pm Post subject:

MR for hair washing I use a large tablespoon of bicarb in a litre jug of warm water... then rinse under the cold tap.....followed by several glugs of cider vinegar in a large bowl of warm water...first jugful goes over the top, then pour and dunk as required...and another cold tap rinse.
If the tap water has a lot of treatments in it, finish with a jug of filtered or bottled water .

Cheap and very effective. No conditioner needed.

Didn't we have some "nopoo " threads?

Mistress Rose

Joined: 21 Jul 2011
Posts: 17235

Posted: Wed Aug 26, 26 5:16 pm Post subject:
When I washed my hair in the sink, I used to use vinegar to give it a shine. Then rinse again to get rid of the smell.

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