ONE FAMILY’S REVOLT AGAINST EVERYDAY POLLUTION
When a beanbag sent thousands of polystyrene balls flying through her garden, Kate Hughes decided to make a break with the throwaway society.
She and her husband transformed the lives of their ordinary family of four. They ditched plastic, shunned supermarkets, cooked all meals from scratch, bought only second-hand clothes, and made their own cleaning agents. Then they went deeper – greening every aspect of their home life, from their gas and electricity to their car, from their money to their IT.
The Hugheses have achieved the ‘zero waste’ goal of sending nothing to landfill. Now they are going even further…
Told with refreshing humility and humour, this eye-opening story shows that a well-lived life doesn’t have to come wrapped in plastic. Packed with handy tips, it reveals much about what makes a fulfilling modern family – and how readers can empower themselves to preserve the climate, forests and seas. And, heart-warmingly, how that can lead to a more relaxing life.
Extract
Cooking our own meals
We were starting to realise that making the journey was leading to more questions than answers, more grey areas, misinformation and conflicts of interest than we ever imagined – and that was just about food. We hadn’t even got started on anything else that came into our home yet.
Take a single, uncontroversial ingredient, let’s say peppers. Should we buy them grown in a UK hothouse or ones trucked in from Spain? What if the Spanish ones are organic? Or the only UK option is wrapped in plastic? Which is better for the environment? Or at least less harmful? If we ever want to eat peppers again without negatively impacting the planet in some way are we going to have to grow our own? Because self-sufficiency wasn’t really part of the plan….
All we could do was dive in and hope we didn’t drown in the detail as we swam around looking for food that worked for us and the planet. We started with the problem of transport because food mileage was a well established measure that meant we could actually make some decisions based on numbers for once. Or, at least, we thought we could.
Three quarters of all the fruit and veg now eaten in the UK is imported. Almost all the fruit we eat has been grown overseas, and soft fruit in particular is flown in. It turns out that the UK only produces half of all the food that is consumed on these shores – which is somewhat patriotically disconcerting as well as practically unsustainable.
One of our family stories is the recollection of the first banana my great uncle ever tasted after WW2, shipped from the other side of the world. We were very aware that bananas came from overseas.
But the fact that such a vast proportion of the apples eaten in Britain are imported from South Africa, or at best France, when the fruit grows very well in the orchards you can see from near our house seemed to be absurd.
The obvious solution appeared to be only to buy food produced not just in the UK but as close to us as possible.
That immediately threw up two questions.
The first we were becoming increasingly familiar with. Were we really prepared to give up things we took great pleasure in for the sake of an unquantifiable, but undoubtedly minuscule effect? Or even just to settle for not adding to the runaway levels of damage that our disconnected food shop was causing each and every day?
But the second question was whether a straightforward food mile approach was even a worthwhile aim. When I put the question of food miles to Riverford Organic Farmers, the sustainably produced veg box people, they told me that for most of the year our carbon impact would be smaller if we bought organic tomatoes trucked in from Spain than those heated thanks to fossil fuels in a UK hothouse.
That means the answer has to be to eat food grown in the UK at the time of year it is traditionally produced.
表中的内容
1. The Eye Opener. English journalist Kate Hughes starts a zero waste lifestyle. Mentioning plastic pollution, going zero waste, polystyrene, EPS, takeaway containers, marine pollution, Sea Empress tanker disaster, impact of cattle grazing, BPA, bisphenol A, BBC Blue Planet series
2. Unravelling a Lifetime’s Training. The challenges of starting a zero waste lifestyle. Mentioning landfill, shopping habits, farmer's market, throwaway society, plastic pollution, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, supermarket shopping, microplastics, plastic carrier bags
3. Assume Nothing. Adopting a flexi diet and eating seasonally. With breakout boxes on palm oil and slow cookers and flexi diets Mentioning processed food, home-churned butter, slow cooker yoghurt, nanoplastic particles, polypropylene, palm oil ingredients, eating seasonally, flexi diet
4. Down the Drain. Learning to reduce plastic and micro plastic pollution by using homemade cleaning agents and homemade cosmetics. Mentioning green washing machines, volatile organic compounds, parabens, Environmental Protection Agency, water pollution, homemade cosmetics, homemade cleaning agents
5. Wardrobe Malfunction. Finding a way to avoid environmental damage when buying and looking after clothes, including vintage clothes and hiring costumes and party outfits. Breakout boxes on synthetic fibres and the trust cost of fast fashion
6. Loving the Preloved. Reducing household waste by repairing, repurposing and buying products second-hand, including sourcing on auction sites such as e Bay. Breakout box on E-Waste. Mentioning preloved, pre-loved, e Bay, e-waste, Commons Environmental Audit Committee, Fairphone, Ida Auken
7. Generation Fear. Creating happy family and looking after environmental concerns about, and for, children. Breakout box on eco-anxious children. Mentioning Christmas toys, plastic toys, laminator, sequins, Mc Donald's Happy Meals, PVA glue
8. Throw Away Tradition. Celebrating festivals such as Christmas, Easter and Halloween in a zero-waste household. Breakout box on the environmental cost of Christmas. Green Christmas, Beltane, recycled wrapping paper, Christmas dinner, Christmas carbon footprint, All Hallows’ Eve pick 'n' mix
9. Seeing It All. Using sustainable transport by reducing air travel, taking the train, and buying and using an electric car. Breakout box on production of electric (EV) cars including environmental cost of lithium battery. Mentioning diesel and petrol costs, Jaguar i Pace, second-hand EV
10. Widening the Net. Broadening out the family's attempts to reduce carbon by eating out sustainably and having ethical holidays. Breakout boxes on a zero waste restaurant: La Petite Bouchée in Witheridge in Devon, and the UK's international environmental performance. Mentioning Earth Overshoot Day
11. Green Energy. Switching the family to green energy and avoiding electricity and gas greenwashing; assessing UK energy mix, including the proportion of renewable power; and improving household energy efficiency. National Grid, renewable energy supplier, renewable energy tariff, Renewable Energy Guarantee
12. A Bit More Zero. The role and uses of household recycling including greenwashing by supermarkets, assessing different types of recycling by material such as glass and plastic and aluminium drinks cans. How to use a garden to provide food. Breakout box on shipping UK waste abroad.
13. Ghost in the Machine. Reducing waste from miscellaneous sources such as junk mail, printed catalogues; going paper-free; reducing junk emails, using a green browser Ecosia, and reducing purchases of new tech such as phones and PCs, and reducing energy waste from streaming services such as Netflix
14. Follow the Money. The family decide to green their finances, by assessing the sustainability of their pensions, investments and savings.
关于作者
Kate Hughes is a national newspaper journalist and columnist. She is Money Editor for Independent.co.uk, for whom she also writes about sustainability. She is a commentator on BBC radio. She lives with her husband David and their two children in Somerset, England.
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