I recently QUITE my dreadful guilty pleasure ebay (read about it here).
But on Friday I had the day off from life and found myself wandering in town twiddling my thumbs and accidentally (on purpose) stumbled in to a shoe shop.
Whoops! After hammering the plastic I managed to justify my spending by the fact that the soles of my lovely new shoes are made from 50% recycled plastic bottles (and they are oh so pretty and comfy!)
With a warm and fuzzy post-shopping feeling inside me I headed for my bus. Brighton is never the cleanest of cities but it had been windy all morning and I noticed all the rubbish and plastic bottles which had collected in the corner of the bus stop. A scruffy looking slouched hoodie shuffled up and added to the collection with the remainders of his high energy drink. I tutted under my breath and had a mental word with myself to shut up and stop scowling.
When I got home I was checking facebook (guilty pleasure number 2), and saw that the fantastic team at Shambala have pledged to make 2013 the first bottled water free festival. Such a simple but positive move for festivals which can easily become massive waste producers.
Everyone seemed to be at it.
Over at Make do and Mend (which is a fantastic blog by Jen who is trying to buy nothing new for a year), you can win a bottle of Ecover by suggesting who you’d send a ‘message in a bottle‘ to. And the wonderful Claire Lewis is ‘making it cool to care‘ with her less is more campaign.
Everyone know’s we can’t managed without plastic (or certainly not in the near future), that’s why it’s great to read at Ecover about the developments in biodegradable plant-astics. They have always been way ahead in the world of eco-friendly cleaning products and their current Message in a Bottle campaign is pledging to clean up the planet one bottle at a time. Do check out their Splash site and support them if you can.
So come on guys. You know who you are. CUT DOWN THE PLASTIC.
Many of my friend buy bottled water every day without even thinking about it. It’s a shame when there are so many different reusable bottles now available. Reusablebottle.co.uk has loads of funky looking stuff and some useful info on what materials are best for you and why reuse. I particularly like Bamboo Bottles and the Bobble Bottle which even filters any nasties).
Anyway, I’m off to polish my ‘eco halo’. How shiny is yours?
a field somewhere 
Oh goodness I need to listen to you…we recycle but seem to get through endless amounts of plastic! I will tomorrow be buying plastic water bottles I promise! 😉
Thanks for dropping by. Sorry for the preaching. Sometimes I annoy myself!
Mine’s not great, I have to admit, but I do hate an accumulation of plastic bottles so I do tend to refill mine from the tap if I’m going out. My daughter is fascinated by the things that are made out of recycled plastic, too!
I stopped doing that as my friend said there are some dodgy chemicals or something that get in to the water from reusing. Is nothing safe these days? I’m sure I used to drink out of puddles!
We cut the bottoms off all our old squash/water bottles and use them as mini-cloches for our seedlings on the allotment! .. or at least that was the intention when I saved a year’s worth of bottles… haven’t actually had time to plant anything up there yet this year!! Romany x
Great idea. There are some great ‘greenhouses’ on our allotments made out of 2 liter plastic coke bottles. Such a great idea. I even saw a kids boat built out of old plastic bottles the other day. Ingenious! Considering they will be around for such a long time they seem to be a bit of a wasted building resource really?
Fascinating article Sarah. I’d really like to see the statistics for Italy in comparison. We used to live in the land of bottled water. I’d be very surprised if their statistics aren’t a lot higher than England. We don’t buy bottled water here in England in comparison to how we did in Italy. Our local tap water in Italy had arsenic in it. Now they have introduced a system, whereby it is filtered out and you can go and buy it so you can drink the water without worrying about it. I found this article really interesting about how a zero energy home used 40,000 recycled bottles. (http://www.gizmag.com/tvzeb-zero-energy-home-in-italy/26583/) I imagine the landfill is amazing in Italy. Although we did recycle we heard stories about how what we recycled didn’t always make it to where it should and probably did end up as landfill.