Sunday 2 January 2011

How Little Impact Can We Have On Our Environment in 2011?

Happy New Year to you.  I hope your year has got off to a good start, although with all the coughs and colds around at the moment, perhaps, like me, you are not feeling 100%.  I had a cold the weekend before Christmas and I still have a bit of a cough and continue to be lacking in energy, although too much food and later than usual nights may have something to do with that.

So it may not be ideal timing, but I've decided to try the No Impact Man one week experiment as a way of focussing on sustainable living at the beginning of the year, and the experiment starts today.

Sunday, the first day is about looking at everything we consume and, for this week at least, only buying what we really need, such as food.  After Christmas, that shouldn't be too difficult, we probably don't even need much food this week.

However, it does raise the more serious issue of how we as individuals have become defined to some extent by what we own and that most of us consume far more than we really need.

I'm not a fan of second hand and charity shops myself, but I think it is always a good idea to consider if we really need an item and then to buy the best quality that we can afford if it is something we want to last.  If we don't want it to last, do we really need it? 

Buying things that are made as locally as possible helps us to make our purchases more sustainable and if we want to live in a better, fairer world, with less poverty, then paying a fair price, that gives the end producer a living wage will help to make that happen.

I'll let you know at the end of the week how I get on.  If you want to join me, I'd be interested to hear how you get on, too.

6 comments:

  1. Hi Karin,

    Saw your link on the FB page. We're also doing the No Impact Experiment too. Looking forward to challenging ourselves to think even more about how we do things...

    Have a good week!

    Kay

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  2. Thank you for dropping by, Kay. Hope your week of experimenting goes well.

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  3. I also caught your link on the YES! site, so happy to compare notes. Very interesting ton read your post from today on garbage, being American I was not even sure what the item was your daughter wanted but found it cute since I am excluding my daughter and maybe my husband- actually I plan to just include a tally of his facial tissue waste!

    I will check in more later!

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  4. Hello Anonymous, thank you for dropping by. Don't be shy, if you haven't got a profile, you can still sign your name at the end of your comment, but of course a profile might help us to get to know you better.

    A Pritt stick is a solid glue stick, inside a plastic tube, which my daughter wanted to make a scrap book of her tour of Europe back in the summer.

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  5. Happy New Year Karin. You have inspired me to sign up for a No Impact Week. It's too late to start this week so I'm going to wait until next Sunday, which gives me time to prepare, including following your progress this week. Good luck!

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  6. Thanks for visiting, Gai, I'm glad this blog has served a useful purpose. It sounds like you are streets ahead of me with transportation.

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All relevant comments to this post are welcome, so feel free to have your say.