Tiny Steps to Save the Planet

This is my contribution to the series being run by the Climate Change Collective.

The Climate Change Collective was born out of an exchange between Michelle over at Boomer Eco Crusader and Jamie Ad Stories. They both care deeply about the impact of human activity on our planet, as we all should, and wanted to find a way to keep the climate change message right at the forefront of all our thoughts.

Introduction

Something that really really annoys me is when people share unsolicited advice that is of no help to me and my situation.

Recently, a PTA person told me that if I maybe tried using a calendar, it could really help me to keep track of what to do when. I’d moaned about getting 2 days notice that I needed an Easter egg for non-uniform – as though I have time to go to the shop between Wednesday lunchtime and Friday morning! I said that I hate to let them down and that a bit more notice would be helpful. She said that she sympathised, she also has many things going on and lots to juggle but keeping a calendar helps – it’s good to update it when the news letter comes out at the start of half term. I was fuming with the condescension; “If you just do this, it would be easy for you.” No recognition that their communication could be better, that a massive long list of stuff (not bulleted by date, but with dates hidden inside paragraphs explaining why they’re amazing) is hard to consume and there’s little accommodation for working families (all the PTA events are at lunchtime when I’m working or at 3.30pm, when my kid is in afterschool club so he cannot attend, I get it the time suits 90% of families but there’s never any sign that the PTA are aware that a minority is left out).

What’s all that go to do with climate change and saving the planet?

Well, I sometimes see lists of ways to help with climate change and so many of the ideas are out of my reach – just like the PTA’s constant requests. Maybe they’re impractical or expensive or the immediate and direct impact on our lives seems to outweigh the intangible benefit. Let’s be honest, very few of us are truly altruistic.

The widely-accepted assessment of managing the human impact on our planet is that a few people completely changing their lives will have a tiny cumulative impact; but everyone doing a little bit would add up to much much more. If you’re lucky enough to be able to fit solar panels or a heat pump to your home, buy and insure an electric vehicle, take holidays by train rather than air, live close enough to your work to cycle or work, then that’s amazing and I celebrate your commitment to doing those things. But, those options aren’t available to all.

So, I wanted to share some things that I do, that are easy for me and which might be easy for you too.

Recycle

Easy peasy, especially where we live because the local authority collects all our non-compost recycling in one bin (or in our case, two because we generate so much volume). We just have a separate bin in the kitchen where we collect all the cardboard, paper, glass, plastic and aluminium that we discard and then empty it into the recycling bin. I remember when we first had the option to recycle, in a different house and area. Himself was not interested because we had three bins: card and paper, glass and tin, and garden and food. It was a right faff and a big adjustment from just having one general waste bin to separate our detritus into four. Just having a couple is a bit easier, and over time, we’ve got used to it, so it feels a lot easier overall.

The only fly in the ointment where we live (and in many areas of the UK) is that our council is now charging to take away our food and garden waste for composting. Our council tax has risen massively and the brown bin emptying now has to be specifically paid for separately. It feels like a bit of a scam, backdoor extra tax, and very much anti-save the planet.

Compost

So, if you don’t want to or can’t afford to or don’t have the option to send your garden and food waste to some central compositing service, you could consider composting at home instead. Of course, this is hugely dependent on having outside space to store a compost bin. I know a lot of people prefer not to compost cooked food, particularly not any meat scraps, for fear of attracting vermin. When we’ve composted in the past, we’ve avoided including cooked meat waste. Once, we encouraged the compost by adding some out of date lager to the bin and that worked well.

Walk if you can

There are so many benefits of walking to run errands.

I mean, sure, there are lots of reasons not too: it takes longer, the weather might be bad, you can’t carry as much, taking the kids is frustrating because they’re so slow and complain, you need to wear comfy shoes that might not look so great. We can always find loads of reasons not to do something.

But walking is great! It’s free, it gets you some exercise so it releases some feel good chemicals, you can pay attention to your surroundings rather than focusing on the traffic so your mental health can benefit that way too, it’s often more direct as footpaths take you places the roads don’t go, you don’t have to find a parking space, you don’t get frustrated with other drivers, it gives you the chance to have a chat with your companions.

I don’t walk to do my weekly shop, because I couldn’t carry everything home. If I’m sick, I might not walk to town for the library. But if I need to pop out for anything within at least a mile, I generally walk to where I need to be. I usually make the kids walk too, and they complain, but then we often have an interesting chat as we go.

Pass it on

I’ve always found it stunning how people often buy the same product over again. For example, pushchairs; people have a baby and buy a new pushchair, their child out grows it so they get rid of it. Then, another baby comes along and they buy another pushchair. Or they just didn’t like the first one, so they buy something new – treating their pushchair for hundred of pounds like a ten pound handbag accessory. We bought a “travel system” when large boy was due: a pram, car set, and pushchair all in one. We kept it and used it again for small boy and would have used it again for any other children if life had played out differently. I just recently parted with it at last, passing it on (for free) to a family in need, expecting their first child.

Other things, we’ve inherited. The kids both used the same moses basket that was mine and my brother’s. They wore some of the same baby clothes we had. We always hand coats down from one to the other and then pass them on to other people. The concept of throwing away clothes or “big” equipment for kids just seems so strange to me.

This isn’t a new approach either. Our grandparents and great-grandparents naturally and without considering that anything else was even possible, shared and handed down anything and everything when they no longer needed it.

For them, there were financial reasons. For us, maybe its also about efficiency of consuming material things?

Buy second hand

This is along the same lines right? What we don’t pass on directly, we gift to charity shops or school fairs or the rugby kit reuse system. Why buy a new book when you can get one from the second hand shop for a fraction of the cost and with the benefit of reducing demand on consumables?

I mean, I do see a disadvantage here. How would non-mainstream authors get popular if everyone only recycled the same books through charity shops, round and round? How might small independent retailers be impacted if we only bought our clothes second hand?

I don’t have an answer other than to say that this whole post isn’t about going to extremes, but more about the little things we can do. If we switched to buying 5 or 10% of our books from second hard sources, that could have a massive reduction on demands for paper and therefore on deforestation. You don’t have to become militantly narrow minded or entirely dedicated to minimising your impact on the planet to take some of these small steps and have some positive impact, which is better than none or a negative one.

Put on a jumper

This is just about the easiest idea I can share. Cold? put on a jumper! Don’t put on the heating; that costs money and energy! Just, put on a jumper, and slippers, and cover up with a blanket while you’re sitting still. All those things are essentially free, so easy and simple. They allow you to turn the thermostat down or the heating off, hurrah!

Batch cook

I’m not really sure about the maths on this one.

Let me lay out my quandary. If I buy a large quantity of ingredients and cook them all at once, say to make a big massive batch of chilli, that uses probably a little more energy than cooking a small quantity but a lot less than making four individual meals’ worth. So far, so good. But once I’ve put aside three meals’ portions and put them in the freezer, they continue to consume energy to keep them cold, and then when I heat each one up, more energy again. The question is whether the energy required to “freeze + reheat” is less than “prepare one meal from scratch”.

I think it probably is. For this example, cooking a chilli usually takes at least an hour. But reheating a batch (having defrosted at room temperature) is maybe 10 minutes.

It’s certainly more efficient in terms of my time and cheaper to buy the ingredients. I think it’s more efficient for energy consumption too.

Reuse water

I’ve got to admit that I’m not very good at reusing water, especially in the winter months. The garden doesn’t need extra water in the winter for a start. I don’t really like the idea of pouring food detritus-ridden washing up water on my house plants inside, it might smell.

However, I’m a dedicated user of a water butt fed by the gutters. All summer, that’s the main source of water for my garden. When the kids were little and they loved splashing in a bowl of water on the patio, whatever was left always ended up for the plants too.

Reusing water isn’t always easy – capturing water from showers or washing up isn’t simple. But, there are much smaller scale opportunities.

Ever since I was at university (over 20 years ago), I’ve always fed my pot plants the dregs of my coffee or tea. Maybe not if it had milk in, but black coffee or herbal tea? Just pop that last mouthful that’s got a bit of distasteful dust in it straight into your yukka or succulent or orchid pot on the window sill. My yukka was entirely nourished by cold black coffee for years and it’s still quite happy. The kids often have a couple of inches of water left in the bottom of their bottles after school or sports, that can go in the house plants too.

See, how easy was that? You don’t have to do things on a big scale to put into practice a bit of repurposing.

Conclusion

So my point here is that “saving the planet” feels like this absolutely massive, intimidatingly huge idea. How can any of us take on responsibility for that? We don’t need to. We don’t need to do it alone and we don’t need to do all of it at once. We can take tiny steps that each contributes a little bit to preserving our planet’s wellbeing.

At work, I’m using a mantra in 2024: “you cannot get to perfection in a single step”. I’m trying to be more understanding of the challenges that we all face as we try to improve. I shouldn’t expect others to adapt to changes overnight and I shouldn’t expect myself to get it right first time and I shouldn’t expect the improvements I ask of from others to achieve their final deliverable in a single iteration.

All those things apply to how we approach taking responsibility for combating climate change too, or indeed anything else. Be patient with yourself and those around you, do what you can and be proud of your contributions, no matter how small. Trying something is better than doing nothing at all.

What did I miss?

I’m sure there are loads of other things that we can do with tiny adjustments to our daily lives. What other ideas do you have?