Category: Environmentally Friendly

The 22nd April 2021 is Earth Day! Earth Day happens every year and helps to raise awareness about the protection and conservation of our Planet. It is a day we can make changes in our lives to help the environment and our Planet. Not sure what to do to celebrate Earth Day? Life’s Little Things brings you 5 little things we can all do for Earth Day 2021.

1. Make a food swap

In my previous blog post, 5 little things we can all do to help the environment, I talked about avoiding products with palm oil in them. I will be writing a more in-depth post about palm oil in the coming months, but in a nut shell, the production of palm oil is absolutely devastating rainforests. It’s destroying trees, animals habitats and is endangering species. So many of our everyday food items at home contain palm oil and we don’t even realise!

For Earth Day 2021 you could choose to swap one of your food items at home for a palm oil free alternative. I chose peanut butter for our first swap. We swapped from a supermarket own brand of peanut butter which contained palm oil to Pip and Nut Peanut Butter. The new product is more expensive but is less oily, absolutely delicious, and most importantly has no palm oil! Our next swap is going to be from a supermarket own brand of sunflower spread to butter that contains no palm oil.

2. Make a household product swap

Many items around our homes are made of plastic or materials that can’t be recycled, don’t biodegrade and will sit in landfill for hundreds of years once we are finished with them. As much as I would love to, we can’t afford to just go out and replace everything in our homes for eco friendly substitutes in one go. Like many people we have budget constraints. But what we are going to start doing is as and when we need to replace items we will be looking for environmentally friendly replacements.

This week I came across a great little shop online called My little Eco Shop. I found environmentally friendly bamboo make up brushes that were half the price of other plastic ones that I had found! I also bought some bees wax food wrap. This is something I have been wanting to try for a long time as I hate having to use cling film to wrap up food. Is there anything that you need to buy soon that you could get an environmentally friendly version of?

3. Unsubscribe from junk mail. Go paperless!

Do you get letters, magazines or bank statements in the post that you don’t read or can view online? A great way to help cut down on paper waste is to go paperless. Although paper can be recycled, the demand for paper has a very damaging effect to our planet. Every year more that 75 million football fields worth of forest is cleared to be created into paper.*² This amount of deforestation has a very damaging effect on our planet. Trees help reduce the effects of global warming by taking in carbon dioxide and giving out oxygen that we breathe. Unsubscribing to unnecessary junk mail that comes through your door is a great way to help save paper and trees.

4. Shop Local, support small businesses

Something I have been very keen to start this year is shopping more locally. By that I don’t just mean my local supermarkets, but local small businesses. Not only does this support local businesses in my area, but also reduces my carbon footprint. I started off with a few small changes, like buying some of our meat at a local butchers. I slowly increased it so that we now buy all of our meat from our local butchers. Then week by week I have been adding other items like locally sourced free range eggs, milk and cheese. This can be a difficult thing to do as many of the items are more expensive than what is available in a supermarket, but what I have been finding is that we are getting much better quality for the money we are paying. If your budget doesn’t allow for it, that’s ok! Just do something small and make one change as and when you can.

5. Walk or cycle instead of taking the car

Research has found that in the first 5 minutes of a car journey, a vehicle can emit up to twice as much pollution as it would once the vehicles pollution control system has warmed up.*³ In 2019, 34% of carbon dioxide emission in the UK came from transport alone and was the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions. Are there any short journeys that you take in the car that you could walk or cycle instead? Not only is it better for you to walk or cycle as it is great exercise but it saves you money and also helps the planet!

Thats it! 5 little things we can all do for Earth Day 2021! All of these are only small actions. You could just do 1 or 2 of them or all 5! Or could you make some bigger changes in your life? Sir David Attenborough said at the end of the documentary ‘Extinction: The Facts’, ‘If we make the right decisions at this critical moment, we can safeguard our planet’s ecosystems, it’s extraordinary biodiversity and all its inhabitants. What happens next, is up to every one of us.’ If all of us make many little changes in our lives, it could add up to some big changes for our planet!

See you all in 2 weeks for the next blog post! In the mean time check out the Life’s Little Things Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest accounts for more posts.

Take care,

Jem X

The state of the environment and our planet is something I have become very concerned about since becoming a Mum. This is something I want to try and do something about through Life’s Little Things. (See my previous post, A little bit about Me, to find out why.) I have always tried to recycle and never litter, but I want to do much more to help.

Over the past few years I have seen documentaries on the state of our planet and sometimes am left feeling like it is an impossible task to try and fix. So I did my usual trick when things feel to big for me to handle, I took a step back and broke it down into more manageable tasks. So…. here is my list of 5 little things we can all do to help the environment. By choosing 5 little things to do to help the environment, I’m hoping they’ll integrate into our everyday lives easily. Then when they become natural to us, we can choose some more changes to make.

Carbon Footprint?

In this post I am going to be mentioning the words ‘carbon footprint’ a lot. So I just wanted to give a little more information about what your carbon footprint is. A persons carbon footprint is based upon the amount of greenhouse gases that are created depending on their actions and their lifestyle. Green house gases damage the environment and are a contributing factor to climate change. So the lower your carbon footprint, the better it is for the environment. Many of my points below help to reduce your carbon footprint. Woohoo!

1. Choose glass jars rather than plastic bottles

In Supermarkets, when you buys things like mayonnaise and ketchup, you can either buy them in glass jars or plastic squeeze bottles. Straight away I thought plastic was the worst of the 2 options. However, after doing some research into this, I found that there are actually pros and cons for both with regards to the environment when considering which to buy.

In many ways plastic is the worst of the 2 options. It becomes a huge problem when it ends up in landfill sites as it takes so long to breakdown. Or if it ends up in our Oceans and biodegrades, it breaks down into micro plastics that fish eat and plastic ends up in the food chain. However, I found that if plastic is recycled properly it does have a much much lower impact on the environment.

Glass initially seemed an obvious better option. It can be very easily recycled or cleaned up and reused for many purposes at home. Another bonus is that it doesn’t contain the same chemicals that plastics do. However, the production of glass carries a higher carbon footprint than plastic due to the processes used to create it. This in turn creates more greenhouse gasses that causes more damage to the environment.

So it turned out that it wasn’t a totally simple answer to just choose between the 2! For me, even though it has a higher carbon footprint, I think that glass is the better option when considering how harmful plastic is to the environment. I’m going to do other things to help reduce my carbon footprint instead to help offset the amount used to create glass. Something else I found out when comparing glass bottles to their same brand plastic squeeze bottle equivalents, the glass jars more often than not are cheaper and you get more content for your money! Bonus!

2. Take shorter showers

I am guilty of taking a longer shower than I should every day. Long showers do not only use up a lot of water, the energy used to heat the water creates higher Co2 emissions which increases your carbon footprint. The recommended time to spend in the shower is 5 minutes. Another recommendation is to turn the water temperature down. Not only will these 2 things save water and energy, it will also save you money! Win win! Maybe you could set a timer, like an egg timer, to help you stick to a 5 minute shower.

3. Have a meat free day

I’ve heard we should reduce our meat intake to help the environment but I didn’t know why that would help. So I did some research to find out more. A lot of land, water and energy resources all go into the production of livestock for the consumption of meat. All these things have an impact on the planet. The amount of animals needed to meet consumer demands also creates a lot greenhouse gasses. The more greenhouse gases that are created, the more damage is done to the environment.

An article I found on the internet about reducing our meat intake had a line that really put it into perspective for me, ‘the emissions associated with producing one quarter pound of beef is about the equivalent of driving a car for 7 miles!’* I found that shocking! I’m not saying we all have to turn vegetarian or vegan! But by reducing our meat intake by maybe having a meat free Monday or replacing some of our meat with plant based options, we will reduce the demand for so much harmful meat production and will reduce our carbon footprint at the same time. We’re going to start doing a meat free day once a week to start with and see how we get on!

4. Don’t buy products with palm oil

This is something that I want to write a longer blog post about in the future. It is quite a big subject, but here is a little bit about it. After watching the David Attenborough documentary ‘Extinction: The Facts’ (still available on BBC iPlayer if you want to check it out!) I was shocked to find how damaging the production of palm oil is to rainforests, animals homes and it is endangering species. Every hour, the size of 300 football fields of rainforests are being destroyed due to the demand for palm oil. That is insane! As soon as I heard this I decided that I wanted to stop buying products that contain palm oil.

I had heard that peanut butter was a product that contains palm oil and was really pleased when I found a substitute for it. But I was so disheartened while unpacking the rest of my shopping to see how many other products I had bought contain palm oil! A lot of big brands use it. A lot! Finding replacements for every product that uses it in my house in one go would be a huge task. So, I am going to focus on finding replacements one at a time. When looking at the products packaging, palm oil can be listed under several different names, so you need to keep an eye out. (View the Ingredients list in this article on WWF to see what other names Palm oil may be listed as.)

Some companies say that they use organic palm oil or sustainable palm oil within their products. These are better options, but to really reduce the demand for it, it is best to try and find a replacement with no palm oil in at all. By doing this you might have to spend a bit more money on products but you will be really helping the environment!!!

5. Don’t leave appliances on standby

A really easy thing that we all can do to help the environment and will help us all save some money too is to switch things off of standby. This increases your carbon footprint without you even knowing it. Although most appliances sold now have standby modes that use very small amounts of energy, the absolute best thing to do to make sure no energy is being wasted at all is to switch things off at the wall plug when they are not in use. I am going to start doing this more at home by making sure things like the tv and the baby monitors are all switched off at the wall when they are not in use.

So that’s it, 5 little things we can all do to help the environment!

Hopefully the tips have been helpful. They are only little things to do to help the environment, but if everyone did them they could make a big difference. My family and I will be doing all of them. I will do some more posts over the coming months on how we can all help out our planet more. After all, it’s the only one we have got! See you in 2 weeks, but check out my Facebook and Instagram accounts for more regular posts!

Take care,

Jem X

*statistic from mondaycampaigns.org which originally came from Pelletier, N., Pirog, R., Rasmussen, R. (2010) Comparative life cycle environmental impacts of three beef production strategies in the Upper Midwestern United States. Energy Use Agricultural Systems; Volume 103, Issue 6, July 2010, Pages 380-389.