Crisp dilemma

Nicola & Pete plus daughters Lola, now 9 and Nell, now 7, spent last year exploring Britain in a carbon-light manner. Our spring 2008 challenge is to give up waste from 24 March to 24 April. Most posts are by Nicola (as it was her silly idea). This is how it’s going:

We all love crisps so there’s been mild panic that we can’t eat them this month because no one could think what to do with the packaging – except bin it. As that’s ruled out we thought crisps had to be off menu, unless we made them ourselves. And I’d ruled that off menu as I’m already having to explore new places to shop where they don’t wrap everything in plastic etc.

Luckily Lola was inspired by a combination of Stig from Stig of the Dump (by Clive King, 1963) and a picture in the newspaper of a model wearing a flash long dress made from vast grey and red plastic laundry bags. The dress looks amazing and it immediately made Lola think up a crisp solution – she would turn the empty Kettle crisp packets into a series of items. Weaving into a lattice pattern should create a new wardrobe for her collection of Sylvanians, but to start with she decided we needed a dish for the scissors and sellotape (see pic).

The crisp package conversion has been so successful that Lola and Nell are now campaigning for us to eat more packets this month so they can set up a mini business selling wrapper dishes and crisp-woven clothes at the car boot sale.

Verdict: who knows if this could be the entrepreneurship opportunity I’ve been waiting for, and all because the family has given up waste for a month.