A-Z no waste - starts here

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:

The two promises I made for 2008 - to do something about climate change every day and to drink English wine - are transforming family life.

Firstly I've got better at locating English wine, but in the process have realised it's a lot easier to find (and a lot cheaper to drink) English lagers and beer. Blame the bloke in the picture as he delivered six bottles of Eco Warrior at the same time as a case of Sedlescombe wine (from Sussex). Luckily I'm begining to really like this Kent-flavoured beer...

As for the other biggie, tackling climate change. Well, I realise you can try and buy your way out of the problem (as I am doing by installing solar panels to heat our water). But another way is to rethink how you live. I thought our family was pretty good at keeping our carbon footprint low but we always have stuff in the rubbish bin (mostly plastic wrappers from magazines and food); we haven't yet cracked recharging batteries and we fill two recycling bins with paper and bottles most weeks. In other words we are waste junkies.

So the family challenge - starting 24 March - is to give up waste. For Lola and Nell that means no sweets with wrappers (buying from a jar is OK though). For Pete it means reading newspapers in the library or on line. For me it means cold turkey on the butter front - unless I can locate butter sold without its wrapper.


With a fortnight to go before our A-Z No Waste project starts gets closer I reckon I'm going to be so anxious about the threat to my daily treat rations that I'll be sourcing wine in vats, beer in barrels and sweeties by the kilo...