Our journey to more sustainable living: What's gone well? And what can we still improve?

Climate change has been at the forefront of everyone’s minds in the past few years and the spotlight has been on it even more this past few weeks as the governments of the world came together for the COP26 summit.

I’ve always loved being out in nature but, I’ll be honest, my awareness about the importance of living more sustainably and my drive to do so have only really developed in the past few years. For me, you won’t be surprised to learn that it began with health and wellbeing. Keeping fit and healthy, and helping you and others to do the same has been my driving force throughout my adult life. As I began to take people out on adventures in the wilder places around the UK, I noticed how refreshed, energised, relaxed, and happy they became as a result. Nature had incredible powers.

Inextricably linked

Around the same time, I also started to realise how closely bound together our own health and wellbeing was with that of our planet’s. Our food comes from the soil and from the sea. Damage those and we have a big problem. I began to understand how everything in nature lives in harmony, in balance you could say. We need bees and other insects to pollinate our food. In fact, we require all creatures to sustain the web of life and the delicately balanced food chain. It is this complex but amazing interaction between every living thing on earth that sustains the great biodiversity of our planet and ensures that we have air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat, and resources for shelter, clothing and everything else we need. The loss of just one tiny element can be catastrophic to our own wellbeing.

I also began to read the research on the impact that time in nature can have on not just your physical wellbeing, but your mental wellbeing too. It blew me away!

It was at this point that I begin to think seriously about my own habits feed into this cycle that damages our soil, our seas, our natural environment and our air. I started to think about how I shopped, how I travelled, how I ate and how much I consumed. I have never been in a position to preach on this topic, and I know from experience when it comes to health and fitness that preaching tends not to help others to change anyway. Instead, I set out to see if I could l change my habits in a way that would protect the environment, to share my journey with you all, and to see if I could find out just how much a difference each of us could make through the development of tiny new habits. I knew well that tiny changes sustained over time could massively impact someone’s health for the better, so I assumed that tiny changes made by enough of us over time could help our planet for the better too.

Do tiny habits make a difference?

I really think they do and here’s why. I recently read Chris Packham and Meg McCubbin’s book, Back to Nature: How To Love Life, and Save It. In it, they explain that the total area covered by our gardens in the UK is 432,964 hectares, an area one fifth the size of Wales and bigger than the Norfolk Broads, Exmoor, Dartmoor, and Lake District National Parks put together. If each single household did something in their garden to better protect wildlife, just imagine what an imapct that could have. If each household grew just a tiny portion of food, what a banquet that would be. If each household composted their food waste, just think how big a reduction in waste that would equate to.

Let’s take another example. How about litter? The sorry stats from Keep Britain Tidy are that two million pieces of litter are dropped in the UK every day. But there are nearly 70 million people on our island. Imagine if just one person in thirty picked up a single piece of litter each day, then 2.33 million pieces would be removed from our streets and parks. Put another way, there’d be 330,000 less pieces than there were the day before. Over two million less in a single week. The tide would start to turn.

What have we changed?

Now you know my motivations for change, I thought I’d share with you what we’ve actually tried to do to play our part and also have a look at where we can still improve in future.

Here’s what we did:

Limit waste to the bare minimum

• Get rid of the waste bins in the house so that nothing went into general waste, even by accident.

• Take plastic bags and soft plastics to our local Tesco where they can both be recycled. (This scheme was originally trialled in Bristol and then extended to the entire South-West. Hopefully it will soon be nationwide.)

• Recycle everything else, plastic bottles, paper, cardboard, tins, the usual things that we can all recycle.

• At present, the only waste that ever goes into the black bin is cat litter and anything that comes in packaging that we can’t recycle, although we try our best to purchase things where this doesn’t happen. I think we’ve only put the black bin out for collection a handful of times this year!

Eat less meat

• Stop buying meat from supermarkets for dinners at home. A simple rule that has allowed us to no if we’re sticking to the plan or not. Instead we have fish or vege options.

• Instead, we only eat meat occasionally, either when we visit local farmshops and can source local, organically farmed produce, or if we head out for a meal when we treat ourselves sometimes.

Be energy conscious

• Switch off all appliances, plugs and lights when they’re not in use.

• Keep an eye on the smart meter and set timers for the hot water tank and central heating. Done together, we’ve saved a few hundred pounds a year off our bills.

• Minimise the use of water. We use an eco-friendly spray with a dry cloth to clean the van instead of a hosepipe and make sure we don’t leave taps running. We have a water butt for the allotment and re-use water we collect from a dehumidifer for the house plants.

Choose better products

• We clean the vast majority of things in the house with hot water, distilled vinegar, baking soda, and lemon juice. Anything else we buy eco-friendly products from companies like Ethical Superstore and e-cover.

• The same goes for washing powder and washing up liquid, buying products without the harmful chemicals in.

• We’ve started to apply this to bathroom stuff too, including beeswax hairwax and shampoo bars.

Buy more sustainably

• Whenever we need something now, first off I’ll check for secondhand options on Facebook Marketplace, eBay, or Gumtree

• For things like books, I’ll check out World of Books for secondhand options (they do free delivery)!

• If we can’t get things secondhand, we’ll look for options with sustainable credentials.

What can we do better?

There are some priority areas to work on in future to live even more sustainably:

1. Decrease our impact from car use. At present we have two vehicles. We can both be off in different places for work on the same day and we live in a rural area. Lou’s car is newer and a low emissions model but, when it’s possible, swapping the older van for a more planet-friendly model or even dropping back down to one vehicle will be a big step. In the meantime, we minimise travel by walking to the local shops and use the car more than the van.

2. Purchase litter pickers and get out there! I have my eye on some made from recycled fishing nets that have washed up on our coastlines. They’ll be in stock in the coming weeks and then we’re going to get out there like a pair of Wombles and start making a difference!

3. Buy even better. We can probably still improve on our impact with bathroom products by finding a good eco-friendly conditioner bar and we can continue to try to reduce the amount of packaged food we buy, even if it does all go back to be recycled.

4. Continue to use the fire sparingly over winter. We only lit it occasionally last winter just for the nice cosy feel it brings to the lounge, but we don’t really need to light it, the heating in the house is more than adequate.

5. When we do eventually get our own place again, our biggest impact will probably come from looking into heat pumps, better insulation, water butts attached to all of the drain pipes and the like.

What do you do? And do you have any tips for how we could do more?

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts and learn about what you do to try to live sustainably, plus any ideas you have for us on how we can improve our lifestyle to make a difference to our planet’s wellbeing.

Learning to live with less: What life on a bike taught us

How much cutlery do you have in your kitchen drawer?

Before you settle down to read this, go have a quick look. Is it just one or two items of cutlery per person? Or is it choc full of silverware? And if so, how much of it do you really need?

What about t-shirts - how many do you have? Pairs of shoes? Hats? And what about the millions of other items we have in our houses that never get used, that we don’t really need?

When we started packing for life on the road during our adventure, a few things quickly became apparent - firstly that we had a lot of stuff (and compared to many people, we buy very few clothes) and secondly, that not much of it was going to fit in our bags. We needed to make sure we took only what we needed; there was even lengthy debate about how many pairs of pants were required. Apparently, two pairs was inadequate.

After much culling, we were left with a couple of cycling outfits each, and a very limited range of clothing for time spent off the bike. Plus of course, all the camping and cooking kit, bike spares and mechanic equipment we were going to need for a self-sufficient life on the road. Even with ruthless management, when we set off, Lou was carrying over 20 kilograms on her bike, and I had just over 30.

Will I fit in the bags?

“There’s nothing like carrying what you need all day to motivate you to live more simply.”

Lugging all of that weight over the Cotswolds, Malverns, Brecons and Pembrokeshire hills definitely helped to us appreciate the importance of living simply - the bikes were heavy and it was extremely tiring on our legs. Even with our minimalist approach, when we reached our first rest stop at Lou’s dad’s house at the end of day four, we were still able to shed another half a stone of items before setting off again. When you really sit and think about what you need to live, you’ll be very surprised how little that actually is.

A wasteful society

Bear these statistics in mind:

• According to the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, Britons only recycled 45% of the waste we produced in 2019

• 9.5 million tonnes of food is wasted in Britain each year - 70% of which is perfectly edible, with a value of approximately £19 billion (WRAP - The Waste & Resources Action Programme)

• 350,000 tonnes (around £140 million worth of used but still wearable clothing), goes to landfill in the UK every year (Clothes Aid).

Put simply, we buy, use and waste far more stuff than we really need.

That shirt, again

You may or may not have noticed that in the photographs of our adventure, we were always wearing the same clothes. Lou had one pair of jeans and a few different tops for the evenings, whilst I had one pair of trousers, one t-shirt and my favourite check shirt. She mocked me endlessly for my wearing of that shirt, and if I’m honest, it probably could have done with one or two more washes that it had en route, but it was warm and comfortable, and more than anything it stopped me from having to make a choice about what to wear. That may not sound like a big thing to you, but when you’re tired, the less decisions you have to make, the better.

What shall I wear today?

Less is more

Whilst I might joke about it, there are massive benefits to be derived from living with less clothes, less food and just less stuff in general. It’ll save you money, giving you more to buy the things you really do value, or to spend it on the experiences that matter most to you. It’ll give you more space, something we always desire; it means less things to clean, tidy, sort, and pack if you’re moving house (we can vouch for the benefits of living with less on this front, having recently spent way too much time sorting and packing ‘things’ when selling the house). Having less and living more simply can help to shift your mindset away from materialism - you’ll feel less stressed if you’re not trying to constantly ‘keep up with the Jones’s’ and you may find that money worries ease too.

And these benefits don’t even begin to consider the great things you’ll do for our planet by living with less. Less consumption means less waste, and less waste means greater sustainability, something that’s only going to become more important as the world’s population continues to rise. You may think that what you do is of little consequence, but the balance ethos says otherwise. We truly believe that tiny individual changes can lead to massive results. Ever heard the folklore statistic about what would happen if everyone in China jumped up and down at the same time? It was said that it would cause an earthquake or some other natural disaster - it’s not true of course (it has genuinely been researched and scientists even created formulas to assess the outcome), but the principle is one that we should still take to our hearts. Small actions performed by millions of people simultaneously can bring about gigantic changes.

How can you live with less?

Do you regularly throw certain foods away? Do you have a big pile of clothes that could go into a charity bag, or be taken to the local clothing bank? Do you really need to buy that new item, or could you repair, re-use, adapt, buy second-hand, or even live without?

Living with less certainly bought us closer to balance on our ride. Life felt less stressful, less confusing and simpler. It can do the same for you.

Re-use, recycle, upcycle

“Ending is better than mending…the more stitches, the less riches.”

I’ve recently finished reading A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, a dystopian future novel written in the 1930s where Henry Ford has essentially replaced God as the being that everybody worships. Part of this alternative religion sees mass consumerism placed at the very heart of society; nobody needs repair things as they can simply buy new and by doing so, they keep the wheels of society turning for the better.

Huxley foresaw this when visiting America in the early 1930s, little did he know how accurate his predictions would become. We might not sing songs about the Great Ford, but we do live in a society obsessed with consumerism and aghast at the thought of repairing something when it’s so easy to buy new. We live in the age of Amazon 1-click, of contactless, of computers that are only expected to last a few years before they’re considered ‘vintage’ (this very word was used by a young ‘genius’ on a recent visit to the Apple store where I had the gall to ask if my 2012 laptop might be repairable). New is always better – new cars, new houses, a new phone every year that does pretty much everything the ‘old’ one does, with a few tweaks. We truly are weapons of mass consumption.

But at what price? New things we need a constant supply of resources to produce them…metals, plastics, man-made fibres and all the fuel needed to power the plants and machinery that create them. And what do we do with the old things? We discard them. Into the bin, thrown onto the tip, or in the worst case, dumped by the side of the road or at a local nature spot.

The Savage in Huxley’s novel, a young man who’d grown up in the wilderness, brought up by Native Americans, was repulsed by this modern world and its endless consumerism and leisure time. His voice is beginning to resonate in our own society. Just this weekend I packed for a camping trip and got out my shiny new rucksack, bought to replace the previous incarnation, simply because the seam had begun to tear in the corner. At the time it never even crossed my mind to attempt to repair it. Why would I bother when I could get online and have a brand new one delivered by tomorrow for free? I say free; covered by my annual Amazon Prime subscription of course.

More recently though, I’ve begun to wonder how my shopping habits affect our planet? About how we will eventually run out of the fossil fuels and other resources needed to make and deliver this constant stream of new things. About how my shopping habits lead to deforestation and a continually shrinking habitat for the beautiful animals on our planet. About how my discarded items are sent abroad and piled into vast mounds of rubbish, damaging the health of local children and families, about how all of the plastics I’ve bought begin to degrade and end up in our oceans, filling the stomachs of marine life and ultimately, possibly ending up in my own through the process of the food chain. And about how reusing, repairing and buying second-hand can make a difference and save our forests, our oceans, our animals, our health and our bank balances.

How has this changed my habits?

In more ways than you can imagine…

• I look to repair things when they break and often, it’s eminently possible and works just as well afterwards, sometimes better

• If I need to buy something, I’ll check out Facebook Marketplace, eBay, Gumtree or Preloved for second-hand options. It’s become a bit of an obsession, searching for the best possible bargains and comparing with what it would’ve cost me to buy new

• I’ve found things in the house that can do a perfectly good job; examples include plates and a toast rack acting as soap dishes, a bathroom door bolt used to secure two scaffold planks together to make a raised bed and old towels turned into dusters and dishcloths

• I’ve worked on throwing away less and recycling more, so much so that for the last fortnight I haven’t even had a bin in the house. Wood, hard plastics and metals get recycled at the local tip, paper, card, plastic bottles, trays, glass and foil go into my recycling bins for collection, soft plastics are taken to Tesco stores here in Bristol where they’re melted down and used again for packaging and I avoid buying things in packaging I know I can’t recycle. The bin by the way, has been washed out and will be used to grow potatoes in future.

Your next challenge is simply to take one step towards less consumption and less waste…buy something from a second-hand shop or through online sites like Facebook Marketplace, reuse something in a novel way – a jam jar as a plant pot, cardboard boxes to store clothes or toys, whatever you can think of. Maybe upcycle an old piece of furniture, it could be a fun project, give you a new hobby and help you get active at the same time. Can you recycle more? Check out sites like Terracycle or Recycle Now to find ideas on what else you can do – maybe take crisp packets or toothbrushes to a local Terracycle collection point for example.

Re-use, recycle, upcycle and help our planet find to become fitter, healthier and happier once more.