I used to be stricken with guilt about all the flying we did, but since February we have travelled only by foot, bike, train or electric car so that has made me feel slightly better about past excesses. But, still, trying to lead a green life isn’t easy – it’s full of difficult decisions, compromises, confusion and still more guilt. And it’s just so labour-intensive that I think you might have to be retired just to fit it all in. Or at most you might be able to manage a small part-time job around all your environmental commitments.
For instance, I know that I really shouldn’t be buying all those bags of salad, but I love them. I’ve tried growing my own, but (as I explained in tragic detail in a previous blog) I am really useless at growing things from seed. Basil seems to be the only exception to this, but what can you do with heaps of basil leaves other than turn them into pesto? As a result I have a freezer full of pesto, which is great, but it would be so much easier not to grow my own basil at all and just buy jars of pesto. It really is a make-work project.
I try to compensate for all those salad bags by using bars of shampoo and conditioner instead of buying bottles, and they do work well. They also make me feel very smug and environmental – but the effort! First of all, they all look the same, so I’ve bought little metal tins to store them in, which also all look the same. So I’ve had to label them. Then you have to make sure they dry completely after using them, otherwise they turn into mush. I am looking longingly at those plastic bottles of shampoo on the supermarket shelves.
Then there are all those unwanted items that must be disposed of responsibly. I do a regular book cull, otherwise we would searching for the cat under a mountain of books, but I don’t know what to do with them these days. I lugged a big box of books to the charity shop a couple of weeks ago, only to be told that they took books only on Wednesday and Friday mornings. I lugged them back again on Friday morning and was rejected again, this time because they’d run out of storage space. I gather that my toxic books needed to be decontaminated. Chernobyl-on-Thames, that’s us.
I do have one top tip for low-effort environmentalism: buy one of those ecoegg things that you use instead of laundry powder to wash your clothes. You just toss the egg into the machine along with your clothes instead of using laundry powder and that’s it. Admittedly it is plastic, but you can use it over and over again and also buy refills for the little pellets inside. It saves me so much time that if I stopped making pesto I think I could even manage to fit in a small part-time job on the side.