Living in a disposable world?

[elwar]

I'm not the most eco-friendly person in the world, but since having DD (Guilt about what kind of world I'm leaving for her) I have made an effort to recycle newspaper/glass and generally waste less resources.

I regret that I chickened out of reusable nappies, (but vow to use them for next child) and I'm currently looking at getting a keeper instead of clogging the water works with sanitary products.

However, rather than trying to help us reduce such waste, companies seem to be finding more and more ingenious ways of adding to landfill & levelling forests.

I'm talking about diposable wipes, and the 'just wipe, and throw away!' mentality. Where does it end? I now see disposable wipes for furniture polish, floor cleaner, bath cleaner, window cleaner as well as facial wash & deodorant.

This must be put to a stop. Perhaps I will start a campaign called J.U.A.B.C. (Just Use A Bloody Cloth)...any thoughts?

p.s. Baby wipes are ok! (used in moderation)

joined friends of the earth recently as concerned about the environment, and made new year's resolution to go greener - have not made much progress to be honest. funnily enough i was thinking of starting a thread on this subject myself!

you may find the friends of the earth leaflet "how to be a friend of the earth" of interest - it's at www.foe.co.uk/pubsinfo/briefings/html/20010326111859.html.

will post more on this if i get a chance. i do think having children makes a difference, e.g. use the washing machine a lot more (however, usually too miserly to use tumble dryer), used to use dishwasher much less frequently - and on the economy, lower temperature setting - but now use it at maximum setting as ds's stuff is in there.

have to say don't feel terribly exercised on the wipes issue per se - surely the cloth itself could be made biodegradable. more concerned on the actual chemicals used these days for cleaning etc - which of course can be used with washable cloths!

interesting topic!

I am pleasantly surprised how advanced our council is with recycling in comparison with the majority on this site. We have two wheelie bins, one green for compostable waste (garden bits, veg peelings etc) and cardboard and one black for rubbish which are emptied on alternative weeks, we also have two recycling boxes, one for plastics & cans the other for paper, glass and textiles, again emptied on altrnative weeks - the system took a bit of getting used to but we now find that we are putting less and less into the black bin - why can't all councils do this?

Yup - there must be a Northern thing going on here - I'm from the North, and we've become a 'Flannel Family' for toddler face & hand wipes. 'Fraid I just can't do the reusable nappies thing though -partly because ds is in nursery, and they have the same policy as mentioned previously.
The 'recycling' thing that really gets me though is what to do with that 'stuff' which is in perfectly good condition, but which you simply have no need for? I hate dumping stuff at the tip, and am a big fan of:
a) quality clothes going to a 'dress agency' (where they resell them for you)
b) occasionally doing a 'car boot' sale and then blowing the 'profit' on something nice
c) charity shops (although I was apalled to discover from my Mum who is a volunteer in one, just how discerning they are, and how much donated stuff gets dumped in a skip at the back!)
But I still have stuff like old skis/ski boots/ old (but working electrical goods/ bits and pieces of falt pack furniture in the loft from my dh & I's first student flats!
I'm a firm believer that someone, somewhere would appreciate this 'stuff' but its just difficult to work out how to find them!

When we lived in Chicago, anything that could possibly be used or fixed (electrical goods, worn out lawn chairs, etc) we left in the alley behind our house. It was usually gone within a day. There were people who made a living scavenging stuff, fixing it up (or not) and reselling it. It was great, especially because if there was something big and heavy I wanted to get rid of, I could wait until I saw one of their trucks, flag them down and they'd help me get it out and take it away. I think that alleys are necessary for that sort of thing, though. There's enough room to "display" things and it was possible to leave them out there until they were taken. For stuff no one wanted, the tried and true way to get rid of it was to bribe the garbagemen. Sad but effective.

About the burning of disp nappies: home fireplaces don't get very hot (this is a relative thing, obviously, what I mean is that they don't get as hot as industrial incinerators) and don't have any filtering. When the nappies burn, they release all sorts of bad nasty chemicals that are no good for the air. The plastics, which are inert under most conditions and, for better or worse, would never decompose in a landfill, are broken up into toxic chemicals and thrown up into the air. Burning the rest of the nappy isn't the best thing, either, from an air pollution standpoint, but that's just being picky. Truthfully, it's not going to do anyone much harm if a few nappies get burned, but a nappy bonfire would be a bad idea and I'd keep the smoke away from the kids. So, while you are saving some space in a landfill, you're not keeping chemicals out of the environment. In fact, you're introducing them very effectively.

Did anyone read yesterday's Doonesbury? I thought of this discussion when I read it. This is the beginning of the arc, hit "Next Strip" to see the rest.

We noticed the same unofficial recycling in London when we lived there. People would just leave stuff on the pavements and it would go pretty fast.