How Can You Be More Sustainable?

Jess Hill 26th April 2019 No Comments Blog

In recent months the topic around changing your lifestyle to make it eco-friendlier has been popular and for good reason.

The planet is struggling with pollution; 8 million metric tonnes of plastic ends up in our oceans each year, and carbon dioxide levels in the air are at their highest in 650,000 years. You can’t become zero waste overnight living in a plastic heavy world. But there are things you can do to help eliminate single-use plastics, reduce your waste and become more sustainable.

Watching your air miles

Flying contributes to around 13-15% of the UK’s impact of greenhouse gas emissions. On average the British person takes a short haul flight every two years and long haul every five years. Only a minority of regular flyers causes a substantial slice of UK emissions. So it is safe to safe you don’t need to give up your holidays just yet.

Firemizer and Firebuilder

Make your stove more environmentally friendly. Firebuilder is 100% green, made from recycled cardboard, contains no chemicals and emits no foul smells when burning. Firemizer can reduce fuel usage and reduce particulate emissions by 72%

Burning wood and coal

Bio-bean makes Coffee Logs that are an alternative for burning seasoned logs or coal. These logs are made from coffee grounds and are very environmentally friendly. The UK produces hundreds of thousands of tonnes of waste coffee grounds every year, most of which is disposed of via landfill where it emits methane, a greenhouse gas that is 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide. – Bio-bean. You can use these logs with Firemizer, read our review here!

Things you didn’t know contain plastic

Biodegradable cutlery – This looks like it helps the environment hence the word biodegradable. However, these contain a mixture of corn starch and plastic. These can’t be composted by a regular old joe, the bioplastic needs to be broken down using very high heat. An alternative could be bamboo cutlery since these contain no plastic and are easily affordable.
Tea bags – Plastic is used to seal the tea bag so they don’t come open in the box or in your tea. This also means they aren’t fully 100% biodegradable so composting them will leave bits of microplastic in the soil. However, not all tea bags contain plastic some use a byproduct of corn starch to seal their teabags. Unfortunately, these are still not suitable to be composted in your home.
Coffee Cups – Takeaway coffee cups are hard to recycle mainly due to the plastic lining inside the cup designed to make the cup leakproof. An alternative would be a reusable coffee cup and you normally get money off your coffee for using one.