Last year I started a thread on UKClimbing challenging people to go through the whole of 2007 without accepting a single plastic bag from a retailer - the thread is here.

“The idea is that you manage to last the whole of 2007 without accepting any plastic bag from any retailer. To do this you need to either carry what you bought, or use bags you already own. If you do get caught out then any bag you accept must be re-used at least five times for it not to count towards your total.”

If we are going to be perfectly honest about this then I have to admit that the James-Louwerse household failed in the strict definition of this challenge. I accepted a couple of bags when stuck at a checkout at a DIY store with lots of little fiddly items and a long way to the car, and Henriette was never really fully with the challenge. The fact that we moved house during the year didn’t help much and then getting two kittens meant that we suddenly needed loads of plastic bags to deal with the cat litter during the first few months while they had to be kept inside. However, the real result of changing our behaviour has been thoroughly successful and we now have a big stock of solid permanent bags (and a wheelbarrow) and we remember and use them, as well as re-using to destruction any old plastic bags.

I think one of the most encouraging things is that I have also noticed a slow change in other people’s behaviour. Shop keepers no longer assume that you want a bag and tend to ask now, many more people appear to be shopping with their own bags and there is also a lot more in the media about zero plastic bags, including the zero plastic bag village - Modbury in Devon. Decathlon now charge for plastic bags and I think it won’t be long before more shops start doing this. It seems to be one of these curious situations where the public opinion is way ahead of the retailers who are all terrified of charging for plastic bags as seen in this article.

So what is the challenge for 2008?

Well obviously to continue the plastic bag challenge, but this year’s main target for us is the stand-by devices and making sure they are turned off when not in use. This is so far proving much harder than I anticipated. So many devices appear to use a bit of leccy just to keep then ticking over like the DAB radios we have which all lose all their stations when turned off at the socket. I have an intelliplug which means you can power-down a whole series of sockets when your computer goes to sleep, however this also takes down the wireless network which I have now had to put onto a different socket. It also means every time I wake up the machine, the printers chug into action making a huge racket and probably using about 10 hours worth of stand-by power. Once again, they have gone onto another socket which only leaves some speakers and a couple of hard drives connected to the intelliplug.

The other issue which should probably be much higher on most people’s agendas is low-energy light bulbs. I am still amazed that the stock of old-style light bulbs is so big in most supermarkets and I had a real struggle finding a shop that supplied low-energy spot bulbs. However we have been using low-energy bulbs for about ten years now so this isn’t one that we as a household can improve on much. Getting the kids to turn them off though is a different matter!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 1st, 2008 at 10:46 am and is filed under Family, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.