Tree Hugger Tips 01

By: Brendan Nash

How to save the Environment

I love trees… and plants, and little creatures, even the goggas that my son and I find under rocks on our walks along the Zandvlei nature reserve. But what I don’t like is what appears to be unstoppable litter streaming into the waterways each and every day. On our walks we often collect a bag or two of litter and we marvel at the journey that a polystyrene cub or packet of crisps must have taken in order to end up in the mud at our feet. So many questions, who ate the crisps? What did they drink from the cup? And how did it leave their happy hands to end up here? Cups and crisp packets can easily be explained in terms of how they got to be here, but tiers, sofas, beds and bicycles? These truly blow our minds!

While we can gather the community with bin bags, rubber gloves and those knaper things driven by a happy trigger finger,  this serves only to deal with the symptoms of the problem we face today. As a tree hugger, I am interested in the cause behind litter entering our environment and sharing ideas to help all of us become environmental champions by changing our habits to collectively reduce this waste.

With this in mind, here are some tree hugging tips:

• 1. Did you know, you have a choice when buying products from the shops and price is not the deciding factor. My deciding factor is determined by the amount of wrapping a product has been layered in and how easily I can recycle it.

At My Green Life (yes a shameless plug of our better choice products) we sell our plant based cleaning products with the option of not using any packaging. You can come to our factory with an old jam jar and we will fill it up with washing powder or dish-washing liquid.

Do this 100 times and you save R1,500 in packaging costs and keep 100 single use plastic containers from entering our municipal waste system. Now that’s an idea I support!

• 2. Did you know, brushing your teeth may be bad for the environment! Back at school at leavers camp, some of the kids were asked to show the class how they brush their teeth. What amazed me was that all these kids turned on the taps and let the water flow wild while brushing their fangs. As it turned out, the point of the exercise was to show how much water is wasted when we bush our teeth. The solution is quite obvious once you recognise this bad habit, all you need to do is turn the tap on and off as you go about your Oral hygiene ritual.

Collectively, we will save millions of liters of fresh water from being poured down our collective drains by changing this water wasting habit!

• 3. Did you know, you are likely making tea all wrong and its not what you think. When it comes to making a single cup of tea, many people make the mistake of filling up the kettle to the brim and boiling the lot without realising that they are wasting energy and their money. When I make a cup of tea, I fill the kettle with the exact amount of water I need, thus burning the exact amount of coal and not a gram more.

If we did this collectively, we would save money, and help make the environment a little bit cleaner.

Do you have any tips to share? Drop me an email: [email protected]

My Green Life is a small startup based in Capricorn Business Park, we supply plant based products that are good for the environment. Our unique selling point is that we re-fill the containers your products are sold in or fill a container you bring to us.

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