the green gal

My first swish

This is a top I swapped for one of my dresses at the Daisy Green swish at UK Aware on Friday. As it was my first swish I wasn't sure what to expect but it was super easy. I took in a few of my clothes that I no longer wore and could pick the same number from clothes that other people had brought in. I took in three dresses (which were quickly nabbed) and I took home this top and a T-shirt. Jury's out on whether I keep the T-shirt, I'm not entirely sure if it's me but if not, I'll just redonate it to a charity shop. However, I LOVE this top!

Daisy Green holds swishing events throughout the year, check out their website to find a swish near you. Soon you could be walking away with an updated wardrobe, for free!

Save water and money

A quick money-saving tip for you, it'll cost you nothing and save you water too. Hop over to Save Water Save Money and get yourself a free ShowerSave. Your water company will send you a little stainless steel tube which you attach to the shower hose where it joins your bath taps (v easy, honest, I could do it). And that's all you have to do.

The gadget evens out the amount of water that flows from your shower so you don't waste money heating water you don't need. Our shower used to either dribble or blast us and batter the shower curtain so the constant even flow has made our showers much more enjoyable!

Now, I do write for Save Water Save Money on occasion but I'm not being paid to write about the ShowerSave here. I didn't even get mine from SWSM, it was given to me by a friend who has a power shower so can't use it. Yep, if you were looking for a catch, this is it, the ShowerSave doesn't work on electric showers.

But, if you have a non-electric shower and you want to save money a ShowerSave will help do the job for you.

And if you frugal-minded folks want more of me, you can tootle over to Almost Frugal where I am the subject of This is What Frugal Looks Like.

What's in a number?

While researching an article on recycling for First News (the national children’s newspaper, I’m the deputy editor) WRAP and the Environment Agency kindly sent me a bunch of stats. Some of them are quite, quite extraordinary. Let me give you an example.

Did you know, that within eight months of a year, the UK produces enough waste to fill Lake Windermere? For those of you who skipped geography that day, Lake Windermere is the biggest lake in England, measuring 10.5 miles long and one mile wide! Crikey, that’s a lot of rubbish.

I’ll continue.

It takes 800 litres of water to make one T-shirt. All that water for one little T-shirt. WRAP tell me that if every household in the UK recycled two T-shirts a year, we’d save as much water as you can fit in 16,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. That’s a LOT of water.

There’s more.

By recycling one can, enough energy is saved to power a TV for three hours. Recycle a can a day and you save enough energy to power a TV for 90 hours. That’s nearly four days without pause! And for anyone out there who claims that recycling a can takes more energy than producing a new one, it really doesn’t. Recycling aluminium uses only around 5% of the energy and emissions needed to make it from scratch.

It gets better.

If you ever doubted that there was a point to you recycling, try this on for size: Recycling one plastic bottle saves enough energy to power a light bulb (60 watt) for six hours. The average UK household uses 373 plastic bottles a year. Recycle all of those and that’s 2,238 hours, or three months, of light saved. Make those light bulbs energy-saving ones and it’s even better! (For double plus goodness ditch the plastic bottle and invest in a reusable one instead.)

And finally. Plastic bags.

Plastic carrier bags are made from oil and oil is a fossil fuel. Non-renewable, when it’s gone, it’s gone. In 2008, UK shoppers picked up 9.9 billion new carrier bags, that’s 400 per household. To produce this number of bags takes 180,000 tonnes of oil and produces greenhouse gases the equivalent of 100,000 extra cars on the road. For those of you out there who rarely or never pick up plastic bags, feel heartened at the amount of oil and emissions you’re saving. For those of you who do pick up a free plastic bag at the till, might you think again?  

World Toilet Day 19 November

Did you know there was such a thing as World Toilet Day? No, it's not about giving toilets the day off or higher pay but appreciation does come into play a little. Here are some staggering toilet-related stats:

• 2.5 billion people in the world don't have access to sanitation such as a toilet and clean water to wash their hands
  
• 1.8 million children a year, so 5,000 a day, die because of diseases caused by poor sanitation and dirty water
• Every year around 60 million children (that's nearly the UK population) are born into homes with no toilet
• The average European uses 200 litres of water every day (that takes into account water used in the production of food and products consumed and used), while the average person in the developing world uses just 10 litres a day
• 97.% of the world's water is saltwater. That means that if the world's water fitted into a bucket, only one teaspoonful would be fit to drink.

(Figures taken from www.wateraid.org)

Makes your bathroom look quite luxurious now, doesn't it?! 

So, having read the depressing statistics, what can you do about it? Well, by watching how much water you use in everyday life you'll be conserving resources as well as saving yourself money (especially if you're on a meter) in energy costs. A few ideas are:

• Fit a hippo (the water-saving device rather than the big beast) in your toilet cistern to reduce the amount of water used for each flush
  
• Turn off the tap when you're brushing your teeth
  
• Shower rather than lie in a bath and try to get your time down to four minutes (it's doable, honest!). There are some fun timers you can get to liven up(!) and time your speedy washing, try savewatersavemoney.co.uk for a selection.
  
• If you're feeling flush (sorry) you could help WaterAid continue their quite remarkable work getting clean water and sanitation to those without by donating at www.wateraid.org

And if you're really serious about saving water you could employ the "if it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown, flush it down" way of thinking!