I am not known for my brilliant mind, nor my good looks come to that. So some things come a little slowly to me, take the whole ‘being frugal’ business for instance. I had been thinking change your shopping habits, make little sacrifices, buy more basic goods and make them in to more fancy stuff yourself, like making my own pastry instead of buying the ready made stuff.
Then there is the whole ‘living greener’ issue. I’d been thinking buy green cleaning products, recycle, compost, turn lights off.
It never occurred to me that there was any connection between the two!
But today the light went on!
These two life stances are actually one and the same thing! Let me show you what I mean;
- By down sizing my spending habits I am buying less, which means less packaging, less miles travelled by the products I didn’t buy, less energy spent in making the product, which is all green!
- By not buying that fancy bottle of perfume I like, I’m not only saving a fair sized chunk of money, but I’m also saving my bin from all that extra packaging.
- By making my own pastry, I’m also saving on packaging, the ready made stuff comes securely wrapped in plastic, as well as almost costing twice as much as it costs me to make it myself. Okay, my pastry may not be as good – yet, -but it is a small sacrifice I am very willing to make.
- Now we get to the really nifty stuff… By making my own frugal cleaners I am saving on packaging, as I use basic kitchen ingredients to make my cleaners which I would have already bought anyway, and as this stuff is safe enough for us to eat, it can’t cause any damage to the environment when it gets washed down the sink! You might think that making my own cleaners is time consuming, but you would be very wrong, it takes no more time than pouring the purchased cleaner from the bottle, so that’s a bonus you don’t normally get. Add to that the fact that making my own works out at a fraction of the cost of purchased cleaners, echo or otherwise, and I’m in a win-win situation here!
- By recycling, I don’t always mean taking it to the special bins. Now before I discard a product or a bit of packaging I look at it twice. That empty egg box would be perfect for chitting my potatoes, or as a bio-degradable seed pot (thus saving me the cost of seed pots too!). That empty jar is the perfect size for storing my dried sage or thyme. That old kettle that blew a fuse would make the perfect plant pot for my mint to stop it spreading more than I want. Those old tights with the holes in will store my onions perfectly, or tie up my tomatoes (saving me the cost of string), or could even be made in to a rug if I save enough of them from going to the allotment. The inner tube of the toilet roll is perfect for seeds, again. Those envelopes that came in the post are perfect for writing out my to-do lists on. Those plastic carrier bags with the holes in, cut them in to strips and use them as weather proof plant ties, or crochet them in to another shopping bag, one that won’t tear so easily this time. Look at everything twice or three times, and try to think outside of the box.
- I used to run around the house turning lights and equipment on stand-by off thinking “save money, save money!” and it got a little stale, if you know what I mean, but now I’m thinking “Save money, save the planet!” and it doesn’t seem so altruistic any more.
Being frugal and being green are not mutually exclusive, they are mutually Inclusive! Who would have thought it?