Kids birthday parties can be a  nightmare when it comes to the waste and plastic tat that they generate. Yet we all want our little darlings to have a fun and memorable party don't we? And ideally we want to do it with the least amount of stress and work!

I’m sure we’re all familiar with the scenario at the end of a party where all the paper plates, cups, bowls, and food waste get swept into black bin liners and deposited in the bin – job done and we get to breathe a sigh of relief that we survived and can now go home and put our feet up.
But all that rubbish! And the more aware we become about plastic and rubbish, the more we’re realising that there is no simple magic land of ‘away' where the fairies take our rubbish and turn it into unicorns and flowers. It all has to go somewhere, and if it’s in our black bins it’s going to landfill or incineration – neither of which are great (to say the least) for the environment.
So what about recyclable plates I hear you ask? Could these be our get out of eco-jail free card and leave us with a clear conscience? Well... it’s complicated. Lots of paper plates can’t be recycled, especially ones that are brightly coloured or themed with Disney characters etc. And add to that there may well be contamination from contact with food and it really is a big fat no-no.
OK, so how about compostable plates? There are more and more so called compostable plates on the market, but this term can be really misleading and many are only truly compostable under industrial conditions, which are only available in a few selected sites around the country.

If you remember my favourite, the Waste Hierarchy, what we really want to do is to use reusable plates and cups (it feels a little mean to either refuse our children a birthday party, or reduce the number of birthdays we allow them...), but it feels like quite an expense, not to mention finding storage etc for it, to buy enough  for a couple of parties a year.
Which is where businesse like Frome Eco Party Packages come in. It was started by Tillie Mabbutt in Frome, in Somerset just a month or so ago, after reading an article about a school PTA who have set one up for families to hire. And it’s such a beautifully simple idea. Tillie has sourced resusable plastic (yes, plastic, but reusable and pretty indestructible, and BPA free too) plates, bowls, cups, trays and jugs and hires out ‘party packs’ for families to use and then return.
It’s SUCH a great idea, and how amazing would it be to have one in every town!

Listen in to find out more, and Tillie’s top tips for getting set up if you love the sound of this so much you want to set up your own (I've compiled all of Tillie's tips into a "How to.." post here)!

Enjoy!

• Frome Eco Party Packages
  - Facebook
  - Instagram
• How to set up a reusable party package service for kids birthday parties in your town (blog post) 
• The reusable sandwich wraps that Tillie refers to
• Tille and her family have swapped cleaning products and have started buying BioD in bulk
• The news article about a PTA setting up an eco party pack
• Ikea plates - £1.20 for 6
• Ikea bowls - £1.20 for 6
• Ikea cups - £1.20 for 6
• Ikea plastic cutlery - £1.20 for six sets of knife/fork/spoon
• Colourful serving platters
• Jugs - Tillie says she got theirs from Sainsburys but I can't find a link at the moment!
• Bunting - obviously if you can make your own, or know someone who would be willing, that's awesome. A great idea is to reuse old fabric, so look out for colourful bed sheets etc in charity shops. Failing that a quick 'Ecosia search' led me to this company that make bunting from upcycled fabric.
• The Eco Party Bags that Tillie refers to
• Plastic-free(ish) party bags (blog post) 
  

Today I’m chatting to Helen and Joe, co-founders of EcoTales, who have been friends since meeting each other at school at the age of 12. EcoTales is a podcast for primary school children that aims to share nature knowledge and inspire future generations to love and defend the planet. And it does it brilliantly through stories and songs helped by a cast of 26 animated alphabet characters. There’s PolyPlastic and Willow Water and Etta Earth, who alongside all their friends, tell Eco-Tales to not only engage children but also to help us to start having some of these conversataions with  our own kids about some of the big issues we’re facing.
In  this episode we dig into how to talk to talk to our kids about the climate crisis without freaking them out, how to get older kids on board, what role schools should be playing in educating children about the future they might be facing and a whole host of other stuff. Now if that all sounds a bit heavy and hardcore, please don’t worry, it’s honestly not. It’s more a light hearted chin-wag over a cuppa, sharing our experiences with our own kids - things that have worked and some things that haven’t - when it comes to talking to them about the planet and the choices we're making.

Enjoy!

• Children inherently care about nature
• Be as open as you can, and explain why you're making the choices you're making - obviously in an age appropriate way, and at a time when they're open to what you're saying (i.e. not in the middle of a meltdown in the supermarket about magazines/Kinder eggs/other assorted plastic crap)
• Encourage connections with nature
• Have the conversations naturally as they come up
• Older children/teenagers can be more difficult to engage but we can also be more open and honest with them about the impacts of our actions
• Easy actions include growing veg, feeding the birds, 'seed bombing', picking up litter, remembering to use reusable water bottles - all of these actions help our children to feel empowered rather than overwhelmed
• Join in with the #ecotalespromise - make a simple promise for the planetwith your kids and share on social media using the #ecotalespromise hashtag

'Poly Plastic' was made by professor Leo at Rock Laboratory and although she is useful, this cheeky superhero misfit must be handled with care!  Her unique superpowers make her indestructible and able to mould herself into any shape or object she wants. However, it is these very qualities that make her adventures into the wild so dangerous.  The question is, where will she end up next?

• EcoTales
  - Website
  - Facebook
  - Instagram
  - Twitter
• "Gloop" - the award winning 'twisted fairytale' about the meteoric rise of plastic that Joe worked on
• Plastic-free(ish) party bags (blog post) 
• "Beebombs" Seedbombs
• EcoTales Warrior Project on the TES site
• Achieving Greenness - Joe and Helen's recommendation for a future guest

In this episode I’m chatting to Celia Pool one of the co-founders of DAME – a sustainable self-care brand on a mission to turn our bathrooms green.

Did you know that globally we throw away 100 billion sanitary products every year? Which is enough to circle the globe 250 times.

Plastic tampon applicators are a big part of the problem –being used for just seconds but taking hundreds of years to degrade. Even cardboard applicators are often lined with plastic. Here in the UK we throw away 13 billion aplicators every single year, and in a recent UK beach clean nine tampon applicators were found washed up on beaches for every kilometre of  shoreline.

There are loads of great reusable menstrual products out there like cups and washable pads but what Celia and Alex realised was that one of the reasons that more women weren’t making the switch to reusables was that it was too big a habit change to switch away from a product like tampons that worked for them.
Hence their first product is the world’s first reusable tampon applicator along with organic cotton tampons

It’s a brilliant story and DAME are a company who really are pulling out all the stops to do things right – from actively seeking out female engineers ands specialists to help develop their produts, through to designing a poduct that can be used with any size tampon and any brand, and re-using existing packaging to send out their products. In fact, on the website they describe themselves as a “consumer goods company that belives in less consumption” (and we dive into that oxymoron in the podcast!).

 Whether you’re already a dedicated cup or reusable pads type, or in fact you don’t have periods at all, this episode still has something for you – it’s a brilliant example of a brand on a mission and it’s hugely inspiring to see how creating and selling stuff can be good for people and planet when it’s done right.

Enjoy!

• DAME
  - Website
  - Facebook
  - Instagram
  - Twitter
• A Beginners Guide to Eco-friendly and Plastic-free Periods (blog post) 
• [031] - Plastic-free Periods and Wipes with Natracare (podcast)
• [028] Buy Less Buy Better with Buy Me Once (podcast)
• B-Corp
• Oddbox
• Skipping Rocks Labs
• Rubies in the Rubble
  

Every year an estimated 300,000 tonnes of used clothing goes to landfill in the UK.

In the UK we buy more clothes per person than any other country in Europe.

It takes over 2000 litres of water to make one single cotton t-shirt.

17% of young people said they wouldn’t wear an outfit again if it had been on IG.

These are shocking stats aren't they? I’ve heard most of them before, but that still doesn’t detract from the shock value. However the one that was new to me was the IG one – I’m a bit too old and uncool to really care what outfit I’m wearing on IG, if indeed I share any pictures of myself at all. And it really hadn’t occurred to me that it would be a thing. That you wouldn’t want to be seen in the same outfit twice on social media. I wear the same outfits ALL the time. I figure that if I can’t remember what anyone else was wearing on the school run yesterday, then chances are they won’t have noticed what I’m wearing. But I guess for younger people, people far cooler than me, who do share their outfits and what they’re wearing, then maybe there is this pressure to be constantly refreshing your wardrobe? Clothes are cheaper now than at any other time, to the point that they are sometimes seen as 'disposable' - worm a handful of times and then simply discarded. Most of us give very little thought to the resources that will have gone into those clothes and the people who have made them.
So what can we do about it?

Well this is where #nonewjune comes in – a campaign being run by three friends at MCR Love Your Clothes encouraging us all to shop secondhand for our clothes in June.
Prolonging the active life of our clothes by just 9 months can reduce their carbon, water, and land footprints by 20-30%.

• MCR Love Your Clothes
  - Facebook
  - Instagram
  - The link to sign up for #nonewjune
• Uprising
• 5 Ways to Get Your Fashion Fix (without Trashing the Planet) (blog post) 
• Easy Sustainable Alternatives to Fast Fashion (blog post)
• Top Tips Tips for Charity Shop Shopping (blog post)
• Fashion Revolution
• Love Your Clothes

If you've not got time to listen to the podcast or read the whole post, scroll to the end for the 'take home' points!

Ecobricks. Plastic bottles packed with clean and dry plastic that can then be used literally as building bricks for a whole variety of structures. They seem to the the marmite of the plastic pollution fight with advocates citing them as a great way to keep plastic out of the biosphere (whilst we work on drastically reducing the mind boggling-ly enormous amount of plastic that we have come to depend on) and for the plastic that we would otherwise throw 'away' (altogether now "but we know there is no 'away'") to be turned into something of value. Meanwhile opponents argue that by having a nice neat end point for our plastic somehow legitimises it's use and prevents us tackling the real issues around reducing the amount that we're using. 

I've been intrigued by Ecobricks for a year or two now, and have been trying to get Lucie on the podcast for the last six months or so. Lucie is the UK's Ecobrick Queen, the 1st UK certified trainer, and all round wonder-woman. And she steadfastly refused to come on the podcast until I had made my very own Ecobrick. And I procrastinated, and faffed, until eventually Lucie sent me a 'make your own Ecobrick kit' to make it as easy as possible for me. And even then it still took me a good couple of months to get round to it. But at last it was done, and it was a really useful experience to make one.

In this podcast we dive into everything Ecobricks - what they are, why they came into being, what we can do with them, and how to make them. I also asked on my FB page what people wanted to know about them, and posed several of those questions to Lucie, especially regarding the issues around whether they actually encourage plastic use, and any damage they might do the environment as and when they degrade. 

It was a really interesting chat (I hope you agree) and it was great to be able to cut through some of the hype and hysteria that sometimes surrounds them, and speak to someone who lives and breathes Ecobricks and is truly passionate about the positive impact they can have, not just on the sheer volume of plastic we're pumping out, but on communities and individuals as well. 

Be prepared, this is a slightly longer episode than normal, but with half-term coming up I figured you might be looking for something to keep you (and the kids!) entertained on long car journeys if you're off on your hols

• Ecobricks International
  - Website
  - Catalyst programme for businesses
  - Facebook
  - Instagram
• Ecobricks UK - Facebook group
• New Forest Aquaponics - Lucie's website with all the UK ecobrick info on
  - Lucie's Facebook page which has lots of info on ecobricks and workshops etc
  - Lucie's next Ecobrick workshop - 1st June near Southampton
• The link to the  post detailing how to make your very own Ecobrick tablelamp
  
• ​The link to sign up for the Sustainable(ish) Sunday newsletter

This is internet speak for "Too long, didn't listen" (it's usually TLDR - too long didn't read). I had to look it up.
In my mind you all eagerly await each new episode of the podcast and sit down in your favourite chair with a cuppa and a piece of cake in blissful peach and quiet to listen, or you're listening while you're out striding around some rugged landscape or other with your photogenic dog running along at your side.
In reality, we're all time poor and I concede that you might not have a free hour+ without extraneous noise at any point other than when you're asleep. So here are the take home nuggets:

- Ecobricks are plastic bottles packed with clean, dry, shredded plastic to create a dense 'brick like' structure.
- They can be used to create whole buildings when covered with 'cob' in the wattle and daub style that we might all remember learning about in history classes in school, and in the developing world schools and houses have indeed been made from them.
- Ecobricks made in the UK stay in the UK, and are used as close to where they are made as possible.
- If you want to use the Ecobricks that you've made in your home, a great project is an Ecobrick stool.
- If you have no use for your Ecobricks personally, you can find a local project that will use them, or start your own community project (things like friendship benches and raised beds for gardening are popular).
- The process of making an Ecobrick is not a 'get out of jail free card' that absolves you of any need to think about and reduce your plastic consumption. Partly because it's actually bloody hard work making one and not for the faint hearted. And partly because the sheer act of collecting all your plastic to go into your Ecobrick will horrify you and is pretty much guaranteed to see you committing to changes to reduce it.
- Ecobricking is not a substitute for applying our old fave the Waste Hierarchy and looking to REFUSE, REDUCE and REUSE plastic before we resort to Ecobricking it.