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BITE-SIZED CHUNKS
Jill Roberson of The Living Rooms, one of Norfolk’s biggest ethical trading outlets, asks how you’re doing with those month-old resolutions.
2008 is only a month old, and how many of you can remember what your new year’s resolution was, let alone claim to have stuck to it? No. me neither.
The problem is, everyone sets out at the start of the year with such grand ideas. So resolutions become ambitious and thus more difficult to keep. We had a customer in the showroom at the start of January who told us that her new year’s resolution was “to be more ethical”. Now that’s a tall order in anyone’s book: I wonder how she’s getting on.
A much better idea is to make a number of smaller, easier-to-keep pledges, against which relatively small progress can be made, with the cumulative total far in excess of an unkept, if worthy, grand scheme.
So for my customer, and anyone else who set out a month ago to be more ethical, here are my suggested five ‘bite-sized chunks’ to help keep you on the straight and narrow.
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Source your energy ethically. With the latest rise in energy prices, many people are looking again at switching suppliers. Why not look at those providers who are committed to investing in renewable energy sources and generally finding ways of producing greener power?
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Try and buy Fairtrade food. It’s becoming more widely available, and if we all buy more of it, the supermarkets will have to sit up and take notice and stock more of it. Despite what we might think about the power of Tesco et al, in the end it’s the consumer who decides what is stocked.
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Whilst we’re on the subject of food, resolve to reduce your food miles. We in East Anglia live in the food basket of Britain, there really is no excuse for buying air-freighted goods when there are perfectly good - and fresher - alternatives grown locally.
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Take a leaf out of Hugh Fearnley-Double-Barrel’s book and switch from intensively-farmed to free range poultry. Yes, it’s more expensive, but if we want to live ethically that means accepting that things like chicken may have to be a slightly rarer treat rather than an everyday food. The price may be low, but the cost of intensively-reared produce is unacceptable.
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Take a stand against excess packaging. That means refusing to buy goods that have ridiculous amounts of packaging. Here’s a tip: many consumer goods have a Freepost address for customer comments. If there is too much packaging, send it all back to them at their expense, with a note explaining why. They’ll soon get the message!
No doubt you’ll be able to think of some more. The key is to be as specific as possible - then it’s much more difficult to break those good intentions. Good luck!
Article published in Eco Echo February 2008 |
