I Bought An Electric Car!! Nissan Leaf

For years I've been trying to improve my environmental awareness, and try to be as green as possible in the way I live.

I make all my own clothes, won't buy anything in single use plastic, try to buy my food as naked and locally as possible, and have switched to a renewable energy tariff at home. We've also stopped flying as much as we used to, preferring to take the Eurostar when we want to travel in Europe, as we live so near to Kings Cross!

So another big one on the list was my car. I'd had it for 15 years, so that was good in that it had lasted a long time!! However, it was becoming less fuel efficient in its old age, and so I have been thinking for a few years that Electric is the way forward.

We started browsing all the different models available, and looked at Hybrids too, at the start of the year, and then lockdown was the perfect opportunity to really seriously research them all, and decide what to go for.

I mostly just drive locally around London, maybe 30-40 miles each way for some longer trips, but mostly within 10 miles, so I knew an electric car would be perfect for this. My parents live 125miles away, and my boyfriends parents slightly further, but as they are all retired, they love to come and visit us more than we go and visit them!!

The main thing for me was boot space - for markets I shove a lot of stuff in my car, and some of the electric models are tiny!! At one showroom, I was looking in the boots of cars first, before looking inside, and the salesperson was very surprised when I rejected some instantly, without even looking inside!!

I also rejected hybrids pretty quickly, as they are not much better for the environment than some smaller engine petrol cars, and also there are 2 mechanisms to go wrong!

So the Nissan Leaf was perfect - great boot size, great reviews, and happily in budget!

The main thing to decide was which model to go for, as the range in the older ones goes from about 80-160 miles, with the price increasing with the higher mileage.

I've settled on a 66 reg one, which a range of around 110-130 miles. I've mostly been driving it around locally, and it is a dream to drive. In eco mode, when driving around London, it barely uses any charge, as every time you brake, it charges the battery! I was instantly in love!

I'd bought it from near Guildford, so had the experience of driving back on the M25 and M4 as a little taste of motorway, but hadn't fully tested it, or rapid charged it. However, I've just got back from a longer trip, which involved a rapid charge and it was great! Normally I hate driving on my own, as I get bored, but the Leaf is such a dream to drive, I was quite happy!

I'd already made accounts for Ecotricity (who run most of the chargers in UK service stations) and Zap Map (which shows where all charging points are, if they are in use, and if they are broken!) so was ready to go.

When entering the route into the Leaf satnav, it instantly told me that I probably wouldn't make my destination without a charge stop, so gave me a selection of possible stops, and asked me to select one to program in. Brilliant!

Ideally, if I had a passenger, I'd have got them to keep an eye on Zap map, to check if the charging points were being used, before I got there, but as I was on my own, I just went with my plan, but stopped with enough charge that I still could have reached the next service station, should these ones have been out of action.

I have to admit I was a little nervous. Various people had warned me against buying a fully electric car, insisting that I would regularly get stuck without charge, but it all went smoothly, I arrived to 2 working and empty chargers, connected to one, exactly as I should have, and 16 mins and £3.50 later, I was back up to 80% charge. Brilliant.

I also had a lovely chat with a couple who turned up to charge their car next to me while I was waiting, which according to them is entirely normal!

As is usual with review sites, most people only leave feedback when there is a problem, so it can seem daunting to look at Zap Map and see so many problems reported, so I made sure to leave feedback that everything had worked as expected!

I'm still very much a new owner, so will report back in a few months when I've explored more, but for now I am a very very happy customer!

Plastic Free Living

It’s been almost a year since I started my pledge to live without single use plastics - and mostly it’s gone very well.

The opening of the fabulous StoreSource Bulk Foods in Chiswick obviously helped make things a lot easier, as well as the great One Step and Four State stalls that pop up at lots of my Duck Pond Market.

The main advice I can give is be prepared. I always have some beeswax wraps, or Tupperware with me, and definitely never leave home without a metal water bottle and my bamboo tea cup!

Milk - is delivered (mostly - sometime they don’t bother!) by my lovely Milk and More milkman.

Vegetables  - come from my fabulous local fruit and veg stalls on Chiswick High Road, or Morrison’s has a brilliant British selection - especially when they do naked cucumbers in the summer.

Meat & cheese
 - comes from the counters in Morrison’s or Sainsbury’s, or sometimes in my local butchers or deli (when I’m feeling richer!) and I take along a good stash of Tupperware for these. All my Tupperware now have fairly sticky lids, from where the price labels get stuck on - but those are the only waste involved in these purchases!

I’ve stopped eating yoghurt, except for when I occasionally treat myself to a glass jar of delicious Riverford yoghurt.

Crisps/crackers/biscuits/cakes - I mostly bake myself. I’ve discovered I’m a whizz at making tortillas, and actually prefer them to the shop bought ones! The only exception to this is our local Lidl sells the most amazing pastries, so again, I take my tubs along to put them in.

Cleaning products - the Source has a great refill selection, so I take along my empty bottles and fill up with toilet cleaner, laundry liquid, white vinegar.

Toiletries - I’ve had a mooncup for about 10 years, so that was already sorted, and have had bamboo toothbrushes for a few years too. I buy soap, shampoo and conditioner bars from lovely people at the markets I do, but also refilled a bottle with shampoo at the Source, for my boyfriend, who refused to use a shampoo bar as he says ‘it doesn’t make sense!’

I am now so repulsed by the thought of buying anything plastic, that if I am out and about and hungry, I usually end up with a banana and a can of something to drink!

We have a few gadgets that help with the cause - a bread maker, and a Soda Stream machine! But I don’t want too many unnecessary gadgets cluttering up the kitchen.

London Balcony Garden

In our old rented house, we had a lovely little garden, which was great. But it never got any sun. And was very boggy....so even the grass repeatedly died. So not the place for green fingers. The house, whilst lovely, didn't really have any windows, or window sills (it was a tiny cottage) so I couldn't even have any house plants.

So when we bought our flat last year, my main criteria were light, and outside space. And we ended up with both!! Our lovely flat has windows on 3 sides, with really deep window sills, and a decent sized balcony which gets the sun ALL DAY!!!

So when we moved in in December, I immediately bought house plants for every room in the house. And then make me so happy.

Then, in the Easter holidays, I went a bit mad on the balcony. I bought pots that sit either side of the railings, so that they didn't take up too much of our precious space inside the balcony, and then planted everything I fancied. My idea was, that I'd plant loads, and if even half of it grew, I would be so happy.

Turns out, my balcony is a prime growing spot. I planted:

Strawberries
Raspberries
Rhubarb
Lettuce
Peas
Courgettes
Cauliflowers
Tomatoes

I've since added in: Chillies, Basil & Mint

Here are some photos.......I am SO proud!!

The first thing I do every morning now is go and check on them, and water them, and I love going out to make a salad, and picking some lettuce, adding some basil, maybe a tomato or two! I love it!

Happeas!

I love knitting, I love smiling and I love vegetables.....so here are all those 3 things in one....

Eating In Season

I've read a lot of articles recently on eating in season and it's something that I try and follow quite strictly, to the point where I won't buy my favourite berries except for a few months in the summer. I love that in our local Sainsburys they've just started to add in labels in the Fruit and Veg section indicating which items are in season at the moment, which really helps to know what to buy at any one time of the year.

I find that British vegetables just taste so much better, which is hardly surprising as a lot of air freighted vegetables are picked before they are fully ripe, so they last the journey and for long enough in the supermarkets, with the idea that they will ripen on our supermarket shelves. However, as we rarely have the weather warm enough to ripen them, I find they always taste a bit raw and definitely not to their best.

In contrast, you can get amazing chunky potatoes and apples this time of year which are massive and full of flavour and have probably come from within 100 miles of London, which is just amazing. I love when supermarkets put the name of the farmer and the farm on the food products, it makes it feel some homely and the next best thing from buying straight from farmers markets.

This website http://eattheseasons.co.uk/foodseasons.htm is brilliant to give an idea of what you can get and when and I've been making some delicious root vegetable based dishes this time of year. Whilst I love being able to buy piles of berries in the summer, there is also something very comforting about munching on all these wholesome and homely root vegetables while it's cold and frosty outside.

All Things Green and Beautiful

I've been having a bit of a love affair recently with spinach. As a child I refused to eat spinach if it was called spinach as I declared it to be slime. However, my clever Granny used to call it holly and I would happily eat up my holly if it was put on my plate as I thought it was really hardcore and cool to be able to eat something so prickly!

I was given a soup cook book for my birthday by my house mates and one of my favourite and most cooked recipe from the book is a spinach and coconut soup - absolutely delicious!

I have made it many times, sometimes with chilli to give it a Thai style soup edge, sometimes with potatoes to make it really thick and creamy, but mostly just as it is as it is scrumptious.

When I haven't got any coconut milk in the house, I have been making a few variations on green soup, with spinach still as the main ingredient. I find spinach just makes you feel better at just the thought of eating it, it exudes goodness, and especially after an exciting weekend with a fair amount of drinking, I feel spinach is absolutely the best thing to be eating to make myself better and keep going for a weeks work.

To make it an ultra healthy soup, I quite often go for a green theme and put in anything I have in the house that is green. As one of my colleagues said today...'ugh - what are you eating' ...it may look like slime, but it tastes fabulous and very, very healthy!

The latest green concoction contains a red onion and vegetable stock cube, as the base soup ingredients, and then also contains spinach, peas, broccoli and celery! Yum!

Mooncup

A friend of mine mentioned a few years ago that she was thinking of buying a mooncup. My initial reaction was 'Eurghhhh!!! That's so gross', and then that was it really. She didn't buy one and there was no more said about it.

I also didn't think much more about it until I was packing to go travelling, and had to pack a ridiculous number of tampons to take with me as I wasn't sure if I'd be able to buy them anywhere whilst travelling through Africa.

When I got back to Kenya, I spent a few days helping out at Mission in Action baby orphanage (http://www.missioninaction.com.au/), but went back to visit the Walk Centre (http://www.thewalkchildrenschurch.org.uk/), where I'd worked before. The kids here all live on the local rubbish dump and both the children and their parents will forage amongst the rubbish to find anything they can eat, wear or sell. Whilst being shown around the rubbish dump to be shown the new rooves on some of the childrens houses, I noticed a massive amount of sanitary towels which just didn't seem to be decomposing at all.

I did a bit of research and couldn't find an exact answer on how long they take to decompose, but I did find out that disposable nappies take 200 to 500 years to decompose and some of the plastic used may never even disappear. That's a ridiculously long time. The plastic in them is also made from crude oil and harmful pollutants which go directly into the earth and are really bad for the environment. In comparison, it only take 6 months to one year for a tampon to completely bio-degrade. Apparently 90% of the sanitary products we used are flushed and end up floating around in the sea until they eventually bio-degrade, if they can.

Again, I didn't think much about this until I was in Rio at the end of my travels last year. As must be the case in many other places around the world where there is a large city situated right on the coastline, a lot of rubbish ends up in the sea. And when there is a stunning, pristine beach, the last thing you want is to be fishing tampons out of your hair.

Thankfully, this didn't happen to me, but I did see a lot of waste including tampons floating around in the sea and heard the horror stories of other people having to pick used tampons out of their hair. That's definitely more disgusting than the thought of a mooncup.

As soon as I got back from travelling then, I decided that this was one way that I could reduce the amount I throw away and so I bought a mooncup. I didn't actually use it for the first month as I will admit that I was pretty scared by it. Mainly that it is quite big. But then I took the plunge and now I can honestly say that I am hooked and will never go back to tampons or sanitary towels again.

Apart from a minor (well pretty major) incident where I forgot about my mooncup whilst sterilising it (it has its own saucepan which I keep in my room - don't worry) and so melted a hole in it and had to buy a new one, I will have it for as long as I need it and there will be no waste each month. Perfect!

Also, as I have very light periods, I used to get quite uncomfortable when having to change a tampon and it was not used enough, and pulling out a fairly dry tampon also increases your risk of contracting TSS. The mooncup is perfect as it is soft, smooth silicone and you really can't feel it at all when it's in. I have spoken to some of my friends about this who are still unsure but I really do urge everyone to convert to a mooncup. You really won't regret it!

Tumble Dryers

After watching Amelie last night, I was thinking about things I like and don't like on my walk to work this morning. And I definitely don't like tumble dryers.

We had one growing up, but it was rarely used. Only for bedding and towels if it was pouring so we couldn't hang them outside. I know it's nice in the winter to dry everything quickly, so that especially in damp student housing, you don't have smelly clothes hanging around taking about a week to dry, but nothing beats sun dried clothes. One of my favourite things in the world is when I can get into a freshly made bed, and the sheets are all crisp from the sunshine and just smell of outside.

So the main reason that I don't like tumble dryers is that they are bad for your clothes. As a self confessed Squirrel, I hate to part with my clothes and literally wear them to death. I have items which I was wearing 5 years ago which I still wear now and I am sure that some have them have lasted so much longer and still look fine to wear now because I don't tumble dry them.

Tumble dryers work by passing warm or hot air through the machine as it rotates, which helps to evaporate moisture from the clothes. So the main actions are heat and agitation. One of the methods of felting is to apply heat and agitation to the fibres. This causes them to shrink and fuse together and so this is essentially what happens to our clothes in the tumble dryer. Holes are more likely to appear as the fibres fuse together, and then are stretched as they are worn. Bad. I definitely don't want my clothes to shrink!

Tumble dryers also cause clothes to lose their softness as fibres are lost from the surface of the fabric. Again, not good.

The other reason why I don't like tumble dryers, is that they are really bad for the environment. And expensive. The average home clothes dryer has a carbon footprint of approximately 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of CO₂ per load of laundry dried. A carbon footprint is "the total set of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions caused by an organization, event, product or person." To compare, the carbon footprint of the train to Woking and back would be just over 4kg. The train to Edinburgh and back for one passenger would be 24kg (so 6 tumble dryer loads). A return flight to Edinburgh would be 193k (so about 48 loads).

In comparison to this, the carbon footprint of a tumble dryer seems fairly low. But in my flat for example, there are probably 4 tumble dryer loads a week (not me!!). This is carbon footprint of 416kg per year which could easily be avoided!

Hopefully we haven't already missed Summer and we will get some sunshine over the next few months so that I can dry my clothes outside in lovely sunshine!

Recycling

I am very big on recycling. When I moved into my flat, one of the first things I did was to apply for a recycling bin. Although we live in Brent, whose slogan is 'Creating a cleaner, greener Brent', they said no, because we live in a flat and so there's nowhere to put it. I emailed back a few times to say we had an empty shop underneath so on recycling days I could leave it in the shop doorway which is off the pavement, but got no reply. How rude.


In Bristol, recycling has been a big thing for a while, and we even have brown bins for food waste only. The idea is to reduce your waste so that the main bin only needs collecting once a fortnight. I think we were pretty special to have 3 bins, but then saw this article today on the BBC news website about some areas having 9 bins!! That just seems scary and like it would put people off.

None of my housemates ever seem quite as keen as me to recycle. I think they like the idea of it as long as they don't actually have to do anything. When we lived in Portsmouth, they gave us green wheelie bins and everything recyclable went in here, apart from glass as that could get a bit messy. So we collected up all the glass in a separate tub and every so often would take it to the bottle bank. We did this so regularly that one of my housemates was genuinely surprised when at the end of the year she discovered that the bin men didn't actually take glass! She hadn't realised that we'd been doing it all along.

My housemates now in London are also equally happy to put things in plastic bags on the back of the kitchen door...but less happy to walk down the road to the recycling bins. I've tried to see what happens if I don't take them...but it just means that your can't really open the kitchen door any more and so it's just easiest if I go.

When I was younger, me and my sister used to fight over who got to smash the glass bottles when we went recycling with Mum. Maybe that's why I enjoy it so much, because it's almost a game to me. I grew up feeling really chuffed when I got to smash more bottles than Chloe. 

On Sunday, one of my housemates said 'Is there even any point in recycling anyway as most of it ends up in landfills in China?'. Whilst it is true that I had heard that this had happened in the past, I just don't physically think that I can throw a glass jar or a tin can in the normal bin.

So I decided to investigate....

According to recyclenow.com, a lot of our recycled waste is processed here in the UK and reused to make new items. 

Information collected for Defra by the Environment Agency on packaging waste shows how much material is exported and how much is recycled in the UK:

Material	Reprocessed in the UK	Reprocessed Abroad
Paper	49%	51%
Glass	81%	19%
Aluminium	66%	34%
Plastic	33%	67%
Wood	100%	0%

The CPI figures, which include newsprint, indicate a balance of about 47% domestic reprocessing and 53% export.

So even though a lot of our waste is sent abroad to be processed, for example to China, this is still better than throwing it into a landfill site, and China has a big need for raw materials such as plastic as it does not have any of its own oil reserves. Also, transportation costs are extremely cheap, as they are already coming to the UK with goods to export, and so would otherwise be returning partially empty. 

So that makes me feel slightly happier...and hopefully might encourage other people too!