Happy Belated New Year!

Well, it has been quite some time since I last posted which I apologise about and as this is the my first post of the year I thought that I would follow Arcadia’s example and post my New Year resolution and also some green pledges for 2008.

New Year Resolution

My one and only New Year resolution is to get a distinction in the first year of my Environmental Studies degree. So far my studying is going very well and I will be posting an update shortly.

2008 Green Pledges

In 2008 I pledge to make my life greener by…

1) Not buying any NEW clothes at all.

How many items of clothing do we wear at once? How often do we end up wearing our old favourites? With this in mind I am going to save money and simultaneously help reduce the amount of energy needed to produce, transport and sell clothes by pledging to buy no new clothes in 2008 at all. Instead I will alter existing clothes, use recycled material to make my own and swap clothes with friends.

2) Making my vegan diet at least 80% organic, locally sourced and word free

I already have a pretty good diet, however since going vegan I have perhaps had too many soya based products which have been grown and transported from quite far . Thus going forward I aim to have at least 80% of my diet organic, locally sourced and word free (with the aim of getting to 100% eventually) as whilst I am prepared to give up caffeine and chocolate I don’t want to give up my daily banana, weekly cartoon of soya milk and fortnightly tofu just yet.

In case you have not come across ‘word free’ before (New Connsumer magazine brought it to my attention) it involves buying food with no packaging – or if it has packaging then only without writing on it. So basically it involves having nothing processed, nothing label-slapped, nothing mass produced, nothing shrink wrapped.

For those of you who are wondering what on earth I will be eating, I promise to write more about this in a future post (linked to my veganism update)

3) Grow more vegetables, herbs and fruits

This will help me in achieving the above and also help me with the below.

4) Buy no presents – instead make them

Instead of buying people presents I will make them instead, for example knit scarves using recycled material, hampers containing home grown and made goodies such as chutney’s / pickles etc, personalised cookery books and cuttings of plants (provided in newspaper plant pots).

5) Cycle instead of getting the bus

Over the winter I have been really bad and caught the bus to work instead of cycled and I do feel guilty. So I pledge to cycle more in 2008 and stop taking the easy option of getting the bus.

I will keep you updated on how they all go.