Tag Archives: Review

Self-care, Sustainable Living ideas

5 Easy Eco-Friendly Swaps For The Bathroom

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There are so many products we use in the bathroom that are encased in plastic and they don’t need to be. The bathroom is the easiest place where you can make eco-friendly swaps.

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Here is a list of some of my favourites (and they are easy ones too!) plus where to buy them!

Bamboo buds

Buds have many uses but, like a lot of things, they are plastic. The plastic tubes end up everywhere and cause all sorts of problems, especially when it enters the sea. Bamboo buds are eco-friendly and will decompose easily. I put mine in the food waste. When I have some more space and start composting, I will pop them in the compost bin.

Buy Here

Safety Razor

If you’ve read by blogs before, you will know that I’m a huge fan of safety razors! They’re friendly to the environment and they last a very long time. Read my previous blog about them.

Buy Here

Body Soaps and Shaving Bars

Soap bars tend to be sold in mixed paper/plastic wrappers which are difficult to recycle and are no friend to the environment. Swapping to bars is a great choice and are easily found in boxes and even without any packaging. Wooden soap dishes are a great way to reduce your plastic!

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Bamboo toothbrush

Think about all the toothbrushes you have used in your life, did you know they are still around? Plastic toothbrushes are terrible to the environment. Bamboo ones are eco-friendly and they only need to be replaced every three months. You can also buy them for children too.

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Dental floss

Dental care is so important and you shouldn’t neglect your gums. Which is why I over the moon when I found these beauties.

Buy here

If you have any other swaps, let us know 💚

Sustainable Living ideas

Sustainable Home – A book review

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For Christmas, I was lucky enough to get a copy of Sustainable Home: Practical Projects, Tips and Advice for Maintaining a More Eco-friendly Household by Christine Liu. I really have the best friends!

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Firstly, I would like to say that this an absolutely beautiful book which has been perfectly separated into five sections; living, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom and outdoors.

Each sections discusses what changes you could make to live a more sustainable lifestyle and things to consider when making your choices.

I’ve been starting to implement a lot of these changes – here’s the first product review on safety razors

Here’s my book review for Sustainable Home

The author offers excellent advice and includes step-by-step guides, for example, making your own toothpaste – something I am keen to try.

Sustainable Home: Practical Projects, Tips and Advice for Maintaining a More Eco-friendly Household book cover

Sustainable Living

Sustainable living takes you through the benefits of minimalism and the environmental impacts our choices have with an fabulous guide on how to declutter your home; how to decide what to keep and what to do with the things you don’t need anymore.

Following onto the furniture we buy, the benefits and concluding on a guide to indoor plants, something I have recently fallen in love with.

Sustainable Kitchen

Food can be a contentious issue as it’s well documented how much of an impact farming for meat has on the environment. Christine navigates this issue really well giving you information to make your own choices.

If you aren’t able to cut out meat completely, reducing your meat intake still makes a massive difference. I particularly like the guides to making your own cashew and oat milk, I’m looking forward to giving these a go. Sustainable kitchen concludes on some really good tips on reducing food waste.

Sustainable Bedroom

This chapter begins with your wardrobe and how to create a minimalist wardrobe but still maintaining your personal style.

In particular, I loved is repairing and repurposing clothes and I am a superfan of ‘make do and mend’.

Following onto bedroom furniture and concluding the section on how to make your own room spray.

Sustainable Bathroom

A place in your home where you can make the biggest changes to live a more sustainable life is in your bathroom.

This section is jam-packed with ideas and guides on how to make your own toothpaste, body scrub, body butter and lip balm.

This section includes an overview of shampoo and shampoo bars, cleaning, water usage and my favourite of all; the safety razor. I moved away from disposable razors about a year ago and I’ve never looked back.

Outdoors

Inside the home isn’t the only place to make a change, this final section discusses ways in how a workplace can become greener, when you’re eating out and looking at your carbon footprint when you’re out and about.

Conclusion

Firstly, the main thing I love about this book is that is doesn’t preach to me. It’s very well written and easy to read.

There are so many ideas and examples of changes you can make to live more sustainably. It’s okay that you can’t do everything in one go; it’s a marathon, not a race.

Would I recommend this book to others? A massive YES.

If you would like to know more about Christine Liu, here are her links

If you would like to purchase the book – click here

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Sustainable Living ideas

7 Eco-conscious Books For Children

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I love the idea of encouraging children to read and become eco-conscious. When I was a child, I remember my imagination taking on a life of its own when I would read a book. There’s something really magical about reading and nothing makes me happier than seeing a child with a book in their hand.

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As children will be inheriting this planet from us, I believe it’s important in encouraging an early understanding of the environment and what we can do to protect it (and ourselves!). They need to be eco-conscious.

I’ve put together a list of environmental reads perfect for children. There’s no time like the present to starting learning about the environment.

What A Waste: Rubbish, Recycling, and Protecting our Planet by Jess French

7 Eco-conscious books for children

Ideal for age 7+

A beautifully illustrated book is filled with facts about the environment; some good, some bad and some ugly. It explains the impact we have on the planet by the things we do; wasting water, renewable energy and examples of single-use plastics we consume everyday. There’s also a section on alternative eco-conscious swaps to reduce your waste.

Buy from Waterstones

Lift-the-Flap Questions and Answers About Plastic by Katie Daynes (author), Marie-Eve Tremblay (illustrator)

7 Eco-conscious books for children

Ideal for age 3+

A great lift-the-flap book for teaching young children about plastic, how it affects the environment and recycling. The book is 14 pages with over 60 interactive flaps explaining how plastic ends up in the ocean and how it’s made. This is a colourful and informative book for little ones to learn about the environment.

Buy from Waterstones

Dear Greenpeace by Simon James

7 Eco-conscious books for children

Ideal for age 3+

Dear Greenpeace by Simon James is such a sweet book about a little girl called Emily who finds a whale in her pond and is worried it is unhappy. She decides to seek advice from Greenpeace by writing to them. Emily clearly has a caring nature and wants the best for her whale.

Buy from Waterstones

Charlie and Lola: Look After Your Planet by Lauren Child

7 Eco-conscious books for children

Ideal for age 3+

Charlie and Lola: Look After Your Planet by Lauren Child a lovely book, when Lola is cleaning up her room and Charlie explains to her that we have to keep using things again otherwise we will run out of everything. Lola decides to inspire her class and includes some ‘green promises’. A great read for young eco-conscious activists.

Buy from Waterstones

Can We Save the Tiger? by Martin Jenkins (author), Vicky White (illustrator)

7 Eco-conscious books for children

Ideal for age 5+

A beautifully illustrated book will help children understand the threats animals face, how they become endangered by human behaviour and why it’s important for us to protect them.

Buy from Waterstones

Fantastically Great Women Who Saved the Planet by Kate Pankhurst

7 Eco-conscious books for children

ideal for age 8+

Fantastically Great Women Who Saved the Planet by Kate Pankhurst is a book with strong female role models from diverse backgrounds, the reader is taken through aspects of recycling, tackling the plastic problem, the importance of shopping fair trade and cruelty-free. Full of hope and encouragement, this book shows everyone has a part to play regardless of how big or small. Any change is still change.

Buy from Waterstones

You Can Save The Planet 101 Ways You Can Make a Difference by J. A. Wines (author), Clive Gifford (author), Sarah Horne (author)

7 Eco-conscious books for children

Ideas for age 9+

You Can Save The Planet 101 Ways You Can Make a Difference is a great step-up for young activists to gain a deeper understaning of the destruction of our plants, global warming and the effects of pollution. Explaining the huge problem faced by global warming, it gives children hope as it is packed full with practical and smart ways children can make a differnce in their community.

Buy from Waterstones

If you have any recommendations, please feel free to share 💚

For older children, I wrote a blog about a book called  No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference by Greta Thunberg

Sustainable Living ideas

Extinction: The Facts – review

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This David Attenborough documentary aired on the BBC called Extinction: The Facts which explains the truth about the dying biodiversity.

This documentary really didn’t hold back, it showed the upsetting havoc and effects humans have wreaked on the natural world. Unlike breathtaking images from his previous documentaries like The Blue Planet or Planet Earth, the images we instead saw were of animals escaping fires, scorched landscapes, dead killer whales and piles of Pangolin scales. It wasn’t easy viewing nor should it be.

I’ve watched other documentaries about what we are doing to life on this planet and the destruction we have caused to the only home we have, but this time, the stark urgency was impossible to ignore.

In 2019, the UN asked a team of 500 scientists to investigate the state of the natural world. It found that all groups of species are in decline and estimate 1 million species out of 8 million are at risk of extinction. I know extinction is a natural process but the difference here is that humans are accelerating the process. When scientists look at fossil records, extinctions are shown to occur over millions of years, this is now occurring over tens of years with no evidence of slowing down.

Viewers got the opportunity to meet the last two Northern White Rhinos left on the planet and learned about the Pangolins being killed for the supposed medicinal purposes of their scales; which are made of Keratin, the same keratin found in fingernails. Of course, there is no evidence these scales have any medicinal purposes.

I was interested to see the documentary made a link between the loss of biodiversity and Covid-19. The more humans encroach into our natural world, the more chance of exposing ourselves to viruses opening us up for the risk of having to deal with a new pandemic more frequently. For those who only understand money; this is something our economies won’t be able to cope with.

Although, this documentary is grim viewing, it also provided us with hope. Rwanda has had a fantastic success story by increasing their gorilla population.

Throughout this documentary, all I kept thinking was that nature can survive without humans but humans cannot survive without nature. We are such an arrogant species and think we are indestructible. We are not, we are more vulnerable than we want to admit.

Nature can survive without humans but humans cannot survive without nature ExtinctionTheFacts #ClimateChange #Attenborough

This documentary must be watched by all and used as an educational resource. Especially to governments and decision makers. Everyday thousands of babies are born into a world where humans are killing life on this planet; killing their future. Seriously, what are we doing?

The time for talking is over, it’s time to ACT!

The time for talking is over, it’s time to ACT! ExtinctionTheFacts #ClimateChange #Attenborough