Wednesday 12 August 2015

Small Green Moves Every Day

Crazy Letter Writing Lady

Some posts back I wrote myself a list to help get remotivated (motivation shake up). On it I prompted myself to do something extra for the environment every day. This morning it is too chilly to leap out of bed, so instead I have been emailing people with a few suggestions.

First one was to a local cafe. While I was painting at my rental the other week I got a coffee to go in my reuseable cup, and a nice big slab of carrot cake. Before I could stop her, the girl serving me had put the cake into a styrofoam container. It's not her fault, she was only doing her job. So I've sent an email to the cafe owners suggesting some alternative actions and reminding them that their customers do care.



Similarly I have sent one to the supermarket where my 91 year old father-in-law shops to ask them to consider not put everything into plastic bags before putting them into the reuseable bags that people bring along to try to stop taking plastic bags home.

It takes time and effort and may be viewed as crazy eh, but oh well.

Boots - A Penny Spent is a Penny Saved

A visit to the Cobbler in the last few weeks left me poorer by $45 per pair of boots, but as he kindly pointed out, it was my own fault. I had let the heels wear down to the point that he had to replace the heel blocks, hence the extra expense. So I am going to save someone else the extra expense by passing on his advice.
Expensive boots are not necessarily made with quality soles. The cobbler says they put the quality into the boot upper, so we need to get along to the cobbler after just a few weeks of wearing these boots to get a good piece of rubber put on the heels to save wear and future expense. Before you wear through that thin first layer.


You can see clearly on this boot heel that it is nearly at the point of extra expense, so it will be going to be repaired before it wears into the darker coloured heel block.

I hope that saves at least one of you some money :-)


4 comments:

  1. That's actually a really amazing effort to go to, well done.
    I'm not a fan of the "automatic plastic bag syndrome" I've trained myself to get in early, and request no bag. Worse still is when they bag an item in a paper bag, and then put it in a plastic bag!

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    1. Thanks Cheryl. I got a positive response from the supermarket, and a defensive reply from the cafe. The cafe owner stated that the biodegradable packaging was up to a dollar more for each container, so I sourced them online and pointed her to some which were only 20c more, in as nice a way as I could, her reply to which was "thanks, I'll look into that next week".

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  2. It's nearly impossible here to find anyone who repairs shoes anymore. I have been looking for one to sew a strap back on my perfectly good backpack but so far I've had no luck. Everyone just tosses things in the trash rather than bother to have them repaired.

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    1. I really appreciate having people who still fix things. We are lucky here, having two cobblers in the city. It's a sorry state of affairs that people have learned to throw so much away.

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