Low waste – meaning low waste for us, which is nowhere near perfect.
Sustainable – meaning we can sustain it everyday without driving ourselves crazy.
I have always led a somehow minimalistic lifestyle even before the word minimalistic was used in this sense. As a child my real hobby was to take all the things I owned from my room and only return the ones that I really loved. (Yes I had friends). Even at uni, my flatmate who had a room twice her size, came to paint banners in my tiny room because there was space.
I never owned a lot of things but that was mostly to moving a lot. All this was never any specific intention. I didn’t try to be low waste or minimalistic in order to save the planet, that came much later. To be honest the real wake up call was when I was pregnant and started to do a research on baby nappies. I read that an average baby will used about 2.5 tun of nappies before learning how to use the potty. Seven thousand nappies give or take a few. That information really really struck. Basically even after your newborn’s grandchildren are dead, there will still be seven thousand nappies somewhere in a landfill.
That sent me into a spiralling research that has led to somewhat changing our life for the better. It’s a process that’s never finished, but it’s a fun enjoyable process. We sometimes feel like hipsters or hippies just simply doing the things that were totally normal for our grandparents. Just this weekend we ate our first fermented sauerkraut. It was good, I didn’t enjoy it as much as our gin :D, but it’s still awesome that we can have it without all the preservatives they put in the store-bought one. To be honest, these are pretty much Lukas’ projects, I just enjoy the final product.
I did however change the way we shop to avoid processed foods, packaged foods, unnecessary plastic bottles in the bathrooms and so on.
And I managed a year and a half with reusable cloth nappies and there’s really nothing to be proud of because nowadays they are just as easy to use the the disposable ones. We also managed a year without disposable wipes, we are still alive and so is our daughter. Granted she’s one of the dirtiest kids on the playground, but if the kids are too clean, they are not having enough fun.
So not only we are saving money, being kind to the environment our children will grow up in, preventing Josie from coming into contact with all the toxic materials inside the nappies/wipes but also none of these “alternative” ways were difficult at all. I listen to mums talking about where they can get the cheapest brand of nappies and I just always wonder why this is not more widely accepted.
So I teamed up with Plastic Free Gold Coast and the most wonderful, fun and caring girls there and we have organised a Zero Waste Parenting Workshop. If I can turn one family to cloth nappies, I will be pretty happy with myself.
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