living lightly in ireland

Making our Trip to Cornwall as Sustainable as possible

It would be wrong for me to label this trip as sustainable, because we flew, and we all know just how unsustainable that it. Flying practically wipes out all your carbon savings from living a low-waste life.

I’ve made my peace with this. We tried the ferry, but after one of the most horrendous crossings in my life, I’ve sworn myself off them for life. Also we only allow ourselves one personal flight a year and given I’ve only one life I’m just not willing to spend all of it in Ireland.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t do my best to keep the impact of our holiday as low as possible, despite flying. This summer we decided to holiday in Cornwall, England, fulfilling a long-held wish of mine at the same time; a trip to the Eden Project. Here’s how our trip went.

Savvy Sustainability

When you start a new endeavour you typically need to invest a lot of time and money initially, but as time passes you become more accomplished and informed, and more efficient and affective, and more economical in how you spend your time and your money. This is what’s happened to us when we ramped up our efforts to live more sustainably. Some of the savings were to be expected, like lower waste and energy charges, but we’ve saved in other ways too. Here’s a list of some of them;

Baby Buying – What you DON’T need

I must have liked some baby stuff recently because Google and Facebook keep showing me ads for baby & maternity stuff at the moment. This reminded me of just how much crap I accumulated in the run up to my first baby, most of which was completely unnecessary and took me ages to dispose of in a sustainable manner.

Here is my list of all the stuff you DON’T have to buy in preparation for your bundle of joy.

Summer Activities with Kids

I’m not the type of parent that feels the need to fill every hour of my kids’ days with entertainment. I think boredom is a great encourager of creativity and I feel that my kids are more than capable of being responsible for their own entertainment. That said it’s nice to have a few crafts / activities up your sleeve for those whiny days that all parents get, and as always I am focusing on compostable / recyclable materials wherever possible.

Origami Money Gifts

I used to buy kids presents in advance and have a little ‘present box’ so that I wasn’t dashing to the shops every time my kids got an invite to a party. As I’ve moved towards Zero Waste I’ve given up on this. I no longer feel comfortable supporting the production of non-recyclable plastic toys by multinationals based outside of Ireland.

So I started to give cash, and when I say cash I don’t mean those nasty non-recyclable gift cards that expire. I mean cold hard glorious cash. Let the birthday girl or boy buy themselves exactly what they want, or better still save it.