January has been a month of new years resolutions – making and breaking them. Our dedicated friend Ash Brown shares her story of trying zero waste in 2016 and lots of simple ideas for how you can this year.

For 6Heads this is our 6th year and we are focusing on how we can have a bigger positive imapct by working together. In spring we will be running a series on events on how we might do this so please get in touch if you’d like to be part of the journey or join our next meetup on Tuesday 21st February at the Duke of Cambridge in Angel. Please email me at Louisa.harris@6-heads.com if you would like to join or get involved.

Trying Zero Waste – guest blog by Ash Brown

At the beginning of this year, after seeing pictures of whales and birds lying dead because of the amount of plastic they had ingested, I decided to try and drastically reduce the amount of plastic that I use and throw ‘away’. Once I had put this filter on my view of the world, I suddenly realised how completely full of plastic my life had been, and how horribly difficult it was to avoid.

The first things I subbed out were easy – a bamboo toothbrush to replace my plastic one, bamboo, biodegradable washing up scrubber, shampoo and conditioner soap bars in resuable tins from Lush. I enjoyed a sense of immediate gratification at these changes, but then I stepped into the world of food packaging, which was a completely different story.

Due to the way our globalised food system works, food from supermarkets is rarely ever fresh, and has usually been frozen as it is shipped from the other side of the world. This means that supermarkets are too scared of food getting damaged or there being any risk of food poisoning etc. I quickly realised after exchanging some emails with the CEO of a supermarket that they were not playing ball due to these aforementioned concerns. So the only thing to be done was to change the way that I bought my food.

Luckily, I had just discovered a new way of shopping for food, known as the Food Assembly. The Food Assembly is an excellent alternative to supermarket shopping as it gives people the chance to buy their food directly from their local farmers, which means that there is very little need to wrap things in plastic.

Find out more about how you can get involved with the food assembly

From just making this one small change to the way that we buy our food, not only are we as customers and human beings helping to reduce the amount of plastic that we get through, but we are also lessening the amount of carbon spewed into the air through shipping. It’s a double win.

Another easy change you can make is to take a reusable container to a place that would normally wrap things in plastic, such as the butcher, the fish monger, or the local café. When you are at a restaurant, having a Tupperware/tiffin tin container helps you to receive your food without needing  to create any trash.

In terms of hygiene and beauty regiments, I am making my own eyeliner with
charcoal and coconut oil, and always use a flannel and some homemade cleanser in a jar to wash my face.

This experience has taught me that it is completely within my power to dramatically reduce my negative impact on this earth. If I can do it, so can you! #restorernotdestroyer