Making do, sustainability and living a simpler life
Friday 25th November is Buy Nothing Day – a 24 hour detox from consumerism and an opportunity for you to tune into the impact we have on the environment through shopping.
Youth Insights Manager, Claire, reflects on how we can be positive about sustainability and aware of the benefits of living a more frugal life:
“I may be looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses, but out of necessity, many of our grandparents lived a thrifty life, often making do with alternative ways to get a job done. From using natural and inexpensive cleaners and soaps to cooking from scratch and fixing the broken. Shoes and boots, bicycles and clothes, you name it – everything was repaired and made to last as long as possible.
It seems as though we have lost this recently, but over the years we’ve been running the Big Ideas Programme, we have come across lots of young people with inspiring ideas for spending less and using what we have. For example, ‘Fashion Waste Warriors’, 2022 Finalists, wanted to produce clothing by upcycling donated clothes that would otherwise go to waste, into lovely new clothes to be given to people in need. And ‘Fast ‘n’ Fashion’, Big Ideas Programme Finalists in 2019, had the idea to run upcycling workshops to teach people how to update their existing clothes to be more fashionable, therefore reducing the desire to buy new.
Buying local or growing food in your own garden was a staple of life for our grandparents and great-grandparents. Growing veggies and herbs is something we can easily do, no matter if you live in a rural or urban area, and it is friendly to the environment and your wallet. We’ve had a number of teams in the Big Ideas Competition that were looking at bringing the school garden concept back into secondary schools, such as ‘Grow Your Mind’ from Moseley Park School, Wolverhampton, and ‘Vegetables’ from Castle View Academy, Portsmouth – so perhaps all is not lost.
Shopping locally as our grandparents did also reduces the use of plastics as most local butchers and greengrocers or farm shops tend to stock loose produce. So, if we want to really learn about living more sustainably perhaps, we could ask the experts, our grandparents. Rather than sustainability being seen as something for the green elite I, for one, would be happy to go back to my working-class roots and make do and mend.”
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Solutions for the Planet Ltd