One of the biggest changes we made when we moved to New Zealand eight months ago was to buy a lifestyle block in the Waitakere ranges and start a food garden. Our aim was to live a simpler, greener lifestyle by making small changes. We - as parents - felt that by not reducing our carbon footprint as a household, our children would one day hold us partly responsible for being eco sloths.
What we did
I have just been amazed at how simple it can be if you just go ahead and 'be the change'. Sure, we want governments to put restrictions in place on carbon emissions and company pollution levels, but if we know which companies are contaminating our environment, it really is up to us to choose whether we support their products - or not.
Seven months ago we moved into our new home in New Zealand, 20 minutes outside central Auckland. We changed all our light bulbs to energy-saving bulbs the moment we moved in, diligently avoid using plastic shopping bags, started a worm farm, a compost heap, bought four laying, brown shaver chickens who roam freely through the bush, and planted beds of vegetables.
The Food Garden
Almost immediately we planted two beds of spinach and bok choi, two large potato stacks and a bed of broccoli (that got munched in one sitting by our sneaky chooks!). We have two grapefruit trees bearing fruit, three cumquats, two lemon trees and two mountain pawpaws. We planted two feijoas which will bear in two years time and hope to add several nut trees to our collection. As the rain pours down at the rate of 2300 mm per annum year in the ranges, watering, for the first time in my life, is not an issue. The garden grows by itself. It was a dream come true after years of struggling to grow veggies amid tight water restrictions, withering heat, strong winds and the sandy soil of Cape Town.
Recycling within our property
We are down to one small bag of waste per week. The bulk of our edible kitchen scraps goes to the chickens, who in turn provide deliciously smelly manure for our compost heap. The worm farm gets all the peels and scraps the chickens won't want, and the Waitakere Council do bi-monthly collections of plastics, glass, tin, paper, all stored in bins in our kitchen cupboards.
By shopping at the small farmers' markets, we buy extra fruit and vegetables we need straight into cardboard boxes that we then re-use to collect recycled items.
One thing that I noticed here is that Kiwis are not very big on the re-usable shopping bags yet. Plastic bag usage here is crazy. I can stand outside Foodtown and see dozens of shoppers with ten or more plastic bags in their trolleys. Now multiply that by one million shoppers per week in New Zealand, at a minimum, and you have ten million new plastic bags entering our environment, and ultimately, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Those that don't quite make it into the trash vortex break down in our landfills, releasing toxic, carcinogenic chemicals.
It doesn't take many brain cells to figure out that 520 million plastic bags per year (at a modest minimum) doesn't compare to using ten re-usable shopping bags per household - year after year. Kiwis need to wake up on this one.
Chemical-free
New Zealand has a large range of natural, eco-friendly cleaning products. They may cost a bit more in the short term, but I love the thought that long term they are not costing the earth and future generations. It makes no sense to spew out thousands of gallons of bleach and poisonous chemicals into our wastewater system, daily.
It's easier than I thought
It's much easier to reduce, re-use and recycle in New Zealand. Excellent second-hand clothing is something that NZ has sorted! I have never dressed as well in my life. I recently walked around a shopping mall gazing into fashion clothing shops and I thought - hey! Not a chance will I be buying those low quality Chinese imports made in a sweat shop. I buy gorgeous second hand designer items, often locally made, thereby halving the carbon footprint of the item.
After years of putting off some of these simple steps, it feels silly not to have done this sooner. It isn't even that hard, and now that we have done this for the past seven months, we cannot imagine living any differently.
Many of the magazines here - even the fashion mags - focus on the carbon footprint of different products and services offered. I imagine the future will include lists of companies that offset their carbon footprint - and those that don't. Again, it will be the consumer who gets to choose which products to support.
What all of us can do
Here are some ways you might want to get involved:
