Category Archives: Health

HERBAL TEAS STRAIGHT FROM MOTHER NATURE

I used to have a line-up of Pukka teas all along the top of my kitchen dresser. Attracted by the colourful packaging and enticing names, I believed that these tea bags were plastic-free until a reader pointed out to me that the sachets each tea bag is sealed in is lined with a polymer for gluing the paper together. Many herbal tea brands, if not all, use plastic in some way or another so I decided to look around my garden to see if I had any herbs, apart from the obvious peppermint and lemon balm, that would be good for making herbal tea. I counted 11 additional plants: chamomile, purple and green sage, rosemary, thyme, elderflower, comfrey, yarrow, nettles and dandelion. And that was just the ones I instantly recognised. How had I missed this opportunity for fresh tea straight from mother nature? The answer of course is because of shiny beautiful packaging of ‘bought’ tea and how easy it is to pop a pack into the shopping basket.

Fresh herb tea tastes beautifully subtle and alive and is easy to make – simply pour hot water over a few freshly picked leaves and let them steep for five minutes. Drying bunches of herbs for making tea for the winter months is also very easy to do. Hang a bunch of herbs upside down for a few days, rub the leaves or flowers off the stems, and store them in a jar or paper bag. You can combine different herbs to suit your taste or try recipes for soothing colds and other ailments. Another wonderful type of herbal tea is hot water with a shot of homemade elderflower cordial.

You don’t need to grow a great quantity of herbs to make a lot of herbal tea – which came as surprise to me. Just one yarrow plant yielded much more than I could possibly use. There are also many wild herbs and weeds that make great tea, such as nettle and dandelion leaves. If you don’t have a garden, growing peppermint in a pot on your windowsill or collecting wild herbs on a walk are good options. You can of course buy loose leaf unpackaged tea from Neil’s Yard and other tea shops – but do take your own paper bags and ask them not to put a plastic sticker on the bag.

Useful links:

• Herb teas for healing: https://smtebooks.com/book/5280/holistic-herbal-4th-edition-pdf
• Best herbs to grow for tea: https://www.thespruce.com/best-herbs-for-tea-4151170
• Neil’s Yard shops for loose herbal tea: http://www.nealsyardremedies.com/

PURE ALL-NATURAL SUNSCREEN

Heeding the advice from even the most staunch defenders of all things homemade, you  will stay out of the sun or buy a good quality sunscreen with pure ingredients rather than attempt to make your own. I have put sun cream down on the list of unavoidable items in plastic packaging. I was therefore over the moon to come across NOT THE NORM sunscreen in a tin in three different sizes, made in the UK from just four pure and organic ingredients. The company also guaranteed to send mailorder items without any plastic packaging. To top it all it arrived on the hottest day so far this summer and I put it to the test straight away. Unperfumed and easy to apply it feels lovely on the skin and if I follow the directions for safe use on the website to the latter, I think this one is a winner for me. I have read so many scathing articles about the ingredients and side effects of ordinary sun cream and sun block that I would rather stay in the shade than expose my skin to these substances – I am not including any links here as the topic is so ‘hotly’ debated that it is hard to know what is real and what isn’t. You must decide for yourself whether this all-natural sunscreen is for you and how safe you believe it is.

ONE YEAR – ONE BAG OF PLASTIC

We have just reached our first anniversary of creating a plastic-free household. During the past year we concentrated mainly on unpackaged food, cleaning materials, toiletries and plastic-free clothing. We have collected every scrap of plastic packaging that we have accidentally, or otherwise, brought into the house. This has amounted to roughly one large bagful of plastic packaging from medical supplies, items that we bought which had hidden plastic packaging inside, presents that were given to us, and also from items that seemed unavoidable. Considering that UK households produce an average of 56kg of plastic packaging waste a year, our one bag weighing no more than a couple of pounds represents a great achievement.

In reality, our single-use plastic footprint is much larger than the household figures measured by Defra and in our case, it is bigger than the single bagful collected over the course of a year. Much of our plastic waste is created outside the home, for example in the workplace, at school, in restaurants, at the petrol station, at the hairdressers, at the gym, and by pursuing hobbies and other pastimes that take us outside the home. In the supply chain of the goods I conscientiously buy ‘unpackaged’, there are unknown quantities of plastic packaging. We are not the only ones in the dark: at a recent talk given by Tesco on food waste, which I attended in Oxford, I learned that all of the large supermarket retailers “currently don’t understand or know enough” about the plastic packaging waste in their supply chains. This means that the plastic packaging that each of us is ultimately responsible for is not just in our bins at home.

Over this past year I have read report after report, attended events, talked to many people and the story is the same everywhere. Most people think there is too much plastic in their lives and that we should recycle more and develop new materials to replace plastic. However, few talk about the one solution that is surely staring us in the face. The one solution that could prevent further environmental crises and help restore local communities is ethical consumption. Ethical consumption means that you choose only what you need, what has been paid for fairly, what has been made to last, and what has been produced sustainably without hurting people, animals or the earth. I might not be a shining example of the perfect ethical consumer yet, but I am immensely interested in becoming one. It seems to be one of the few things in life that is actually within my power!

Read More:

  • Waste and Resource Statistics_2016 by the Department for Rural Affairs (Defra)
  • Plastics_Market_Situation_Report_2016  by UK based WRAP, the world leaders in helping organisations achieve greater resource efficiency. Between 2010 and 2015 in England alone, WRAP initiatives reduced greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 50 million tonnes (Mt), which is equivalent to the annual carbon dioxide emissions of Portugal.
  • How did I calculate 56kg of plastic packaging per UK household? I used the most up-to-date figures provided in the two reports above which are for 2014 (new data is collected every two years, so the data for 2016 should be available soon). I applied this to the total number of households in the UK in 2014 as provided by the Office for National Statistics.
  • Article on Ethical Consumerism by Tania Lewis first publishd in 2012

WILD NUTRITION SUPPLEMENTS

I am excited to introduce Wild Nutrition to you. This UK based family-run company have developed food-grown supplements sourced from high-grade, pesticide free, 100% raw whole food ingredients which are highly absorbable by the body. These bespoke ranges for children, teenagers, women and men come in glass bottles with metal lids and not a shred of plastic. If you order by mail they will use cardboard and paper instead of bubble wrap.

I have searched high and low for plastic-free nutritional supplements and I am really excited that these are also food based rather than synthetically created. I am currently taking Wild Nutrition’s botanical menopause complex which I bought at Whole Foods Market. There is a fantastic health and wellbeing blog on the website and lots of reviews and tips. Karen, the Nutritional Therapist at Wild Nutrition who answered my questions regarding their packaging policy, paid me a lovely compliment: “I just had a look at your website. How wonderful that you are focusing on this incredibly important issue.” I’d like to return the compliment!