Waste not want not

It's humbling sometimes to appreciate how simple the world seems from the perspective of children. The Easter weekend was spent in Wales where I hail from (well done Wales for a fab Grand Slam result!) and it's quite some journey from Leicestershire, particularly with children in the car. As we drove down the motorways the children noticed just how much litter and rubbish, particularly plastic carrier bags are wound around trees and hedgerows en-route and were asking pertinent questions about why. They remembered that in Corsica for example, there simply were no plastic carrier bags - it was paper bags or re-usable long life ones in every supermarket. That led to more discussion about our consumerist society, recycling, re-use and rubbish dumps... My oldest had just returned from a school trip to a recycling plant, so had some strong views on the subject.

I explained that I have been doing some very interesting work with community waste organisations over the last couple of years and that the objective was to encourage businesses and consumers to think before they send things straight to landfill. The children regard this as just sensible - why does it take some companies so long to see it in such a simple way? Have a look at Resource Saver - this scheme acts as a marriage broker between businesses and community groups that can re-use or recycle their unwanted materials/goods. Established in the East of England, it's now operating in the North West too, www.resourcesaver.org.uk worth looking at ...

The wonders of technology

I don't often get the chance to do this, but today I set aside a few hours to help some girlfriends with the wonders of modern technology. Now I've worked with all of these girls in the past when they've been high flying executives in various high brow roles in industry and each are now either 'retired' or 'semi-retired', so unlike me they aren't in a position to keep abreast of new web developments. So I found myself being 'the expert' in buying and selling on e-bay - something I rarely do incidentally! It was quite a frightening proposition being 'the expert' but we had a hilarious time and did actually manage to achieve our objective of listing at least one item to sell. One of the funniest things was starting out with a selection of potential items to sell, but then working out that many of the girls actually didn't want to part with half of them (or at least not for the money that it looked like they'd get on e-bay)! The moral of the story however, was that all of us agreed we should take some 'time-out' more often not just to learn new skills, but to keep in touch with old friends ... it was fun!