How to summer like an eco blagger
As Capri bans plastic, Shane Watson takes us through this year’s dos, don’ts and wish-i-coulds-but-can’ts
Summer 2018 was the beginning. That’s when we started to feel the eco wave building. By the end of it we were, if not owners of reusable water bottles and coffee cups, then on the verge of buying them, and we’d got the message about disposable barbecues. That was, as we now know, just a taster of the full green awakening that was to come. This year we’ve had Extinction Rebellion, the interventions of Swedish schoolgirl Greta “Our House is On Fire” Thunberg, litter picking campaigns and Styrofoam crackdowns.
The latest news is that, starting this month, tourists to Capri are being banned from bringing any disposable plastic to the island, including bags, straws and cutlery, in a bid to protect the surrounding coastline. In short, we’ve gone, in the space of a year, from being mildly eco conscious, to accepting that now “it’s the environment, stupid”, which means we’re looking at a very different sort of summer.
Summer – at least in this country – has long been the season of hedonistic excess, when the general mood of the population is: Let’s get out there and make some picnic waste! Go to festivals and dump our tents! Fly off on a budget airline for 40p to somewhere we can trash, or at least not have to worry about boring stuff like using too much water!
Well now, like it or not, the tanker is turning, and here’s some of the ways it’s going to affect your summer.
Outdoor showing off
You will recall the recentish big boom in outdoor status leisure equipment. We’re talking about the family-size trampoline (still green, so far as we know, but watch this space). We’re talking about hot lamps in the garden (uh oh), gas-fired barbecues the size of a mixing desk (ouch), outdoor pizza ovens (not good), those big smelly outdoor candles (toxic), hot tubs (bad).
David Cameron’s newly purchased hot tub for his holiday home in Cornwall may be wooden and natural and Scandi-esque in appearance – and therefore automatically good – but just because it isn’t magnolia plastic and stuffed with blokes wearing gold chains and nursing glasses of pink fizz doesn’t mean a hot tub is an environmentally aware purchase. Hot tubs are the new log burners.
Basic garden activity
Nor are you off the hook if you are not a COG (Cock of the Garden). Things we have taken for granted for years are now looking dubious. For example, paddling pools. A third of the country owns one, which they break out as soon as there’s a whiff of a heatwave, wasting an estimated four billion litres of water, and we are already, in May, close to a water shortage situation. We can’t help suspecting the problem is on account of the modern consumer requiring the Titanic iceberg of paddling pools rather than the limp eight-inch-deep pancake we grew up with, but, either way, paddling pools are new environmental enemy number one.
Then there’s your plant watering system and lawn sprinklers, very water wastey. A hammock is OK, though.
Festivals
Thinking of going to a festival and letting it all hang out like you did all the years before? Think again. Festivals are calling for a ban on the single-use tent now that more than 250,000 of them – mostly plastic – are abandoned in fields during festival season. Glastonbury have already banned single-use plastic bottles this year, so you will need your reusable one with you at all times.
Want to cover yourself in sparkly glitter? Forget that (it’s a microplastic on a par with microbeads). Want to light some sky lanterns and watch them float up and away? Don’t even think about it; they drift off, come down and kill turtles. Or cows. Releasing sky lanterns is hippy luxe littering with consequences.
Last year the plastic confetti canons that rounded off a Gary Barlow concert at the Eden Project created a bit of an embarrassment for Barlow. This year that would probably be a career finisher.
Holidays
Bearing in mind that we are now living in times where an A-list actress flying first class long haul makes front-page news (that would be Emma Thompson), holidays and their impact on the environment are on the front
actually need the sheets changed? That 30-litres-a-second monsoon shower, are you really letting the kids mess about in it? Should you be staying in a place where the disco makes the beach vibrate during turtle laying season and the lights are causing the dolphins to swim backwards? Are you eating from a zero miles menu (ie locally sourced and responsibly produced) or food that’s been flown half way around the world, then refrigerated, then flown around once again for luck?
These questions are top of the holiday priorities list this year – where once those questions would have been: does it have a kids’ club, cheap cocktails and top-of-the-range air conditioning? (AC now not good).
As of summer 2019 you have full permission to think badly of the idiots on the jetskis ( jestskis: NO) and the people plastering themselves in sunblock before entering the sea (it’s like plutonium for coral! Get your rash vest on… that’s your sun protection!) Even your swimsuit is an eco issue in 2019 – they shed tiny microfibres that end up in the food chain. The way forward is swimwear made out of plastic water bottles (see Madewell) or alternatively, secondhand. Apparently.
Summer wardrobe
We’re not talking about only wearing sustainable fashion labels, or rejecting the slippers made out of baby seals. That fifth peasant top that is not biodegradable is a bad idea.
Entertaining
The spare ribs and beef burger barbecue supper is starting to look a bit like that scene in Mad Men when the Draper family stop on the grass for a picnic and then zoom off in their gas-guzzling Buick, leaving all their litter behind.
Offering nothing but burnt meat to your guests is now not just too pre-vegetarian (Vetoo) but carcinogenic and air polluting. Some other no-nos to avoid: buying herbs (any fool can grow herbs, apparently). Serving anything involving palm oil, obviously, because it kills the rainforest, and if you want a visual trigger, Sad Faced Gentle Almost Human Orangutangs!
Wasteful dishwasher cycles (people notice that stuff, and the recycling). Serving bottled water, particularly if it’s still. And if it’s fizzy you should be getting a soda maker – or don’t, because we’re looking at a CO2 crisis so just drink tap water, for pity’s sake. Using a Nespresso machine and clearly not recycling your pods. Also you might not want to Eton mess up your strawberries because a lot of people are down on cream.
Could go on, but have to lie down now.
Once, the closest you got to being green on your hols was not overusing your towels