Going Zero

ONE FAMILY’S REVOLT AGAINST EVERYDAY POLLUTION When a beanbag sent thousands of polystyrene balls flying through her garden, Kate Hughes decided to make a break with the throwaway society. She and her husband transformed the lives of their ordinary family of four. They ditched plastic, shunned supermarkets, cooked all meals from scratch, bought only second-hand clothes, and made their own cleaning agents. Then they went deeper – greening every aspect of their home life, from their gas and electricity to their car, from their money to their IT. The Hugheses have achieved the ‘zero waste’ goal of sending nothing to landfill. Now they are going even further… Told with refreshing humility and humour, this eye-opening story shows that a well-lived life doesn’t have to come wrapped in plastic. Packed with handy tips, it reveals much about what makes a fulfilling modern family – and how readers can empower themselves to preserve the climate, forests and seas. And, heart-warmingly, how that can lead to a more relaxing life. Extract Cooking our own meals Wrestling out of the firm grip of the supermarkets has had other, unexpected benefits, too. It’s undoubtedly cheaper to cook from scratch, especially if you can batch cook and fill every available space in your oven to reduce energy costs. The need to become the more organised, list-writing type of shoppers has also helped dramatically cut our food waste. We’re lucky that we can and do buy our raw ingredients from small, independent retailers that source from nearby suppliers and growers and pass on our questions about sustainability, sometimes even with enthusiasm. But what we hadn’t anticipated were the indirect effects of a brand vacuum. If you ever pop round to ours and start randomly opening our kitchen cupboards, fridge or freezer they would probably remind you of a blind taste test or an episode of the BBC’s Eat Well for Less. There’s definitely food in there, but it’s all in label-less jars, paper bags or sometimes even sacks for bulk items like bread flour and oats. At first, visitors find the lack of familiar packaging quite unsettling. We get a lot of questions that start: ‘Is this proper/real/like…?’ as guests hold jars up to the light with badly disguised scepticism. On the plus side, our children now have zero pester power. We don’t need to navigate the snack shuffle at the supermarket checkout because they have no hope of deploying the ‘It’s not the one I like’ argument at mealtimes. Nor, for that matter, have the adults. ... But we were starting to realise that making the journey was leading to more questions than answers, more grey areas, misinformation and conflicts of interest than we ever imagined – and that was just about food. We hadn’t even got started on anything else that came into our home yet. Take a single, uncontroversial ingredient, let’s say peppers. Should we buy them grown in a UK hothouse or ones trucked in from Spain? What if the Spanish ones are organic? Or the only UK

Kate Hughes is a national newspaper journalist and columnist. She is Money Editor for Independent.co.uk, for whom she also writes about sustainability. She is a commentator on BBC radio. She lives with her husband David and their two children in Somerset, England.