46 caravanworld.com.au
LEDT TO RIGHT Resist the urge to buy water on the run but if you do, always refill and recycle;
switch those helpful yet harmful non-biodegradeable wet wipes for compostable bamboo ones
or a washable cloth and soap-free cleanser for 'baths' at campW
hat’s the worst thing we do today
that our grandparents didn’t? You
might say that we poison our food
with pesticides or that we eat too
much, work too hard or drive instead of
walking, all of which are true.
But what we do much more often than our
grandparents ever did, is throw things away.
The amount of waste that every Australian
discards has increased tenfold in the last
century to a whopping 560kg a year. What’s
more, every single piece of plastic existing
on the planet today will never, ever, go away,
no matter how much it breaks down or how
often it gets recycled. This includes plastic
bags and straws, disposable coffee cups, wet
wipes, polystyrene plates and more.
The good news is that, as consumers, we
are powerful people with choices to make.
By ditching and switching the products
we buy and use when we hit the road this
year, each and every one of us can keep a
mountain of waste out of landfill and, more
importantly, our oceans.DITCH: SINGLE-USE WATER BOTTLES
Every minute of every day, a staggering one
million plastic water bottles are bought
across the world — that’s 16,666 bottles per
second. If you think that sounds like a third-
world statistic, consider this: in Australia, a
quarter of us drink from a single-use water
bottle every week and less than 40 per cent
of those bottles are being recycled.
Most end up in landfill and, when they do,
take more than 1000 years to degrade. The
result is microplastics, which are becoming
more of a hazard to our oceans than the
plastic bottle itself.
Recycling makes a difference. Place just
41 plastic bottles in the right bin and you’ll
save enough energy to run your computer
for 17 hours. But what if you stopped buying
plastic bottles altogether?
In 2009, the NSW town of Bundanoon
did, offering only reusable drinking bottles
for sale in its stores and chilled filtered tap
water to fill them with: simple and genius!
All we need to do is change our habits.Resist the temptation to snap up water on
the run by always carrying a water bottle
with you. Buy a quality stainless steel
water bottle and cart it everywhere: to the
supermarket, on strolls around town, on
bushwalks and out to lunch.SWITCH: WET WIPES
The wet-wipe wash has saved many an
outback camper between showers, but this
guilty pleasure demands a rethink.
Despite a lot of claims on supermarket
packaging, very few wet wipes are
biodegradable and, worse still, when
flushed they accumulate in sewers as what is
delightfully known as ‘fatbergs’.
The next destination for these wipes is
the ocean where they will take upwards of
100 years to break down or worse, kill the
creature that ingests it.
I’ll admit that I’ve carried antibacterial
wet wipes on almost every road trip I’ve ever
tackled, until now. My switch this year is to a
washable muslin cloth and natural, soap-free