Recycle Week: I failed and I succeeded

Now that Recycle Week is drawing to it's end, it's time for a recap.

The pledge I took thanks to The Rubbish Diet's initiative and the uptake of the tag my many British Mummy Bloggers (this is how I found out about it rather than getting tagged directly) was not to take home any new plastic bags from shops. I thought it was a realistic pledge and one that I should have made years ago after lapsing since moving to the UK/Ireland from Germany 13 years ago.

My plan was to stick bags where-ever I thought I might need them and then all I needed to do was remember to take them. Easier said than done, bad habits take some time to get changed. I forgot my bags twice, when I went for a lunch break clothes shopping trip (that's how I clothes shop, in a half hour slot!) and when I went food shopping with Cubling. My concentration always lapses when she's around, which is understandable because how could you concentrate on anything but my one and only cutiepie (on bad days I'd say that taking my eyes off her for only one second may result in serious disaster). On the first count I failed good and proper, took a bag home and only realised my mistake a day later (oops), on the second count I bought a sturdy bag for life and realised how fabulous they are - 0.39 p and my whole shopping fitted into it, it didn't fall over backwards in the car and I didn't need to fear that handles would break and wine bottles smash.

It's been both a success and a failure. The success is that I've finally done something about not using so many plastic bags, the failure has shown me that really it takes looking at something with fresh eyes and a bit of commitment to identify where improvements can be made. So on the whole it's been a success of course, especially because I do hope to keep up the challenge in the future, but I'll still have to have a day without chocolate (right, that was wishful thinking as hubby just informed me. My forfit is to go A FULL WEEK WITHOUT CHOCOLATE. OMG!!!!!). Just as well, I think I ate a week's supply of chocolate this weekend. I may skip this Wednesday's weigh in...

Now I'm looking forward to reading the Recycle Week Carnival over at the Rubbish Diet, which should be up some time on Monday. Please join me in reading how everyone else got on and how we can take recycling beyond this week's attempts.