If you've been following along with my posts/Tweets/TikToks, you've probably noticed the amount of "single use" products I buy.
And if you've seen some of my other content around sustainability, you might notice that it seems like I'm contradicting myself at times.
Why go to the effort of gardening, saving vegetable scraps for soup stocks before composting them, and learning how to mend things, when you're also buying single serve 2 min noodles and exponentially increasing your household's waste?
Because I have control over my household. I don't have control over other households.
Even though there's always kids here, and I have one who does overnights here, there's only one who actually lives here.
The kids who come are my daughter's peers, so they're mostly aged between 11-13, and they're still learning adult skills like cooking, washing etc.
I also don't know what the situation at home is, or what they have or do not have.
So I use my own life experience to guide me.
When I was that age I was responsible for my own food and the things that stuck with me were:
1. It is not practical or possible to carry lots of heavy items home in your school bag.
2. It's hard to cook when you don't know how to cook.
3. If you don't have the basics (oil, laundry powder), you're restricted with what you can do.
I often opted for things like biscuits for dinner because they were easy to carry home and required no cooking.
My ultimate goal here is to get these kids fed, and to give them other essentials they need - in the most accessible way for them.
So while we use sustainable period products here, I buy disposable ones for the kids who might not have the ability to wash sustainable products at home, or anybody at home to instruct them on how to use them.
And while I cook from scratch and can whip up an easy curry or even a homemade pizza for dinner, I buy mac and cheese or noodle bowls for the kids who can take them for themselves or their siblings (some do), carry them home themselves and prepare them themselves.
Yes, we absolutely should be more sustainable when and where we can - but sustainable products and zero waste lifestyles are a privilege that not everyone can afford.
I will never shame anybody for using single use products, because I don't know their circumstances (sometimes it's not poverty, sometimes it's health related or they're not accessible where they live etc).
And I'll continue to use them for "my" kids 💙