Being Ill Means Falling off the Wagon

So as alluded in the previous post of Mr Harrison’s litter picking experiences, we’ve been a house of the sick the last couple of weeks (hence the blog inactivity), and boy does that mean we’ve fallen of the plastic redacted band wagon hard.

When we get ill…

We think the youngest may have been patient zero in our house with the local high temperature cold virus that is doing the rounds at the moment. She had it over a couple of days, a tad hot and fractious, but generally fine. Then Mr Harrison was struck down – we didn’t see him for two days as he hid in bed. Then it was my turn to get all poorly, which the worst bit coincided with the weekend. though I wasn’t as feverish as Mr Harrison I was permanently hacking my lungs up in a particularly dry cough. The cough was so nasty, my boss politely suggested that working at home to avoid infecting everyone else in the office might be a nice idea.

Its just not fair – kids get over these things in minutes while it takes us frail adults’ weeks to get through the same bug and then even more time recovering from the dam thing. However, we seem to have a rule of three in our house when struck down by illness – three of us get what ever the bug is going and one escapes. There are pros and cons as to if this is one of the adults or not – I mean would you like to be the sole survivor handling two kids vomiting or would you like to be vomiting with them? It’s very much a Catch 22 situation.

On to the plastic

So elevated single use plastic consumption has in part been down to general stuff that was already in the house, so it was a bit of a silver lining as it’s helped clear some of the single use plastic out of the house. So, here is the list of plastic shame and tips for future bouts of illness:

Disposable tissues – we’ve always got in the bathroom cupboard some Klenex Balsam pocket tissues that come in single use plastic wrap that can’t be recycled. I’ve tended to use these as they don’t rub my skin raw when you use them. To avoid the plastic wrap, I could get a carboard box of tissues in future. However, though tissues are made of paper, they can’t be recycled due to their very short fibres, so off to landfill / incinerators they must go.

Also, I’m not entirely sure if the tissues themselves are from recycled materials. The Kleenex website is a bit vague only saying “100% of the fibre used in Kleenex® tissues come from legal and sustainable sources”.

Perhaps its time to invest in some good old fashioned cotton hankies? Some debates out there on the web as to what is more hygienic – the tissue or the hankie, which may steer one toward the tissue route based on the rather aggressive catch it, bin it, kill it strategy the NHS ran a few years back. Though actually the bit that is the carrier of the virus to others is your hands handling the tissues and the handkerchiefs, so if you keep those clean it should be ok. So off to track down some hankies in town tomorrow.

Cough sweets – I picked up some lozenges from Lidal which unfortunately had lots of plastic wrapping. Is there an alternative? I have found a few cough drop recipes so I might give them a whirl next time I start getting a tickle at the back of my throat.

Cough Syrup – yep this comes in a plastic bottle and lid, so not great. Part way though cold-mageddon, we ran out so was able to get a different brand that came in a glass bottle and no cardboard box (bonus!). Downside was it tasted pretty awful – that means it works right? By the end I was just ploughing through home-made honey and lemon before heading off to bed, which was probably just as successful sorting out my sore through and cough.

Paracetamol, lots of paracetamol – like most pills, these come cocooned in plastic of unknown origins. Now I’m not sure there is a way around this other than perhaps glugging vast quantities of the kids Calopl, which comes in a glass jar, to get up to the dosage of a paracetamol capsule (that’s 4 teaspoons ish [120 mg per 5 ml] to one capsule [500 mg] at a guess). But then there is probably the same amount of plastic waste if not more in the plastic child safety cap to the bottle as there is to the plastic packaging for the pills. Therefore, paracetamol pills are here to stay.

Emergency purchase of plastic wrapped meat – general state of tiredness meant less energy to muster expeditions to the shops or butchers, so there were a number of tea times where “eke, we haven’t got anything to feed the kids” so Mr Harrison bravely made his way to the local corner shop and came back with some plastic package meat. One of which as a pack of bacon – said bacon made an appearance at an all day meeting the other week when I discovered that I hadn’t picked up my sandwiches I’d made the night before, but rather the bacon in an identical plastic container. Was a tad embarrassing…

In our defence, we were ill and its been an experience we’ve been able to identify a couple of places we can keep on redacting more plastic. Looking forward to the cough drop sweet making session!