Amid a sea of terrible news, going green is becoming more important than ever

Celebrating my youngest’s without plastic-filled party bags felt like a win, says Kate Hughes

It’s never felt more right to blow out the candles on non-recyclable, single-use party bags (Getty)

For a moment, it felt like a tiny but significant win. And at a celebration too. It was my youngest’s fifth birthday on Saturday. We had his friends round for games, cake and general chaos. All reassuringly ordinary, normal and safe. And at the end of the day the rabble of smalls departed, sans party bag.

If you’re a parent, you’ll know that’s high risk. It’s certainly something that has come back round to bite us more than once as we pursue a zero waste life.

Our lad was a newborn when we ditched the bin, so we’ve had a few bites at the no plastic party cherry, numerous lockdown birthdays notwithstanding. We’ve employed various tactics, from sending kids home with the equivalent value in book vouchers (back in the no fun mum phase), to the classic packet of seeds and a flower pot (which got rolled out three times before one particularly precious six-year-old screamed in my face that she hated gardening).

In fact, none of it met with much approval from the army of expectant ankle-biters. Or, for that matter, the parents who claim to hate the plastic tat as much as us.

Not this time though, nobody batted an eyelid. So it felt like a win – and we need a couple of those right now. It felt like a win against a norm that suggests children need to be bribed with stuff to have fun, given gifts to attend someone else’s birthday.

In fact, as we’d made a conscious decision to use the no-parties-Covid-reset to get off the thundering train that demanded more extravagance, greater piles of consumables, and general one-upmanship with every passing stop, we could tick a few boxes on the cost and simplicity front too.

But let’s be honest, it’s all pretty trite amid the daily cascade of terrible news – from domestic fears over keeping the lights on, to images of kids my son’s age watching their fathers from departing train carriages in Ukraine.

And always, in the background, climate change.

You’d be forgiven for missing the details from the last report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) recently. Which didn’t make for great reading either.

For starters, there were the warnings of misinformation campaigns across the pond, which came to mind as Nigel Farage made that bizarre, and inaccurate attempt to derail the UK’s Net Zero pledge here in the UK this week. (Yes, the one we’ve already voted on and for.)

And as we all start making the connection between wheat in fields in eastern Europe and the price of a loaf in the supermarket down the road, I’m reminded of the panel’s warnings of ‘substantive’ falls in crops across Europe this century thanks in large part to water scarcity as temperatures rise. (See also wildfires already creating a third of the world’s carbon emissions and modelling that predicts extinctions across Australasia and massive increases in coastal damage.)

There’s also the small matter of the Amazon rainforest now being so weakened that it can’t recover from droughts and fires.

All in all then, whether or not an unimportant bunch of sugar-filled reception kids got their sticky fingers on a party bag or not as they went about an average, safe, normal Saturday would be a laughable subject for an article right now, if there was much to laugh about.

I’m sure as hell not going to take away the few plastic toys still owned or recently given to the tiny Ukrainian boy staying with us right now, for example.

But the more I think about it, the more important it becomes to throw everything we’ve got into an environmentally responsible way of life – from dealing with that now familiar sense of individual impotence (interestingly, the IPCC report assessed the effect of climate change on mental health for the first time in February’s report, particularly among children and young adults) to mitigating the rising cost of living, to finally acknowledging the fundamental and growing link between climate change, economic and foreign policy.

‘Going Zero: One Family’s Journey to Zero Waste and a Greener Lifestyle’, by Kate Hughes, is now available to order