HELLO! I’M SOPHIE

I’m Sophie Tait and I live in South-East London with my nine year old identical twin girls, a pretty decent husband and two mildly annoying cats.

Environmental and ethical issues have always been pretty high on my agenda. I’ve been vegetarian my whole adult life, and (imperfectly) vegan for the past three years. But it’s only really been the last couple of years that the problems our planet face have come into sharp focus. It has become abundantly clear that unless we all radically change how we live, that things don’t look good. When thinking about the scary world my girls will inherit, this weighs pretty heavily on my mind.

I’m also convinced we still have it in our power to change the narrative. But time is running out. We’ve made a lot of changes at home to reduce our carbon footprint. But perhaps the biggest - certainly the most tangible - change has been around plastic. Horrified at the stories about ocean plastic, at the end of 2017, we embarked on a challenge to see if we could cut it back by a pretty bullish 80%. If that wasn’t enough, I was curious to see if we could do it without compromising too much on how we live.

It’s been such an incredibly positive experience. I can honestly say we are living better with far far less plastic (around the 80% less we set out to do - although this fluctuates a bit with the realities of daily life). Nearly every change we’ve made has been one for the better. But it’s taken some hard work to get here. And ‘living better’ might not always mean what you think, or even what I thought it would at the start of the experiment.

Looking back, what I needed was a practical ‘how-to’ guide to help me. One that made it easy. One that showed me it could be sustainable long term. One that showed me that my life could still include lovely things. Unfortunately that guide didn’t exist, so I slowly pieced it together bit by bit. And then I made the guide I wished I’d had myself.

So that’s it really. Thanks for being here. It’s reassuring to know that others care deeply about this stuff too. I truly hope you find something in Trash Plastic that you find useful. Nothing would make me happier than to know this endeavour had prevented even a little bit of plastic from doing harm.

Love, Sophie x

PS It’s probably obvious if you’ve read this far, but Trash Plastic is just me. I’ve never made a website before. I’ve researched, bought, tested, reviewed photographed, edited, written and designed it all myself. It’s been a steep learning curve and it’s taken the best part of a year. I’ve done all I can to be accurate - to list sources, resources, references, suppliers, costs & availability. But I am a regular flawed human and I’m sure I’ve got it wrong in places. Please do let me know where I’ve messed up, or where I could improve. But please try to be kind. I’m just trying to do a good thing :-)