It's a dull Tuesday afternoon. I've just been out for a walk with my wife around the local estate to get away from the desk and enjoy some fresh air. I can sit at my desk all day and night sometimes, so having that little break during the day just helps to refresh the mind and break up the day; otherwise, the week is over in the blink of an eye.

Whilst walking, my wife and I were talking about compostable sponges, as you do :). We sell them online here, and they're really good. As daft as it sounds, I feel a little smug when I'm using one because I'm not using one of those horrible plastic ones anymore. But for the price of one of our compostable sponges, my wife said she could buy a pack of six plastic ones—you know the type, yellow or blue with a rough scrubbing layer that always goes really horrible after a few uses.

I knew this already, but it got us talking about the whole climate change message and what people can realistically do on a day-to-day basis to help mitigate the problem. The climate change message is met with all sorts of backlash: from a hatred of Greta, to cloud seeding, to money-grabbing politicians. The arguments are misguided, the data untrusted, and the potential consequences unfathomable.

So, we need to bring the conversation down to an individual level but reaffirm the bigger picture. The choices we make matter. We might feel that buying a compostable sponge is too small an act, but if enough people care and make that switch, it helps the manufacturers of these sponges grow, influences their business direction, and promotes the production of more sustainable products, which in turn can fuel a business. It also gives the user a sense of pride. Yes, it might cost more, but only in monetary terms. It costs a hell of a lot more in terms of environmental damage when buying the cheap plastic sponges.

I say, any action you take, whether big or small, that seems (I'll come back to this) like the right thing to do for people and the planet—do it. Think about the swaps you can make. Think about the plastic all around us. Think about the toxins being poured into our waterways. Just think, and try—just try—to do something that makes life a little better.

*I said I'd come back to the word "seems" because there are very clever, devious, or naive people in this world doing jobs that trick us into thinking something is good when it's not. "Greenwashing" is most definitely a thing. But we're all about not feeling guilty: read the labels, make a decision, and if you find out a product is not what you thought it was, swap it. We’ll try to help on that journey too. There’s a great magazine we subscribe to called Ethical Consumer. If you can, we recommend signing up. Alternatively, we'll include snippets in our email newsletters, which you can sign up for by clicking the pop-up on the bottom left of our website.