A staff member at the University of Bath is starting her second year of abstaining from shopping, in a personal bid to help the environment.
Christine Bone, an administrator and student on the School of Management’s MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice, has committed herself to ‘compacting’, a lifestyle movement which began in America and focuses on shuning all shopping for anything new.
‘Compacters’ can borrow, barter or buy second-hand but pledge to buy only new goods such as food, toiletries and medicines.
“I started out hoping to do a whole year, and my husband and I made a bet with each other of £100 that we couldn’t keep the compact, but we both did,” said Mrs Bone.
“I loved shopping and it was a big part of my life but the course I am doing about business, community and sustainability really made me want to go beyond recycling and re-using to actually reduce what I buy in the first place.
Mrs Bone finished on a hopeful note: “I’m not going to be preachy about compacting because I have a lot to learn and we all have to make compromises, but I hope that it might catch on now that people are really feeling the pinch. It’s about making your own rules and keeping to them, whatever they are.”
Read the full press release on the University of Bath News website.
Content added on 12 January 2008.
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