Bristol woman urges more sustainable shopping this Christmas
Barbara Bloomfield got all her presents from a reuse shop, for just £15
A woman from Bristol has told us everyone should shop more sustainably this Christmas, after managing to get all her presents from a second hand store, for just £15.
Barbara Bloomfield volunteers at Bristol Waste's reuse shop in Avonmouth and managed to get all her gifts from there this year.
We decided to speak to her about how she managed it and what it's made her realise about Christmas.
"This is like a ramping up of something we've (her family) have tried to do before," she said.
"We've always had a bit of a £5 limit on Christmas presents and both my daughters are quite ecologically minded, quite political I suppose in a way, so I decided to ramp it up this year and rather than say we won't buy anything, I said why don't I support the great stuff we've got at Avonmouth in the waste shop."
Barbara describes the site, which is just off Kings Weston Lane, as like a big charity shop with all sorts of things on sale including toys, furniture, kitchenware and, slightly bizarrely, compost.
We asked her how difficult it was to find what she needed.
"Well it was surprisingly easy," she said.
"I've got a little grandson who's only seven months old, and I managed to score a, I can say this because he won't know...I got him some wooden toys, a xylophone and some bricks and things that he can knock over, you know really good stuff. I was surprised."
Barbara calls it a "waste" that so many people at Christmas will buy brand new presents, often at great expense, for people that don't really need them.
"I just don't know why I ever thought that it was a good idea to spend loads of money on things that I don't really need," she said.
"I just feel really passionately now that reuse is the way forward. There's so much stuff in our homes and in the world that we don't need, so much stuff that's harming the planet, and I don't want to add to that."
Last month we heard stats that 80 percent of all things bought on Black Friday in 2020, was either thrown away immediately or chucked out after just one use.
An expert we spoke to at the time said "it's now clear" that Black Friday is having a large, negative, environmental impact.