A bit of inspiration from SleepyGreen's blog. I was intriged by her blog, so I decided to look up on the net about 'Froggles'.....it seems pretty darn interesting! I nicked this from the independant....big time lol.

Last week Laura Cousins chose to make some soap. She had all the ingredients: the drain cleaner, essential oil and rain water. "But I didn't have the sugar thermometers I needed, or a stainless steel pan, or a pair of rubber gloves."

Cousins is part of the new "froogle" movement, which began in America. "Froogles" are environmentally-motivated types who use the internet to help them cut their consumerism back to basics. The trend grew out of waste-reducing internet groups like "Freecycle", where goods are exchanged for free. Then in December 2004, New Yorker Judith Levine realised she had spent over $1,000 in the run-up to Christmas and resolved to tap the ATM for nothing but necessities for the next 12 months.

In her book about her fritter-free year, Not Buying It, Levine challenged her country's consumer culture. "In New York, only a day after the towers fell," she writes, "Mayor Rudolph Giuliani counselled his trembling constituents to 'show you're not afraid. Go to restaurants. Go shopping.' When the world's people asked how they could help, he said, 'Come here and spend money.' Shopping became a patriotic duty. Buy that flat screen TV, our leaders commanded, or the terrorists have won."

Levine questioned if freedom could really be bought at the cash register. She'd heard of the International "Buy Nothing Day", but decided to take things 364 days further. In December 2005, a group of 50 San Franciscans made an identical pledge for 2006. Calling themselves "The Compact", this assortment of teachers, engineers, executives and other professionals vowed "to go beyond recycling in trying to counteract the negative global environmental and socio-economic impacts of US consumer culture, to resist global corporatism, and to support local businesses, farms, etc - a step, we hope, inherits the revolutionary impulse of the Mayflower Compact; to reduce clutter and waste in our homes; to simplify our lives".

Their resolution permitted the purchase of food, health and safety items and underwear. Other items could be acquired second hand. Nine months on the group is still hanging in there.

Inspired by the secular Lents of Levine and The Compact, Cousins decided she'd commit to her own 12 months of "froogalism". As we sit down for coffee in her cosy suburban home, the 39-year old drum-circle facilitator explains that she inherited a strong reduce, re-use and recycle philosophy from her parents. "They grew up during the war, and were used to a degree of deprivation. Then they moved out to California in the 1950s and I was born there in the 1960s. They never threw anything away, so green issues had always been there for me.

Cousins gets her clothes from charity shops and jokes that she'd have to move if her local Age Concern closed. I ask about underwear. She giggles. "I haven't needed any new yet, though I admit I wouldn't buy any second-hand. But my five-year-old son's wearing second-hand pants. A friend's son grew very quickly and she passed them on."

Cousins' husband, David, admits that he hasn't gone for the project 100 per cent. He keeps tropical fish, which need new things. And Cousins herself has cheated a little already. When she needed some camomile teabags she asked her brother if he had any. He didn't but went out and bought some for her, in exchange for a lift in her car. "That's not really the way it's meant to work," she says.

.................it does go on from there...article is http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/froogles-the-new-challenge-to-rampant-consumerism-418795.html