HOW TO SAVE THE PLANET ONE PLASTIC FORK (OR SPOON) AT A TIME

By SHAGORIKA EASWAR

 I love the tagline below publisher Watkins’ name: Sharing Wisdom Since 1893.

If people you’ve been dishing out advice to haven’t come after you then you must be doing something right.

Several years ago, Adria Vassil (Ecoholic, Ecoholic Home, Ecoholic Body) had written about carrying your own containers to bring home leftovers from a restaurant meal. It was a great idea, but one that I never really got around to implementing. In my defence, all I can offer is that I reuse the plastic containers I do bring leftovers home in – or did, pre-COVID – and that our occasional takeout meals now come in. They are very handy to pack food that I want to share with family and friends.

And I’m not into single-use plastics – or so I thought, but more on that in a bit – I dry my clothes in the sun in the summer, I don’t keep the tap running while brushing my teeth, I print on both sides of the paper. And so, I have to confess to being a tad complacent about my efforts to help the environment.

But my conscience was given a sharp prod by Isabel Losada. From a fork, of all things.

In the very first chapter of The Joyful Environmentalist, Dangerous Woman in Whole Foods Without Fork, she describes a laugh-out-loud experience in which she struggles to get the staff at her local Whole Foods to supply her with a metal fork to enjoy her salad with.

The solution as suggested by a woman Losada vents in front of? Carry your own fork.

It really is as simple as that.

The book is packed with ideas on how we can help the planet by changing the ways “we live, work, travel, shop, eat, drink, dress, vote, play, volunteer, bank”. The best part is that she doesn’t get preachy. Not once. She’s fun, clever, and shows you how she does it. There are ideas that require a time commitment and there are ones for the “intention-rich but time-poor”.

In the chapter on how to remove plastics from your home, she comes up with a long list that will have you looking at everything with new eyes. Single-use plastic lurks in places you never imagined, but in plain sight.

Plastic pens.

Disposable razors.

Fruits and vegetables that come shrink-wrapped – cucumbers, I see you! And peppers, snow peas and even corn that come cling-wrapped and in plastic trays.

Cigarette lighters.

And toilet air fresheners.

So what’s the alternative for those, you may well ask. Light a match from one of the match boxes you will replace cigarette lighter with, Losada suggests. “It magically gets rid of any smell.”

Losada puts the higher price for organic food in perspective, sharing a conversation she had with an organic farmer. “The only way we can get away from this is if we start internalizing the costs conventional agriculture places on all of us in terms of pollution, loss of wildlife, loss of biodiversity and climate change. If we counted all this then organic food would be cheap. But I don’t see much hope of that happening.”

She quotes artist and designer William Morris who said, “Have nothing in your home that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful”. To this she adds Gandhi’s philosophy: The less you have the more you are.

She describes her time at Vipassana retreats and what she learnt about mindfulness, of learning to be fully aware of the present moment. Advaita teaches you not to identify with thought at all.

And her experience volunteering with a charity called Trees For Life. She urges people to plant more trees – and to find ways to protect them – because in some parts of the world, deer and sheep devour all tender saplings.

Any time a tiny sapling peeks its head up through the earth, something comes along and eats it. This has led to what is known as ‘geriatric forests’: forests in which all the trees are fully grown, old or dying or dead. No saplings growing beside them.

Rewilding, she explains, “is a way of returning former arable land to a state of natural productivity with obvious benefits to wildlife, the soil, local water supplies, and not least, human enjoyment”.

She introduces me to a delightful new word, Wombles: Vegetarian and recycling creatures, the Wombles first appeared in a series of children’s books by Elizabeth Beresford.

From this to another new concept, The Library of Things, is but a hop and a skip. At this marvellous place in Oxford, people can borrow everything from power tools to children’s toys.

And she advocates changing one’s search engine to Ecosia. It works exactly the same as Google and other search engines – except they plant trees.

So, Wombles unite! Upwards and onwards!  

HAVEN’T THE STORES GOT GALEN WESTON’S MAIL YET?

An email from Galen Weston titled “We have a plastic  problem and Loblaw is part of it”,  recently popped into my Inbox.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Some of the angriest customer emails I’ve ever received were about cucumbers. More specifically, why our multi-pack cucumbers were wrapped in so much plastic. Does that drive you crazy too? Obviously, there were good reasons for the wraps – food safety, maintaining freshness and reducing food waste – but it’s a perfect example of a much bigger problem... plastic waste.

“You may have heard that plastic in our ocean will soon outweigh fish and that each of us eats a credit card worth of micro plastic each week. Here’s another stat: The packaged goods industry – my industry – is responsible for one-third of all that plastic waste.

“It makes me think: If we’re one-third of the problem, we should be at least one-third of the solution. After all, we develop the products, we design the packaging, and we sell the stuff.

“Here’s what you can expect from Loblaw as we bring new energy to the old “Three R’s” – reducing, recycling, and reusing plastics.

“We’re cutting unnecessary plastic. Double-wrapped multi-pack cucumbers are just wrong. So, we’re fixing that problem. We’re also eliminating plastic straws and stir sticks, taking 1.8 million plastic hangers out of the Joe Fresh operation, and looking through our entire business to get rid of this kind of waste. Last I checked, we had more than 100 projects in the works and we’re going to keep at it.

“We’re working on reusable options. By 2025 all President’s Choice products will have recyclable or reusable packaging. This is a big commitment and a challenge. One creative solution is a pilot that starts today in parts of Ontario with “Loop”, which puts big brands, including some of our President’s Choice products, into a system that reuses packaging over and over. Imagine the milkman concept but modernized.” 

Three weeks after the email, I spotted the same shrink-wrapped cucumbers in the produce aisle as before.

So change might still be coming, but we’re not there yet.