We will be starting this project in earnest on the 20th April.
In the meantime, I’ve been doing some general research on changes I need to make to my lifestyle.
There’s already about fifty items on the list, and the list isn’t as easy to write as you may think.
This isn’t a blog about Green Living, but Sustainable Living, so it isn’t just about looking at environmental impacts. I also want to know how changes will impact the economy, communities, businesses, industry, politics, resource management, laws, technologies, progress, and most of all, happiness. Every issue is multi-faceted and complex.
What makes things even harder is that you can’t always trust the research – there is so much bad science on the internet it can be hard to know where to turn. A company slapping ‘eco-friendly’ onto their product isn’t always eco-friendly themselves, both sides have their liars and misconceptions, and when you’re looking through secondary sources can be a bit like playing Chinese whispers, by the time it reaches your ears, it’s gobbledygook. It makes it tough for anyone wishing to go against the grain.
My research background screams at me to do something about this – I’m sure we all get that overwhelming desire to fix the Internet. I can, at least, try.
The first thing I want to tackle this month is reducing my waste. Plastic in particular is something that’s always bugged me. For something that takes forever to biodegrade, we sure do use a lot of it. Take a look around you – look at your clothes, your food packaging, and even your re-usable bags. So much of it is plastic. How bad is it really? What are the worst culprits? And what can I be doing differently? Hopefully these are just some of the questions I’ll be answering in the weeks to come.
Until then, I have a challenge for you:
Don’t buy any single-use plastic bottles this week.
Check in next week and let me know how hard that challenge was. I’m currently typing this, drinking out of a Pump bottle. So I’m not exactly winning.