Shopping Sustainably - Yep, it's possible!

1. Introduction: Humans are consumers. We love things, but oftentimes the things that weakens you can, I will massive environmental and social impact. If you've chosen to take this class, perhaps you interested in reflecting on your own consumption habits and then learning how to minimize your own impact. Maybe you're wondering, what should I be buying? Where should I be shopping? My name is Shelly around me and I'm on sustainability and climate activist and blogger. My mission is to help you find products that are made with the environment and the people making them in mind. In this class, we'll be covering everything from mobile phones to cosmetics, clothing to food, how to buy them from ethical sources. We'll talk about what the words ethical and sustainable even mean and how they can mean different things to different people. This class is divided into six chapters. And each chapter will include a different product category. Ready to start your journey to a more sustainable life. Let's get started. 2. Chapter 1 - Food: Let's start with something we all consume. Food. Don't worry, I'm not going to ask you to go vegetarian or vegan. I'm not vegan myself. I'm just going to put some facts out there and propose better options. Before we get into the shopping bit of food sustainability, I would be remiss if I failed to mention the biggest issue around food. Food waste, $700 billion worth of food is wasted each year. Can you wrap your head around that? That's billion with a B. So a big part of the puzzle is cutting down food waste. To put things into perspective, food waste has a higher carbon footprint than the entire airline industry. A lot of food gets wasted in the supply chain which you and I, as consumers can't do anything about. But a lot of the food also gets wasted in our homes. And here's what we can do about it. We can store up food properly and reorganize our fridge from time-to-time. Ever gone into your fridge and found old food or fruits and veggies that got lost because there was just so much clutter. We can get a green fridge. What is that? It's a fridge that helps us produce last longer. In your notes, I've included a list of some brands that sell green fridges. Number three, we can get ethylene observers. These are little pouches we can put into a fridges, crisper drawers, and our fruits and veggies will write them slower. Now let's do you know how to reduce food waste? Let's get into the shopping bit. What should we buy? What should we eat? Well, let's start with what not to eat. There are some foods that are just really bad for the environment because of the amount of resources they consume. There are three foods that are particularly bad, namely almond milk, cereal, and soda. That's not all. Soda companies are some of the most shooting companies on the planet. Now, let's address the elephant in the room. I know you've all been waiting for this. What about meat? This class is not going to ask you to go vegan. It's just not practical for all humans. However, when it comes to meat, there are certain types of meat that have a higher carbon footprint than others. You know what I'm talking about? Beef. One meal of beef steak can emit about 330 grams of carbon. That's equivalent to driving a car for three miles. But if we switch to chicken, carbon emissions come down to 52 grams, just less than five times. Even if you don't give up before entirely. If we just cut down the frequency at which we eat beef, or we can cut down the portion size. We're going to make a huge difference in our own personal carbon footprint. Lucky for us. Lab grown meat is gaining a lot of interest in the market and it likely going to hit the mainstream market rate. What about fish them? Well, oceans are pretty much the lungs of the planet. Marine phytoplankton produce more oxygen than the entire Amazon. Rain forest. Fishing is part of many cultures around the world for so many centuries and fish is part of many cultures diets and that doesn't have to change. The thing however, that is damaging ecosystems, marine ecosystems is commercial fishing. They caused huge nets in the ocean, catching everything in the week, leading to a lot of bycatch and damaging the seafloor. Get this 50 million sharks are caught and killed unintentionally by as bycatch. Each year. Ten to 40 per cent of all fish ever got our bycatch. That means they're caught and then the thrown into the ocean because they never meant to be God. But by the time they're caught and thrown in there already dead. Experts say that the ocean will be fish less by 2048. Grandchildren, they mean that was C1. So cutting down fish intake or even better, giving up fish might be the most sustainable option. Of course, if you're visiting a fishing village and the people there are catching fish locally and they're catching fish fresh for your meal. By all means, you should enjoy that. But it's commercial fishing, that's the problem. If you're wondering what about farmed fish, then unfortunately, the situation is even more dire. Fish farming is extremely harmful to the environment and salmon farms of destroying mangrove habitats around the world. Enough about the problem stripe, here are some solutions summed up for you. Buy from local brands rather than international brands. This way, you save on shipping emissions and support local businesses. Buy from bookstores and cut down on plastic waste by from ethical stores like Whole Foods. If you can afford it. Cut down your consumption of meat, especially beef and fish. Cut down on food waste, compost to food scraps. That's the end of chapter one. We can still enjoy food without destroying the environment. If you pay just a little bit of attention. I'll see you for chapter two. 3. Chapter2 - Clothes: Chapter two, clothes. Did you know that fashion is one of the most polluting industries in the world. Shocking, right? If you're thinking when I'm not into fashion, I don't really care about fashion that much. So this chapter isn't for me. Wait, wait right there. As long as you wet clothes, you're part of the fashion supply chain. In the last few years, a trend called fast fashion took the world by storm. It essentially means selling low quality clothes at very low prices. Stocking the shelves with new designs every week, making clothes or disposable item in the consumer psyche. What does this mean? It means higher land, water and pesticide usage for cotton plantations. It means more water pollutions around dying facilities. Higher dependency on the oil and gas industry for polyester and more microplastics in the ocean. It also means extremely low wages for people making these garments in places like Vietnam, Bangladesh. What do you buy it, right? These are some materials that do not harm the environment as much. Organic cotton. Regular cotton has very high carbon footprint. Look for the gods certification. Linen, hemp. Economy, regenerate the nylon, dental and modal, and other recycled materials. So where do you shop? The most sustainable way to buy clothes second-hand. Now, I acknowledged that this might not be for everyone. Not everyone wants to wear clothes that have been worn by someone else. But if this is not the case, If you don't mind buying secondhand, you have hundreds of options to choose from. Look for thrift stores near you or check out one of these online shops depending on which country you're based in. There, so many ethical brands out there that you can choose from depending on where you are, it's always advisable to buy local. Here are some resources you can follow in order to find local ethical fashion brands in your area. If you're out shopping at the mall or in the market and you look, you find a brand. And if you're wondering how that brand is doing in terms of sustainability, there is an app that allows you to put the name of the brand and tells you how the brand is doing in terms of labor, environment, and animal welfare. The app is called Good on you. It's been very useful to me. I use it all the time whenever I want to research a brand. So check it out and it might be very valuable to you. It might seem daunting to go through all of this trouble just to buy a t-shirt. Once you get a hang of the process, trust me, it can be fun. And once you learn about all the unthinkable atrocity, some of the most popular brands in the world are responsible for. You'll never want to buy from them again. That brings us to the end of this chapter. I'll see you at the next chapter. 4. Chapter3 - Shoes & Bags: Chapter three, shoes and bags. Shoes and bags out there. I'm made of one of two things. Leather or polyurethane or B. Let's get into leather first. I'm not going to talk about the whole letter is bad because it's comes from animal philosophy. I think that's personal preference. But there's another issue with leather that needs to be addressed. Leather tanning. Most leather is done in the developing world, especially India and Bangladesh, and the process involves large quantities of toxic chemicals, especially chromium. The issue with this, almost no regulations in countries where letters stand around the use of chromium. And almost always the residue of these chemicals are dumped into nearby rivers. Entire generations of children in Canada, India, have been found to be born with birth defects. Because of the high level of toxicity in the nearby rivers. Others have developed cancers and neurological disorders. That's not all. The workers that are handling these chemicals seldom use any protection and are exposed to these toxic chemicals day in and day out. So what's the alternative? Natural leather? Naturally tanned leather. Brands like high design produce gorgeous, high-quality leather goods with Dan, without any chemicals. Leather alternatives that have just recently hit the market. Some of them may not be accessible everywhere and at all price points now, but they definitely will be in the near future. These include mushroom leather, cactus letter, pineapple leather, or buying a text, Apple leather, cork and recycled rubber. My go-to is always high-quality, naturally tanned leather bags and shoes. I know that it's high-quality. No chemicals have been used in producing it because it's leather. It's going to last me a long time, sometimes decades. As an example, this is a bag that I got, I got from the Indian brand high design. And you can see the bag is shiny, almost like a regularly tanned leather bag, but it's a vegetable. Tanned leather. It's naturally tanned leather. They have the certification for it. Let's talk about the second material, BU. A polyurethane. Pu is essentially plastic, its derivative plastic that's made to look like leather. But it usually falls apart within two to three years. Once you're done with it, it goes straight to landfill. It cannot be recycled. What's the alternative? Recycled bags like Cancun and free tag? Or for a more sustainable alternative, bags made from recycled polyester or equal nil from brands like back safe. This is my taxi backpack. It's made from a 100% equal new post-consumer waste. So it's nylon, but it's recycled or regenerated nylon. And this nylon use could be, could have come from old fishing nets in the bottom of the ocean or an old so far old carpet that had been discarded and was in the landfill. So yeah, it's a sturdy, perfectly good nylon backpack. That's all for shoes and bags. I'll see you in the next chapter. Phones. 5. Chapter 4 - Phones: Chapter four, folds towards planned obsolescence. All the brands out there, Apple, Samsung, Google. All of them have one thing in common. They all want us to buy a new phone every 12 months or so. I mean, they all cost anywhere between 600 to $1200 and they want us to buy a new phone every 12 months. How crazy is that? And we do it. We buy a new phone almost every year or every two years because we have two, we don't have a choice. The upgrades render our phone useless after time. Imagine the amount of e-waste that it creates. Imagined the number of phones lying in landfills right now. Imagine the number of phones just lying in people's drawers that have been rendered useless because of the last update. And they don't know what to do with it. We've all become victims of the scam. There is one way out. It's the fair phone. If you haven't already heard about the fair phone, It's exactly what the name suggests. It's a phone that doesn't die when you upgraded. It's a phone you can prepare yourself without being an engineer or next foot. They want you to repair it. The wonderful and the last as long as possible. The beauty of the fearfulness that if one thing breaks, you don't have to replace the whole phone. So for example, if the speaker breaks, you can actually go to the fair phone website and buy just the part of the speaker. And they'll ship it to you. And you can easily open the phone without being an expert or an engineer. Replaced the speaker. Or if the camera breaks, the screen breaks, you can go to the website and order just that part. You can order the screen or the battery and they ship it to you and you can easily open the screen apart and replace the screen. And your phone is going to be good as new. It's the polar opposite of the iPhone or full like that. Which aware the phone is like mystery box that you cannot access unless you're really an expert. All the metals used in the fair phone or sustainably sourced, all the plastic that is used in the phone is recycled. Not to mention that all the packaging used in phone is all recycled. The fair phone costs around $650. And to be honest with you, you cannot really compare the quality of the screen or the camera to that of the Google Pixel or the iPhone. But if you're sick and tired of the scam of the smartphone companies making you, making a product obsolete every year and making you need to buy a new phone all the time, then this is your readout. Get a fearful. That's all performance. I'll see you for the next chapter. Cosmetics and makeup. 6. Chapter 5 - Cosmetics & Makeup: Chapter five, cosmetics and makeup. When it comes to hygiene and beauty products, it's not just the fact that most of these products are packaged in plastic, but more importantly, a lot of the ingredients used in this products can be really dangerous to our health and well-being. Don't fall for words like natural, organic, and Hubble, because really there is no legal definition for words like this. There is no third body checking to see if when a brand uses the word organic on the label, is it really organic? So really anyone can slap anything on the label. When it comes to buying personal care products. You have to be smart. You don't want to be putting toxins into your body. According to dermatologist Dr. Anthony, yield. These are the five ingredients you must try to avoid at all costs. Because everything from cancer to birth defects. I'm not going to try to pronounce them because honestly, I will butcher the names but here, there. But how do you identify these ingredients when you go to the drugstore or the supermarket, right? It's really hard. So that's why I'll give you a list of brands that make natural skincare. Products that are not just made with natural ingredients, but also come in sustainably sustainable packaging. Now, let's talk about makeup. There are two ingredients that we should absolutely try to avoid in makeup. Their lead and mica. Lead, as you may know, is a highly toxic ingredient. And unfortunately, a lot of the mainstream makeup brands use lead lipsticks. So we should absolutely, absolutely try to avoid LED and our lipsticks. Another element is Micah. Micah has a very problematic supply chain and this is why most of my car is mined in rural India where child labor is rampant and slavery is very common. The beat is very meager. You might be wondering where is Mike I use mica is that shimmery element that gives that natural glowy look to are highlighted or bronzes and eye shadow. And so I will be providing a list of brands that are lead for you and Mike are free or use use sustainably sourced Micah. These are some brands that not only use natural ingredients, but also use sustainable packaging. Finally, one of the easiest way to make a sustainable switch in your bathroom is to switch to bars as opposed to bottles. Brands like lush and ethic offers bars for shampoo conditioner as well as moisturizers. That's all it's for personal care products. I'll see you for the next chapter. 7. Chapter 6 - Cars & Scooters: Chapter six, cars and scooters. The answer is obvious, electric vehicles. But many, many people are still conflicted on the true cost of owning an electric vehicle. Doesn't the grid have to be powered by renewable source, doesn't take a lot of energy to make batteries. I want to settle this debate for you once and for all and give you some clarity on this issue. The international consulting firm Ricardo, was commissioned a study by the European Union to study the impacts of an EV compared to an internal combustion engine from its cradle to grave. Essentially, they studied both types of engines, from their manufacturer to the usage, to their disposal, from the metals used, to the batteries, to their fuels. All the aspects and this is what they found. Electric vehicles, without a doubt, help cut down emissions compared to internal combustion engine cars. Wait for it. Even if your grid is not renewably powered. That being said, of course, the most sustainable way to go is to use whatever vehicle you own until the end of its life. Or rather even better, the most sustainable way to go is to not own a vehicle at all. And you use public transport if you're fortunate enough to have good public transport where you live. The same applies to all the bikes and scooters. Congratulations my friend. We reached the end of this class. A final note from me before I sign out. Although we've talked about how to buy things in an ethical manner in this class. Ultimately, the most sustainable way to live is to reduce the amount of things we bye. Thank you for joining me for this class. Ciao, ciao.