Weekday Veg!

Ever since I saw Cowspiracy about a month ago, I’ve been meaning to write about the topic of food and sustainability – specifically regarding what I have been learning about the impact of producing and consuming meat on the industrial level it is currently happening in the world.

I have to be honest, I got a bit stuck on the way. I haven’t exactly figured yet what I can add to it. There’s waaaaay too much information to take in and to discuss about, and I lack any form of factual overview on this. All I can gather so far, is that seemingly, the relevant people have already done their homework in researching this and publishing stuff and spreading a message. Several scientists, articles, movies and talks have already come to the conclusion, that the best thing we can do currently for the world in regards of a sustainable future, is to become vegetarian. At least. If not vegan. And like, right freaking now. Or else.

Or else – yes, there’s a pretty grim future for the human race in a couple decades if our food consumption habits continue the track they are currently on. And as overwhelming as this already is, the fact that we seem so oblivious to this is what’s the most mind boggling abouth this.

It boggles my mind that I have considered myself to be somewhat above average in terms of environmental consciousness, with my compulsive recycling habits and very modest consumer lifestyle. And yet here I was, presented with facts that were before unknown to me, like livestock being among the top reasons for deforestation, and a bigger contributor to greenhouse gas emissions than all transportation together. What? Really? Since when?… I was just watching and reading these facts from more and more sources, and kept thinking: how come I haven’t really heard about this? Why did noone ever tell me, that being a vegetarian (or vegan) could have other reasons than simply feeling sorry for animals? That deciding to not eat meat can actually be considered as taking a conscious stand about supporting a sustainable future for humans as a whole? I mean, I don’t know the motivation of other people to be vegetarians, but this is definitely a reason that makes me consider it.

Now I know that the issue doesn’t seem urgent enough, and it’s way too unpleasant to change our diets in such a radical way, especially for reasons that are so beyond us and hence so hard to grasp. I am also aware that going around on the internet yelling at people that they should ‘STOP EATING MEAT!’ probably won’t do the trick either. So I feel like the best I can do from my part is that since I’ve already spent hours going through materials, I can direct anybody who bothers to read my blog to spend your next 6 minutes with the video that I feel might have the biggest impact on you in the shortest amount of time. Please enjoy below, the weekday vegetarian concept from Graham Hill.

Of course, if you’re interested in hearing/reading more about this, I recommend watching Cowspiracy, or any of the sources that I linked in the beginning of the post. Those are all good stuff.

Finally, BYO shopping bag!

Did you notice? Since January 1 of this year, no more free plastic bags are given away in supermarkets in the Netherlands. From now on, retailers must charge their customers for plastic bags an advisory fee of 25 eurocents.

I thought it was very nice touch how already days in advance, every cashier in every shop warned me at checkout how they will soon not be able to give me a plastic bag for free. I was so happy every time, I nodded enthusiastically and said ‘I know’ while packing into my sturdy shopping bag that I’ve been using now for years – courtesy of a Christmas gift from my Mom 3 years ago which was supposed to make me feel less homesick.

Plastic bag bans like this have been introduced in the last years in various countries, one of the most recent examples is England, where shoppers are charged 5p for every new plastic bag they use at large stores in England since October, 2015. Already since then, the number of plastic bags taken home by shoppers for example at Tesco stores has dropped by almost 80%. Can’t wait to see the figures on this for for example Albert Heijn!

These initiatives are part of this big EU project to reduce plastic pollution of streets and waterways. The below infograph sums up the main data points nicely:

In order to reach the above targets, the EU offers 2 options for member states:

• reduce annual average consumption of plastic bags to 90 lightweight bags per citizen by the end of 2019, and 40 by the end of 2025
• or ensure that by the end of 2018, no more light plastic bags are handed over free of charge to shoppers.

So actually, the Dutch are being overachievers, because according the European Commission, with 81 bags per person the Netherlands is already below the target of 2019.

Looking at this graph it almost feels like the NL change is insignificant compared to what a ban like this in the top countries will actually mean. Looking forward to those numbers dropping steeply in all those plastic bag loving areas!

I also wonder though why there’s only estimations  and no proper data for this for a bunch of countries – will make it pretty difficult to track the changes.

Have you compared yourself already to the stats? Are you below the average of 200 a year? Or have you yourself been throwing away every other day a single-use plastic bag? Time to change then!

Takeaway message: if you haven’t been carrying a re-usable shopping bag with you so far, now is the time! Have your pick – there’s plenty out there. (But instead of buying a lot of fancy ones, just remember to take the one you have always with you..).

Last but not least, for those advanced environmentalists who already have their re-usable shopping bags at hand, you can now take your next level at sustainable shopping.

If you have read the details of the ban carefully, you will notice that (unfortunately) some situations are exempt from the free plastic bag ban. This includes amongst others:

• the purchase tax-free liquids, aerosols and gels purchases at airports
• and bags used to pack fruit and vegetables at supermarkets.

Now, I’m not sure what we can do about the airport purchases, as I’m not aware of the regulations there, but there’s a fairly simple solution for the second: carry your own re-usable bags for the fresh goodies! I have just purchased this set of bags – the tiny container bag includes 5 see-through net-like bags that even allow you to wash the veggies and fruits in them.

They are a super simple alternative to the ones offered in the supermarkets. They weigh nothing and take up zero space.

With these, if you buy 2 different fresh items on a weekly basis, you will use 2 x 52 = 156 less plastic bags a year. If everyone had the same habits and adopted the same re-usable alternative, the Netherlands would save an additional 2.6 billion of these superthin lightweight plastic bags within a year.

How many plastic bags will you not use in 2016?

 

Away with the throw-away plastic

I have just recently been on holiday. Holidays are supposed to be these periods of time when one should not worry too much about anything. People go on holidays to relax. So with that in mind, after having boarded the plane towards my holiday destination, I leaned back in my chair to enjoy the upcoming week. And I forgot my worries. I was carefree.

Up until about 40 minutes later, when I was served this:

Before anybody draws the wrong conclusion, this is not one of those posts complaining about the quality of airplane meals. Actually I was very happy with my (vegetarian) dishes. No, it was not my stomach, but my inner environmentalist that got upset: my focus of worry was aimed at the packaging.

(Note: I might risk sounding like a hypocrite at this point, using a largely harmful form of travel  for leisure purposes and then complaining about related, but seemingly relatively small issues. So I would like to point out that I am amidst my attempts of transitioning to a more sustainable lifestyle, and have not yet figured out the puzzle of travel yet. Also not the magnitude of each issue that can or can’t be tackled in my life. So I am still at the beginning, and I’m starting small. And to be honest, seemingly tiny issues, when added up, become pretty big anyway.)

Because sure enough, we were all served our meals in single-use plastic.

Single-use plastic. Not once, not twice, but served to us everytime, for everything. Food, drinks, everything else. Which on this particular 10 hour flight over the Atlantic meant:

• a snack and a drink
• a sanitary napkin
• a full-fledged lunch – including a small water bottle
• another drink
• a full-fledged dinner – including a small water bottle
• aaaand one more drink

On top of that, we also got those prepackaged headphones which unfortunately I believe are also not recycled (answer from KLM pending on that).

I did appreciate however, the gesture and thought that was printed on this box:

As you can imagine, after witnessing all this, my inner environmentalist wasn’t really on holiday throughout this holiday. I kept being baffled by the fact that something so wasteful is still in practice in 2016 several thousand times everyday, and noone seems to bat an eye about it. This whole line of thought became especially confusing, because KLM is the world’s most sustainable airline.

So I started investigating. I had no idea, but plastic cutlery apparently became so widely used on airlines after the 9/11 attacks, although a lot of airlines seemed to have switched back to metal since then. I tried to find info specifically for KLM, and strikingly enough, turns out that they intentionally opted for the throw-away packaging on intercontinental flights because single-use plastic solutions are better for the environment according to this article. It’s explained how on an overall scale the environmental impact is smaller – which is great info, it’s exactly the type of stuff I want experts to calculate and tell me, as I have no clue how much energy and whatnot is costs to clean re-usable cutlery, etc.

However, there is one thing I don’t really understand about the abovementioned study: for some reason the comparison was done between single-use plastic and porcelain, where the weight of the porcelain clearly outweighs (pun intended) the advantages of the re-using. I wonder though, why someone would want to use porcelain on a plane. Why not compare to bamboo? Or more durable re-usable plastic? Apparently some other airlines re-use their plastic plates and cutlery up to 30 times. Why not compare these practices? Or why not at least reuse for example the cup and cutlery for one person for the whole period of the flight, instead of having a new one for every meal?…

Anyway, I won’t figure out the above question unless I talk to KLM, which I might end up doing. Until then though, I still need to find that better solution I was trying to figure out earlier, a solution that I can implement myself, or anyone in fact, without having to wait for huge corporations to implement the change first.

While sipping from my beloved Dopper waterbottle (picture above) it slowly it dawned on me: there’s no way around this but to carry my own cutlery around. I mean, I am already carrying the above waterbottle around with me all the time, so a piece of cutlery really shouldn’t be that big of a deal right? And apparently, I’m not the only one arriving to this conclusion – here is a very insightful article on why we should all carry our own cutlery around.

Imagine if for example every passenger aboard a Boeing 747-400 would carry their own re-usable cutlery for an intercontinental holiday. That would save 268 (max. passengers) x 2 (nr. of meals) x 2 (roundtrip) = 1072 plastic cutlery sets from being thrown away.

Or if every person in the U.S. did the same for a year, they would save 1.8 (nr. of flights an average U.S. citizen takes a year) x 319 million (population of U.S.) = 574 million plastic cutlery sets from going to the landfill.

 

On that, note, I’m about to order this durable piece of spork that I shall carry around and make people confused when I refuse their single-use cutlery and pull this out of my bag instead. I’ll report on how that goes.

May the spork with you.