The UnSchool Journal provides weekly brain activating thinking food from leading experts and community members into systems thinking, activating sustainability, the circular economy, creative change-making and design.
The UnSchool of Disruptive Design turns 9 years old this week! What an immense pleasure it’s been to create and share this experimental knowledge lab with tens of thousands of people from around the world over the last 9 years.
By Leyla Acaroglu, originally published on Medium
Image by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on UnSplash
I think it’s safe to say everyone has done this at some stage.
We’ve popped the coffee cup into the recycling bin with some coffee still in it and the lid on, or that thin plastic wrapper, a pizza box, lightbulb, broken drinking glass, batteries, chopsticks, maybe even an extension cord (I’ve seen it happen), and hoped that it would go off and be magically made into some new thing.
Yet the truth is, we don’t have a magical recycling system where everything can be easily transformed into something new. In fact, most things you think are recyclable, are probably not. Recycling has not been able to keep up with the rapid changes to our hyper-disposable and complex material world. Yes, your uncoated paper, tin and aluminum cans, PET bottles, and a few other ridged plastic products can technically be recycled, but the vast majority of the packaging and products that end up in your home, can’t or won’t get a second life.
Waste collection systems all over the world are struggling with the diversity of material combinations of products and packaging. Coupled with the recent changes to the global recycling supply chain, we have an exponential waste crisis unfolding. The list of what not to include in your recycling (because it will end often up contaminating the entire load of recyclables and be destined for landfill or incineration, all at a cost to the recycling company) is long. It’s actually surprising just how many not-to-include items are on the list in some places. That’s because recycling is different everywhere, and because we have created a material world so complex, it’s hard for the waste processors to keep up with the diversity of ever-changing waste streams.
When modern recycling first became a regular curbside thing in the 70’s (in part to reduce the amount of waste filling up city landfills), the material world was very different. Originally it was just glass, metal and paper that were separated and collected. These had clear markets they could be sold back into, and so the economics of recycling was feasible. Then came combination products like tetra packs and chip packets (plastic and aluminum together), and a vast number of plastics. The diversity of new packages and household products started to really muddy the waters for the recyclers, and over time, most recycling moved to a single market — China.
Now we live in a material age where there are tens of thousands of different material and product combinations that enter homes the world over, and after a few decades of being told that recycling is great, we wishfully place many of them in the recycle bin, feeling good and hoping for the best.
Take, for example, the samples of packaging that I collected from different retailers in the UK. I found instructions, in small print on the back, mainly telling me that the products needed to be returned to the supermarket or were not recyclable at all. I was alarmed by how many packages (organic food products I might add) explicitly stated: “Do not recycle.” Nearly all of them were non-recyclable in my household collection system, yet a quick look in the shared recycling bin in my apartment block and it was overflowing with these very same un-recyclable materials.
The issue of greenwashing — misleading consumers into thinking something is green, or in this case recyclable, when it’s not — is a topic I have talked about in the past, and this certainly plays into the wishcycling issue. But it’s not as simple as all of us being manipulated or duped into thinking that everything with a recycling symbol is recyclable.
Many of us really do wish that things we buy can be recycled because it validates us buying them to begin with.
Organic products with different instructions on where and if the packaging can be recycled!
The people producing these types of packaging and products are very rarely thinking about the end-of-life issues that their material combination choices will have on a waste stream. They deflect responsibility onto us, the customers, and onto the city that will have to manage the plethora of produced waste from their poor designs. I also think it’s unfair that there is an expectation that the customer will be able to decipher the many different options for end-of-life management, for what appears to be the same types of materials, when they are not, as there are hundreds of different types of polymer combinations.
Equally, retailers don’t set adequate guidelines on what types of packaging they will accept in their products, so it becomes a free-for-all. Without shaming the specific brands or supermarkets, I can say that a quick walk up and down the isles of several UK supermarkets showed me that most of the packaging was un-recyclable. I’m going to guess this is the same in Australia, North American, China and most other major economies.
How can we, the customers, be responsible for not recycling when so much of what our food and hygiene products are designed into, is packaging that is not even collected in most cities? Here is a selection of packaging from fruit and nut packaging from major UK supermarkets, all non-recyclable. I wasn’t just cherry-picking these ether! Go look in your cupboards and see what is actually recyclable, and what is most likely not.
Orange, lime and nut bags from two different UK supermarkets, all not recyclable.
Plastics are particularly problematic as they are not easily recycled. Whilst the industry invested 50 million dollars a year to convince us that a number inside a triangle stamped on the base of a piece of plastic will mean that the product will be recycled, the likelihood of it being turned into something new will depend on many different factors, such as: if it’s even technically possible to recycle it (often not); how contaminated with food or product it is; if the local council will collect it; if the local municipal waste processing facility will take it; and if there is a market for that type of plastic to be sold into. Oh, and if there is a market for that plastic to be made into new plastic products. The oil and plastics industry has long known that it’s cheaper and easier to just turn virgin oil into new plastic than it is to collect, clean and resell it. They have profited off us believing that recycling is the solution when they have long known it is not.
This all leads to much confusion about what can and can’t be recycled, which unfortunately leads to people’s wishcycling, which then goes on to contaminate recycling streams all over the world, and then we get blamed for it! Education alone will not fix an inherently broken system.
Mainstream curbside recycling has been around for just over thirty years, and it’s in the last fifteen years that half of all the plastic that has ever been produced has been made and sold. To add to this, more than 90% of plastic ever produced hasn’t been recycled. Not because we consumers do the wrong thing, but because most of it is not easily recyclable!
The margins on recycling are already very thin, with the collections and sorting often being more expensive than the value of the products being recycled. Some recycling processors still use human line sorters, and others are entirely mechanical. The machines that sort waste are often engineered for the main types of recyclables, such as glass, metal and hard plastics, not the plethora of other stuff that ends up in the sorting lines.
Then, even after the products are all sorted out and bailed up, the waste processing company has to find a buyer for that specific waste stream. Metals usually have a healthy demand, and thanks to the rise in online shopping, the paper board industry is doing ok. But plastics have always struggled to find a place to go (all the more reason to focus on post disposable design).
We wishcycle in part because we have been told that recycling is great and it will solve the issue of waste (this the plastics industry did a great job of convincing us of in the 90s, by creating the numbers up to 7 inside triangles that get stuck on certain types of hard plastics to supposedly help everyone identify and recycle them — side note, the history of the design of the original recycling symbol, the triangle made out of arrows, the Mobius Symbol, is fascinating and well worth the read here in this article.).
I have explained in the past that the global recycling system is broken, and that recycling is part of driving the generation of waste. It legitimizes the production of waste and creates a false solution to a manufactured problem. But here in this article, I want to explore the phenomenon that results from confused, good-intentioned, or perhaps lazy people that don’t know what to do with certain types of waste.
I will be the first to admit that even I am one of them at times. Intrigued by how others experienced this, I asked the UnSchool team to do a quick snapshot assessment of food items in their houses. As can be seen from the image below, it’s all very confusing about what the symbols mean. The cross through the recycling symbol means it can’t be recycled, but should we be happy that these ones even have any instructions at all? Because many of the other items they found had no information stating whether it was or wasn’t recyclable. This begs the question, whose responsibility is this? Ours, the supermarkets’, the local council, the recycling companies’, the packaging designers’, the product owners’? The federal government’s?
With such a confusing mess, it’s no wonder people wishcycle!
North American packaging: single-serve applesauce, coffee, frozen berries and crisp tube.
As I explored these issues, I come to feel very sorry for the recycling sector; they are beholden to the decisions made by the producers of products and packaging, and to the lack of regulation or guidance from the government. Then they’re burdened with the responsibility of finding new homes for an ever-growing stream of disposable stuff made with little care for what its end-of-life destination or impact will be.
The less sexy name for the issue of wishcycling is recycling contamination, and in wealthy countries like the UK, Australia and the US, it’s a massive issue.
According to the UK Department for the Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), in 2018, contamination meant councils in the UK sent 500,000 tonnes of recycling to landfill. Research conducted by WRAP revealed that 82% of households in the UK add at least one item to their recycling that is not accepted. The amount of plastic packaging used in supermarkets in the UK is staggering. In 2017, the 10 biggest UK retailers produced 900,000 tonnes of packaging and 2bn plastic bags.
“More than two-thirds of consumers (69%) believe supermarkets and retailers are responsible for reducing the amount of plastic used, and many want to see more progress.” — Packaging News, 2021
In the US, the recycling system is increasingly under pressure. The EPA explains the conundrum of recycling: “Most Americans want to recycle, as they believe recycling provides an opportunity for them to be responsible caretakers of the Earth. However, it can be difficult for consumers to understand what materials can be recycled, how materials can be recycled, and where to recycle different materials. This confusion often leads to placing recyclables in the trash or throwing trash in the recycling bin.”
All over the US, recycling with no market to sell to, or place to store it is being burnt or sent to landfill. Increasing costs of processing have meant that some councils have just stopped collecting recycling altogether. This analysis shows how different states are working to address the issues with recycling in the US.
“Since 1960 the amount of municipal waste being collected in America has nearly tripled, reaching 245m tonnes in 2005. According to European Union statistics, the amount of municipal waste produced in western Europe increased by 23% between 1995 and 2003, to reach 577kg per person.” — The Economist
In Australia, a country where over 60% of people recycle, it was reported recently that 58% of plastic and 23% of glass packaging were put in the wrong bin. This is contributing to ongoing issues with contaminated exports to neighboring countries, where over 50% of recycling is sent to be processed.
To add insult to injury, Reuters reported last year that the oil industry plans on investing 400 billion dollars on plants to make new plastics and just 2 billion on reducing plastic waste. Wishcycling is only going to get worse.
The issues of wishcycling go deeper than just misunderstanding what is and isn’t actually recyclable. It speaks to a wider issue of waste and our relationship to it — specifically, how planned obsolescence and enforced disposability feed our addiction. To justify consumption, we need to believe that there is a better destination for our waste than just landfills, incineration or escaping into nature. We want it to be ok to create it, and as our material lives have become more disposable, more complex, there is a higher desire for the idea of recycling to work.
All over the world, the amount of municipal solid waste being generating is growing at unprecedented rates. In India, in 2001 it was 36.5 million metric tonnes, twenty years later in 2021, it’s now 110 million metric tons. This is estimated to grow to 200 million metric tons by 2041 (source, statistia).
“China is responsible for the largest share of global municipal solid waste — at more than 15 percent. However, in terms of population the United States is the biggest producer of waste. The U.S. accounts for less than five percent of the global population, but produces roughly 12 percent of global MSW and is the biggest generator of MSW per capita.” — Global waste generation — statistics & facts, Statista, 2021
Recycling is not the solution to waste. The global increases in solid waste generation are happening at rates far, far greater than any recycling system can manage (except maybe Germany, which has policies that shift responsibility back onto the producer and Wales, which is the world's third-best recycler!).
Recycling doesn’t work because its existence incentivizes and legitimizes the creation of waste. Thus, as a solution to the global waste crisis, it does no more than temporarily mask the issue at hand. We live in a linear economy, a system that requires the production of waste for it to function. We designed an incentive system of growth that relies on continual consumption, which means we must make waste to perpetuate it. To solve the waste crisis, we need to redesign the entire system of materials and how they flow throughout the economy. And certainly, companies need to be held accountable for the things that they create and pump out into the world.
This is the biggest design challenge of our time. How do we redesign everything so it works better for all of us? How do we meet human needs without destroying the systems that sustain us? This is the topic of a book I’ve been working on for some time and the more I reflect on the changes that need to occur, the more I see that many of the solutions put in place (such as recycling) are actually reinforcing the problems and preventing us from reimagining the systems that created this issues to start with!
I find this a hard realization to voice, but under the current system, recycling is a key part of legitimizing the disposable economy we live in and thus we need to stop relying on recycling and demand a full redesign.
Recycling contamination. Photo by Vivianne Lemay on Unsplash.
Recently there were reports of UK recycling being dumped in Turkey after the recycling market took a huge hit from the China waste ban that started in 2018 (the rise in waste trafficking is a rabbit hole I will explore in another article).
This is where the wishcycling situation plays into a psychological bias we are all part of. It’s also called aspirational recycling, which feeds into the desires that people have to “do the right thing.” Here, we all want recycling to be the solution to our growing global waste crisis, so much so, that people are likely to recycle items that connect to their self-identity, such as the coffee cups or the take-out food containers, even if they have a suspicion that they are not recyclable (which cups are not, nor are black plastic take out containers). A Harvard Business Review article claims there is a bias whereby waste production is increased through the pre-knowledge that an item could be recycled, which leads to an increased use of disposable items. So we trick ourselves into using things that are non-recyclable by wishing that they were. This is the root cause of wishcycling.
We collectively rely on recycling as a crutch, allowing the potential of materials being reused to justify our continued consumption and use of disposable items.
Industry relies on this collective bias to continue to produce more and more non-recyclable stuff and feed into a collective misunderstanding of what is and isn’t recyclable. Confusion is a great tool for distraction. When known side effects (such as the millions of tons of plastics in the oceans) come to light — and even though there is a nonexistent recycling system for the billions of tons produced each year— they go back and blame it on us for not recycling properly!
Is Recycling Worth It? By NPR
Then there’s the issues of different rules in different places, and the persistent claims from industries that things are recyclable (even if they are not), along with the misinformation that recycling is somehow the silver bullet solution to the world’s waste crisis — it’s no wonder we’re so misdirected. We wishcycle because we have been told that recycling is the solution and we all want to do the right thing.
Our desire for things to be “greener” often makes us do un-green things. This is not really our fault though; we’ve all fallen victim to decades of marketing spin from industries addicted to disposability, saturated with ads that tell us that littering is the issue and recycling is the solution. The false answer to a manufactured problem is to believe that a simple act of separating our waste into that which can be recycled and that which will end up in the ground or being burnt will fix the myriad of environmental and social equity issues that waste creates.
Recycling may have a place in a well-designed circular economy, but it will not solve the problem created by our addiction to easy, convenient, disposable stuff. The only way we can stop waste is by designing it out of the system to start with and this requires us to redesign everything, the materials used, the way we create products through to the entire economic system that they work within.
Wishcycling is part of a fairytale that has been told to us over and over again, it says recycling is a good solution to a massive problem. It feeds into our collective delusions that disposability can be remedied by the same system that benefits from waste. This all adds up to confused good-intentioned people who put their broken Christmas lights and soiled diapers in the recycling and hope for the best. And an industry that then blames the customer for not getting it right.
The term “wishcycling” first appeared around 2015 when journalist Eric Roper wrote about the waste industry’s rising challenge of dealing with new types of materials and polymers that were making their way into the recycling bins of households.
In an article, Roper interviewed Bill Keegan, who was the President of a waste and recycling firm DEM-CON, where he mentioned the idea of people wishing things would be recycled. Inspired by the concept, Roper wrote a follow-on piece the following week about the concept of wishcycling where he detailed how plastic bags and bowling balls, food sachets, and loose bottle caps were all contributing to recycling contamination.
In the article, Roper explains, “A number of materials in particular frequently show up at local processing facilities, causing problems for the complex machines that make curbside single-sort recycling possible. They ultimately end up comprising the ‘residual’ waste that facilities cannot recycle.”
Wishcycling on the news (on Fox news!)
According to the industry magazine Recycling Today, “there are five common curbside recycling contamination themes: tanglers (hoses, cords, clothes), film plastic (plastic wrap or bags), bagged things (garbage or recycling), hazardous material (propane tanks, needles/sharps) and a category that can be summed up as ‘yuck’ things that downgrade other materials and clog the system (food, liquids, diapers, etc.).”
To help address this, on a practical level, online tools like this can help keen people figure out what can and can’t go in their recycling right now. But let’s be honest, the average person is more likely to make a quick judgment based on assumptions, leading to wishcycling. I know in my case, I feel guilty when I put things in the normal waste bin, so I want to avoid it and hope that the oat milk tetra pack is indeed going to be recycled!
Commonly wishcycled items:
Paper coffee cups: They are lined with plastic and have polystyrene lids so are not easily recycled. These have to go in the trash, so get a reusable cup for your daily caffeine fix!
Paper take-out containers: They are also often lined with plastic and if not then contaminated with the oils and residues of the food, the best you could hope for is the unlined ones going directly in your home compost or organic waste collection.
Broken glasses and ceramics: Recycling facilities are usually high-tech places that use lasers and magnets to separate out the recyclables. But often there are humans working a line, and broken glass can’t be picked out by the machines — humans with hands have to separate them out.
Pizza boxes: Any food-contaminated paper product is hard to recycle because the fibers absorb the grease and thus make the recycling process harder. So they have to go in the general waste or if you have organic waste collection/composting then it should go in there.
Flexible and soft plastics: These are basically ALL your food plastic packages that are soft and flexible, such as crisp and candy wrappers, rice bags, nuts and loose lettuce bags. Anything that is flexible is unlikely to be recyclable in most mainstream waste recollection services. Some stores offer a takeback program if you are diligent enough to separate, collect and take them back to your store.
Any electronic item: 100% of these have to go in a dedicated electronic waste recycling collection service. They are filled with complex and often toxic materials and can even explode, so be sure to find out from your local council about collections and drop-offs for e-waste.
Light globes: Most light globes are made of several different materials and thus can’t be recycled through the normal collection and need to be taken to a specialty recycling drop-off location.
Any household item: Broken toys and old T-shirts are most likely not recyclable in your household collection. These need to be taken to a specific location or better still, repaired and resold.
Waste is produced as a result of consumption. So the first thing we can do is nip the issue in the bud by not buying the things that can’t be recycled to start with. Of course, it would be even better if the companies who produced unrecyclable crap stopped designing such items, and supermarkets and producers got together and figured out how to create more universal packaging solutions that dramatically reduced waste, to begin with. Ahh, that would be bloody brilliant. But in the meantime, whilst we all wait for some of the biggest companies in the world to catch up to the growing global demand for a circular economy (I’m looking at you Amazon), then we have to each take on the task of figuring out what is actually recyclable in our community and then be a bit more diligent about where it ends up.
I for one buy mostly from a local food producer who only sells local produce and delivers it in reusable boxes. When I do have to shop at the supermarket I try and take a bit of time to read the packaging (and I still get it wrong sometimes FYI). I compost all organic waste and include all light uncoated paper products and bio-based plastics in the compost drop-off point (this will be industrially processed so all the biodegradable packaging can go in it).
It can feel insignificant to take these small micro-steps against a tidal wave of waste, but our own actions are calculated up and used to influence the actions that industries take. Once they realize people are actively avoiding certain products, they will be forced to refect and hopefully change. Wherever we can flex our consumer power, we help shape the way new trends emerge through demand (oat milk, and vegan food options, for example, is a relatively new addition to grocery shelves for a reason!).
Wishcycling is a symptom of a much broader issue at play: we have designed a world addicted to waste and disposability. Until we break that cycle, we, as everyday people, will continue to have to navigate our way through the material complexity that is thrust upon us.
But as long as we believe the fairytale that recycling will solve our waste crises, then we will continue to enable industries to get away with creating more and more disposable, unsustainable and un-recyclable crap.
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If you want to get started on your change-making journey, then check out my list of free tools for circular and sustainable design, or explore the everyday actions you can take via my United Nations collaboration, The Anatomy of Action.
The big opportunity for systemic change is in the way we do business, so I have courses on circular systems design, sustainable design, the circular economy and how to activate sustainability in business.
If you are interested in diving deeper into how to activate sustainability in any size business and want to help to bring about the transition to the circular economy, then consider signing up for my 2-day in-person Masterclass this October in London.
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Additional sources used in this article:
Rebecca Altma, Discard Studies, On Wishcycling, 2021, available here
Stephanie B. Borrelle, The Conversation, Recycling isn’t enough — the world’s plastic pollution crisis is only getting worse
Jackie Flynn Mogensen, 2019, Mother Jones, One Very Bad Habit Is Fueling the Global Recycling Meltdown
Erin Hassanzadeh, 2021, CBS Minnesota, Pandemic-Driven ‘Wishcycling’ Is Causing Big Problems At Recycling Centers
Drew Desilver, 2016, Pew Research Center, Perceptions and realities of recycling vary widely from place to place
Tom Mumford, 2020, ReCollect, Wishcycling 101: When Good Intentions Lead To Contamination
Here at The UnSchool, there’s a handful of things that we never stop talking about: making positive creative change, embracing systems thinking, normalizing sustainability, igniting the circular economy, leveraging the Disruptive Design Method, and finally, diving into Cognitive Science by hacking our brains, mindsets and biases so that we can all expand our sphere of influence and active our agency to make massive sustainable changes to the way we live on this beautiful planet we all share!!!
When we started this experimental knowledge lab in 2014, we did so with the intent to give others the tools they needed to disrupt the status quo and solve complex problems in order to make the future work better for us all. Now that we’ve been fully operational for almost 7 years, having transferred knowledge to thousands of change-makers like you all around the world, run fellowships in 10 countries (!), and created >80 offerings at UnSchool Online, we decided to organize our courses, toolkits and ebooks into the themed-knowledge areas that we focus on the most.
Systems are all around us. Explore how to identify, work within, and understand the systems that make up the world around us, the relationships that connect us, and how to map them effectively for change making initiatives.
Sustainability is all about social, economic and environmental considerations we make to create a future that works better. Map life cycles, calculate your ecological footprint, think critically about sustainability and bust through eco-myths.
A holistic approach to complex problem solving combining sociological inquiry methods with systems and design thinking approaches to help you to develop interventions that are smart, effective, thoughtful, and sustainable.
Learn how the brain works and how our minds organize information, understand where to focus your efforts as a change-maker and know where to intervene, the intersections of behavior, bias, attitudes, and social structures.
New career paths continue to unfold, and at the centre is creativity. How we evolve as a species requires new ideas, ways of seeing, doing and making change. Creativity is not a hobby - it is a cognitive skill and job title for the future.
Understand the difference between our existing, resource-draining linear systems and the circular systems that we need for a regenerative, sustainable future, gain insight into how governments, industries, and individuals are shifting.
Our six brand new learning categories — Systems Thinking, Sustainability, Circular Economy, Creative Change, Disruptive Design, Cognitive Science — are designed to help you find what you need more efficiently and take a more targeted approach to refining your creative change-making skill set. Whether you are brand new to the world of making change or you’re a leader in creative change, we have offerings that can help you build your knowledge bank, refine your skillset, and amplify your impact. These new learning categories are simply like destinations on your change-making journey map, and we’ll step you through where to go based on where you are right now.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll spotlight each of the new learning categories here in our journal to help give you a better understanding of why these focused areas are so important not only to us — but for your work, too. Stay tuned!
PS: Speaking of knowledge transfer, have you browsed our recently upgraded Free Resource Library lately? It’s packed with brain-activating content (like Leyla’s Decade of Disruption report, or The Circular Classroom or Sustainability in Business!) and practical tools (like the Superpower Activation Kit, the Circular Redesign Kit, and our personal Post Disposable Kit!) that you can utilize right away.
Every year the Global Footprint Network marks on the calendar a date that signifies the day we have collectively used up all the resources allocated for that year. It’s called Earth Overshoot Day, and in 2020, it falls on the 22nd of August. This is actually much better than 2019’s date, which was the 29th of July. This shift in a more sustainable direction is mainly due to the economic slow down as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Adapted from Earth Overshoot Day, last year we were a month behind this year.
The Global Footprint Network combines the most reliable data available and forms a set of reasonable assumptions to assess the current resource use of humanity. They look at changes in carbon emissions, harvesting of forest products, food production and fossil fuel demand, along with other factors that have an impact on global biocapacity. The research team concluded that this year, as a result of the global pandemic, there has been a 9.3% reduction in the global Ecological Footprint compared to the same period last year, as reported on the Earth Overshoot Day website.
“The novel coronavirus pandemic has caused humanity’s ecological footprint to contract. However, true sustainability that allows all to thrive on Earth can only be achieved by design, not disaster.” - Earth Overshoot Day
The changes reported by the World Footprint Network as a result of changes to the economy from the Covid-19 pandemic
Earth Overshoot Day brings awareness to one of the main issues that sustainability is seeking to address: we collectively consume more than the Earth can provide us with. Everything comes from nature, and the planet provides us with an abundance of resources, from minerals to shelter and food.
But since the early 1980s, we started to extract and use more resources at a rate faster than the Earth can replenish them each year. This means we are eating into future generations resources and creating a deficit. Thus we need to find creative ways of meeting our human needs, living prosperous lives, but whilst maintaining and respecting the life support systems that sustain life on Earth.
The ecological footprint methodology is a tool that helps individuals, cities, countries, and the entire world understand how big an impact they have on the one planet we all share. The eco footprint method looks at many 'impact categories', which are areas of our daily lives that have impacts on the planet and then provides a calculation of how many earths would be required if everyone lived your lifestyle. So the place you live, the types of things you consume - these all impact the size of your personal ecological footprint.
In part inspired by the ecological footprint concept, last year in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Programme, we came up with the Anatomy of Action - a set of actions everyone, anywhere, can take to live a more sustainable lifestyle. Using the hand as a memorable reference for the actions we each take in our lives, we can opt to reduce our footprint by making more effective lifestyle choices that reduce the impact of our actions.
Each year there is a campaign is to #movethedate for Earth Overshoot Day so we can get back in line with the Earth’s ability to sustain us. The last time this was the case was in the late 1970’s, so we need to collectively move the date back to December 31st, so that we are living within the carrying capacity of the planet.
In honor of Earth Overshoot Day, we challenge you to measure your own ecological footprint and see what kind of present impacts your lifestyle is having on the planet.
From the Earth Overshoot Day website, the lifestyle areas that we can change to help #movethedate
Did you know that currently, we need 1.6 planets to sustain the consumption and lifestyle choices of all the humans alive today!? “From 1961 to 2010, Ecological Footprint accounts indicate that human demand for renewable resources and ecological services increased by nearly 140% “ says a report on our growing ecological footprint.
This is our collective impact, but what is your individual footprint? Click on the image below to do the calculation and see! Then check out the Anatomy of Action to find ways you can reduce your impact and help design a more sustainable future.
At the UnSchool we are all about agentzing people to help design a future that works better than today, we have classes, handbooks, toolkits, advanced learning tracks and masterclasses all on activating systems change for a sustainable and circular future.
As for the gift, to celebrate Earth Overshoot Day being moved back nearly a month this year, we’re having a 24-hour, 50% off Flash Sale on everything* at UnSchools Online, on this Saturday, 22 August!
Help #MoveTheDate by activating your agency and contributing to making positive change with tools on sustainability, systems thinking, creative problem solving, and more at UnSchools Online!
*for certification tracks this applies to the first month only
By Leyla Acaroglu, Originally published on Medium
There is a well-quoted statistic that says around 80% of the ecological impacts of a product are locked in at the design phase. If you look at the full life cycle of a product and the potential impacts it may have, be it in the manufacturing or at the end of life stage, the impacts are inadvertently decided and thus embedded in the product by the designers, at the design decision-making stage.
This makes some uncomfortable, but design and product development teams are responsible for the decisions that they make when contemplating, prototyping, and ultimately producing a product into existence. And thus, they are implicated in the environmental and social impacts that their creations have on the world. The design stage is a perfect and necessary opportunity to find unique and creative ways to get sustainable and circular goods and services out into the economy to replace the polluting and disposable ones that flood the market today. The challenge is which designers will pick up the call to action and start to change the status quo of an industry addicted to mass-produced, fast-moving, disposable goods?
For those that are ready to make positive change and be apart of the transition to a circular and sustainable economy by design, the good news is there is a well-established range of tools and techniques that a designer or product development decision-maker can employ to ensure that a created product is meeting its functional and market needs in ways that dramatically reduce negative impacts on people and the planet. These are known as ecodesign or sustainable design strategies, and whilst they have been around for a while, the demand for such considerations is even more prominent as the movement toward a sustainable, circular economy increases.
Sustainability, at its core, is simply about making sure that what we use and how we use it today, doesn’t have negative impacts on current and future generations' ability to live prosperously on this planet. Its also about ensuring we are meeting our needs in socially just, environmentally positive and economically viable ways, so its very much a design challenge. Consumption is a major driver of unsustainability, and all consumer goods are designed in some way.
When sustainability is applied to design, it enlightens us to the impacts that the product will have across its full life cycle, enabling the creator to ensure that all efforts have been made to produce a product that fits within the system it will exist within in a sustainable way, that it offers a higher value than what was lost in its making, and that it does not intentionally break or be designed to be discarded when it is no longer useful. Provisions should have been made so that there are options for how to maximize its value across its full life cycle and keep materiality in a value flow. This is otherwise known now as the circular economy and the practice of enabling this is circular systems design.
Long before there was a Twitter hashtag devoted to all things sustainability, sustainable design pioneers like Buckminster Fuller and Victor Papanek were figuring out how to reduce the impact of produced goods and services through design. As the sustainability concept has evolved, so has the framework for the thinking and doing tools that we now can routinely integrate into our practices to help understand and design out impacts and design in higher value. I see sustainable design as one of the tools that we each need to employ in order to make things better, its the practical side of considering sustainability, connected to considerations around life cycle thinking, systems thinking, circular thinking and regenerative design. By understanding these approaches, a toolbox for change can be created by any practitioner to advance their ability to create incredible things that offer back more than they take. This should be the goal of any creative development.
The ecodesign strategy set for sustainable design includes techniques like Design for Disassembly, Design for Longevity, Design for Reusability, Design for Dematerialization, and Design for Modularity, among many other approaches that we will run through in this quick guide. Basically, the ecodesign strategy toolset helps us think through the way something will exist and how to design for value increases whilst also maintaining functionality, aesthetics, and practicality of products, systems, and services. It’s especially effective when applying materiality to any of the creative interventions you are pursuing in your changemaking practice, be it a designer or not. We have a free toolkit for redesigning products to be circular that also details all of these strategies, and more.
For decades, much progressive experimentation and exploration of ecodesign, cleaner production, industrial ecology, product stewardship, life cycle thinking, and sustainable production and consumption has occurred, which all led up to the current framing of a new approach to humans meeting their needs in ways that don’t destroy the systems needed to sustain us. Right now the framing is around creating a sustainable, regenerative, and circular economy, whereby the things we create to meet our needs are designed to fit with the systems of the planet and maintain materials in benign or beneficial flows within the economy, which requires businesses to change the way they deliver value and consumers to adjust their expectations around hyper-consumerism. Central to this success is the design of goods and services and that's where these strategies and designers' creativity fit in.
There have been thousands of academic articles and business case studies on a multitude of different approaches to sustainable and ethical business practices, demonstrating the strong and clear need for systems-level change. Contributions from biomimicry, cradle to cradle, product service systems (PSS) models, eco-design strategies, life cycle assessment, eco-efficiency and the waste hierarchy all fit together to support this approach to sustainable design.
Within the last 20 or so years, we have really started to feel the negative impacts of what's called the linear economy, where raw materials are extracted from nature, turned into usable goods, purchased and then quickly discarded usually due to poor design choices, inferior materials or trend changes (or the more insidious practice of planned obsolescence). Recently, there has been a great framing around the shift from linear to circular systems called The Circular Economy Framework, which combines a range of pre-existing theories and approaches. Moving to a circular economy (which embraces closed-loop and sustainable production systems) means that the end of life of products is considered at the start, and the entire life cycle impacts are designed to offer new opportunities, not wasteful outcomes.
Our interpretation of the value flows within the circular economy from the Circular Systems Design handbook.
You may be wondering — especially if you aren’t a designer — how can we integrate this into a creative practice to make a positive change? Well, here’s the thing, the approaches to understanding and reducing the impacts of material processes are really important to reduce the use of global materials and the ecological impacts of our production and consumption choices. This is what the circular economy movement is seeking to achieve: a transformation in the way we meet our material needs.
On top of that, these approaches are very empowering for non-material decisions — you start to see the ways in which the world works and can apply this thinking to different problem sets. Sustainable design and production techniques allow for reducing the material impact by maximizing systems in service design — thus, providing sustainability during both production and consumption.
From our free educational project, The Circular Classroom. Find out more here
These sustainable design strategies are best known as starting off with Victor Papanek in the 1970’s and have been contributed to over the years by many different people and approaches. This curated life of ‘design for x’ strategies takes into consideration the circular economy and how they relate to closing the loop and dramatically changing economic models.
In this list I have curated, I have also included a few “negative” design approaches at the end to remind you what not to do, and how easy it is to accidentally do the wrong thing right, rather than the right thing a little bit wrong.
In order to achieve circular and sustainable design, some, or many, of these design considerations need to be employed in combination throughout the design process in order to ensure that the outcome is not just a reinterpretation of the status quo, but something that actually challenges and changes the way we meet our needs.
These approaches are lenses you apply to the creative process in order to challenge and allow for the emergence of new ways to deliver functionality and value within the economy. There are also separate considerations of the circularization process outlined in the next section.
One of the main ideas of the circular economy is moving from single-use products to products that fit within a beautifully designed and integrated closed-loop system which is enabled through this approach. Think of alternatives to purchasable products such as leasable items that exist as part of a company-owned system or services that enable reuse. Leasing a product out — rather than selling it directly — allows the company to manage the product across its entire life cycle, so it can be designed to easily fit back into a pre-designed recycling or re-manufacturer system, all whilst reducing waste.
By transitioning away from single end-consumer product design to these PSS models, the relationship shifts and the responsibility for the packaging and product itself is shared between the producer and the consumer. This incentivizes each agent to maintain the value of the product and to design it so that it’s long-lasting and durable. PSS requires the conceptualization of meeting functional needs within a closed system that the producer manages in order to minimize waste and maximize value gains after each cycling of the product. Many of the circular economy business models are either based on this concept or create services that enable the ownership of the product to be maintained by the company and leased to the customer. But it’s critical that this is done within a strong ethical framework and not used to manipulate or coerce people, as this could also easily be the outcome of a more explorative version of this design approach.
In a traditional linear system, producers of goods are not required to take responsibility of their products or packaging once they have sold the product into the market. Some companies offer limited warranties to guarantee a certain term of service, but many producers avoid being involved in the full life of what they create. This means that there are limited incentives for them to design products with closed-loop end of life options. In a circular economy, producers actively take responsibility for the full life of the things they create starting from the business model through to the design and end of life management of their products.
Product stewardship and extended producer responsibility are two strong initiatives that encourage companies to be more involved in the full life of what they produce in the world. There are several ways that this can occur; in a voluntary scenario, companies work to circularize their business models (such as a PSS model) or governments issue policies that require companies to take back, recapture, recycle or re-manufacture their products at the end of their usable life. For example, the European Union has many product stewardship policies in place to incentivize better product design and full life management such as the Ecodesign directive, WEEE, Product Stewardship and now the circular economy directives.
The key here is that the design of both the products and the business case is created to have full life-cycle responsibility and is managed as an integrated approach to product service delivery so that the product doesn't get lost from the value system. Partnerships between organizations can enable a rapid introduction of product stewardship, such as a bottling company leasing the service of beverage containers to the drinks company. One key element of this is a take-back program, whereby the producing company offers to take back and reconfigure, repair, remanufacture or recycling the products they produced. This incentivizes them to design them to be easily fixed, upgraded or pulled apart for high-value material recycling.
Reducing the overall size, weight and number of materials incorporated into a design is a simple way of keeping down the environmental impact. As a general rule, more materials result in greater impacts, so it’s important to use fewer types of materials and reduce the overall weight of the ones that you do use without compromising on the quality of the product.
You don’t want to dematerialize to the point where the life of the product is reduced or the value is perceived as being less; you want to find the balance between functional service delivery, longevity, value and optimal material use.
Products that can be reconfigured in different ways to adapt to different spaces and uses have an increased ability to function well. Modularity can increase resale value and offer multiple options in one material form. Just like you can build anything with little Lego blocks, modularity as a sustainable design approach implicates the end owner in the design so they can reconfigure the product to fit their changing life needs.
As a design approach for non-physical outcomes, modularity enables creatives to consider how the things they create can be used in different configurations. This is all about making this adaptable to different scenarios and thus increase value over time. It’s important to ensure designs are durable enough to withstand being taken apart and reconfigured, as well as making it easy to do and the style timeless so it increases its duration of use. Modularity should also increase recycling and repairability by offering replacement parts and a service model.
Longevity is about creating products that are aesthetically timeless, highly durable and will retain their value over time so people can resell them or pass them on. Products that last longer aren’t replaced as frequently and can be repaired or upgraded during their life as long as their style and functionality have durability as well.
Ensure that the materials you select enable a long life, and be sure to consider multiple use case scenarios such as repair options and resale encouragement.
Design for disassembly requires a product to be designed so that it can be very easily taken apart for recycling at the end of its life. How it is put together, the types of materials that are used and the connection methods all need to be designed to increase the speed and ease of taking it apart for repair, remanufacturing and recycling. Often the case with technology, the norm is to design products that lock the end owner out, discouraging any form of repairability during the use phase while also reducing the likelihood of recapturing the materials at the end of life.
This design strategy is particularly relevant to technology, requiring the design of the sub and primary components to be just as easily disassembled as it is to manufacture them. For maximum recapture, we need to reduce the number of different types of materials, the connection mechanisms, and the ease of extraction. This is a super critical strategy for monitoring technical materials inflow to reduce negative impacts at end of life.
Making a recyclable product goes beyond simply selecting a material that can be so. You have to consider the recyclability of all the materials, the way they are put together and the use case, along with the ease of recycling at end of life. Relying on something being “technically recyclable” as a sustainable design solution to your product is just lazy and often does not result in environmental benefits, as recycling is very much broken. So, you need to ensure that it is being designed to maximize the likelihood that it will be recaptured and recycled in the system it will exist within.
Assembly methods will impact how easily disassembled for recycling products will be. Also, make sure that there are systems in place so that the product can actually be recycled in the location it will end up! For it to be circular, the product has to fit within a closed-loop system, and recycling often is the least beneficial outcome since we lose materials and increase waste through this system.
Connected to disassembly is the ability to easily and cost-effectively recapture the material at end of life. Just making something recyclable does not guarantee that it will be recycled, as it’s often costly and time-consuming. Additionally, many technology items are shredded to get the valuable parts (like gold) instead of getting all the different parts back. What is crucial about this strategy is that it must be used in a system that has the appropriate and functioning recycling market, or a take-back and recapture system must be in place, as well as design features that maximize the behavioral outcomes of the end owners so that the product is actually reacquired and recycled. The Scandinavian bottle recycling system is a perfect example of this. Drink bottles are made of thick and durable materials that can be washed and re-manufactured, and the system is set up with an easy-to-use deposit program and financial incentive to maintain a high level of recapture.
Repair is a fundamental aspect of the circular economy. Things wear out, break, get damaged, and need to be designed to allow for easy repair, upgrading, and fixability. Along with the extra parts and instructions on how to do this, we need systems that support, rather than discourage, repair in society. For example, many Apple products are intentionally designed to be difficult to repair, with patented screws and legal implications for opening products up.
Sweden recently opened the world’s first department store dedicated to repair, but any product producer can put mechanisms into place for ease of repair so that the owner has more autonomy over the product and will be encouraged to do so. The Fair Phone is a great example of this.
Repair allows the end owner to maintain its value over time, or sell it more easily to then increase its lifespan. But there is also the option of designing so that the product can be reused in a different way from its intended original purpose, without much extra material or energy inputs. An example of this is a condiment jar designed to be used as a water glass.
There are many ways a product can serve a second or even third life after its core original purpose. This approach is useful when you have limited options for designing out disposability.
For this strategy, the producer takes into consideration how the parts or entire product can be re-manufactured into new usable goods in a closed-loop system; it’s critical to the technology sector but fits perfectly for many products.
Re-manufacturing is when a product is not completely disassembled and recycled or reused, but instead, some parts are designed to be reused and other parts recycled, depending on what wears out and what maintains its usefulness over time.
During the use phase, many products require constant inputs, such as energy, in the form of charging or water in the form of washing. When a product requires lifetime inputs, it’s called an “active product”, meaning it is constantly tapping into other active systems in order to achieve its function. That’s when design for efficiency comes in, designing to dramatically reduce the input requirements of the product during its use phase.
This will increase the environmental performance and also reduce wear of the product, increasing lifetime use. This approach can also be taken as an overarching one — design to maximize the efficiency of materials, processes, and human labor. As a general rule, “Weight equals impact,” and the more efficient you can be with materials, the lower the overall impact per product unit (this rule has many exceptions, as it is always related to what the alternatives are).
Things we use influence our lives. This is why social media applications are designed to act like slot machines with continuous scroll, and why airport security lines make you feel like a farm animal. The things we design in turn design us, and thus there is a huge scope for creating products, services, and systems that influence society in more positive ways.
There is still a lot of resistance to sustainability, often because it seems confusing. So, imagine how you can design things that give people an alternative experience to this mainstream perspective. Designing in positive feedback loops to the owner helps change behaviors, just as designing in less options to limit confusion can help direct the more preferable use.
Accidentally or intentionally, many goods are designed to reinforce stereotypes. Pink toys for girls, dainty watches for women, and chunky glasses for men are a few examples. Reinforcing stereotypes subtly maintains negative and inequitable status quos in society. There are entire labs dedicated to first researching an established trend, and then designing to reinforce it. Design for equity requires the reflection and disruption of the mainstream references that reinforce inequitable access to resources, be it based on gender or outdated stereotypes.
Oppression and inequality exist everywhere, from toilet seat designs to office buildings. Considering the potential impact of your designs on all sorts of humans is critical to creating things that are ethical and equitable. This also applies to the supply chain, ensuring that people along the full chain of materials and manufacturing are valued, paid fairly and respected.
Perhaps the most important of the design strategy tools is the ability to design interventions that actively shift the status quo of an unsustainable or inequitable system. The world is made up of systems, and everything we do will have an impact in some way of the systems around us. So instead of seeing your product as an individual unit, see it as an animated agent in a system, interacting with other agents and thus having impacts.
All systems are dynamic, constantly changing and interconnected. Materials come from nature, and everything we produce will have to return in some way. So, designing from a systems perspective with the objective of intervening will allow for more positively disruptive outcomes to the status quo (see my handbook on the Disruptive Design Method for more on this approach).
Other things to consider
Where is the energy being sourced? Shift from fossil to renewables.
What are the hidden impacts embedded within the supply chain? Remove embodied fossil fuel energy.
How can you recover and put to good use all wasted resources across the supply chain? Look for industrial symbiosis or by-product reuse opportunities.
How can you design in life extension on your products? Design repair and rescue options as a service for your products.
Are there ways of partnering to create industrial symbiosis where your product’s by-products are used as raw materials for another process? Reduce waste to landfill by encouraging secondary industries to use industrial by-products.
How can you design your product to be a service instead? Embrace full product stewardship.
Do you need to produce a product to deliver the functional need? Look for alternative business models to deliver your customer’s functional desires.
What is the energy mix in the manufacturing and use phase? The types of energy used will increase or decrease environmental impacts.
Does a product need to exist or can we deliver value and function in a different format?
There are many insidious techniques used by designers to manipulate and coerce consumers into behaviors and practices that are unsustainable and inequitable. Here are three types you should avoid! There are also many accidental actions that may have good intentions that result in greenwashing, so be careful not to invest more in marketing green credentials than in R&D to ensure your product truly is what you claim it to be.
Planned obsolescence is one of the critically negative ramifications of the GDP-fueled hyper-consumer economy. This is where things are designed to intentionally break, or the customer is locked out through designs that limit repair or software upgrades that slow down processes. This approach tries to constantly turn a profit by manipulating a usable good so its functionality is restricted or reduced and the customer is forced to constantly purchase new goods. It’s in everything from toothbrushes to technology. The habit has led to massive growth, but at the expense of durability and sustainability. How it is used as a positive strategy is when it is part of a well-designed closed-loop system that enables the product to naturally “die” at the right time so it can be reintegrated into the system it is designed within.
Designing for things to break is due to the cultural normalization of disposability as a result of increased use of disposability in the design of everyday goods. From coffee cups to technological items, it is a race to the bottom of our economy, where many reusable things have become hyper-disposable. Single-use items plague our oceans with plastic waste and increase the end cost for small businesses and everyday people, as the more addictive the cycle of disposability is, the more costly it becomes to deliver basic service offerings. I have written extensively about this; read more here.
A term coined by designer Harry Brignull, the idea of dark patterns are intentional tricks used by designers to manipulate and lure customers into taking actions they don’t necessarily make the choice to do or may otherwise not agree to. Dark patterning includes often exploiting cognitive weaknesses and biases to get people to do things like purchasing extra items they did not need when checking out online, or creating a sense of urgency to increase purchasing — leveraging single-click buy now for impulse buys, using particular colors to evoke emotions and sharing outright misleading information to increase purchases. This website has many great examples.
Much of this content is from my handbook on Circular Systems Design, and over at the UnSchool Online, I have a short course on sustainable design strategies and a more extensive one on sustainable design and production. You may also like to find out about the Disruptive Design Method that I created to support deeper design decisions that works to help solve complex problems. I also created the Design Play Cards which include all the eco-design strategies and fun challenges to solve.
Do you think it’s time for nature? The United Nations does, as “Time for Nature” is the theme for this year’s World Environment Day, which is celebrated each year on the 5th June. Of course it's in our opinion that every day should be a day to celebrate the magical natural beauty of the only known life-sustaining planet in the universe.
But we also wanted to take this opportunity to explore some of the top reasons why biodiversity is so bloody awesome and important, especially in a time where we are challenged by a global pandemic in which many top researchers and scientists warn that nature is sending us a message, drawing clear links between natural systems destruction and the rise of communicable diseases.
Nature provides all the goods and services we need to operate the economy, not to mention life. We’ve only recently lost sight of the power and importance of nature in our human existence, with the last 70ish years creating the rise of hyper-convenience-fueled lifestyles that in turn created demand for the design of disposability that then led to environmental crises like ocean plastic pollution, climate change, destructive bushfires, freak weather events and deforestation - all issues that impact biodiversity. As these issues continue to be amplified as causes for encouraging sustainable lifestyles to be on the rise, the world is reawakening and reconnecting to the unrivaled power and importance that nature uses in creation and destruction alike.
Here are five compelling reasons why this theme is so important, right now especially:
Simply put, biodiversity is what makes Earth, Earth. Without diversity, we have weak systems that are susceptible to disease — which then breeds a new onslaught of system impacts. The UN explains that biodiversity encompasses the over 8 million species – from plants and animals to fungi and bacteria – that are all interconnected and share our planet as home. All ecosystems need diversity to succeed. The oceans, forests, mountain environments and coral reefs are all teaming with genetic diversity of all manner of plants and animals. Ecosystems sustain human life in a myriad of ways, cleaning our air, purifying our water, ensuring the availability of nutritious foods, nature-based medicines and raw materials, and reducing the occurrence of disasters.
To learn more about biodiversity and find out more about what you can do, check here for the UN’s “Practical Guide” to Earth Day 2020.
“At least 40 per cent of the world’s economy and 80 per cent of the needs of the poor are derived from biological resources. In addition, the richer the diversity of life, the greater the opportunity for medical discoveries, economic development, and adaptive responses to such new challenges as climate change”. - The Convention about Life on Earth, Convention on Biodiversity
There’s a reason that #naturephotography is hashtagged over 108 million times on Instagram. No manufactured life experiences can take the place of the beauty of what surrounds us every day in stunning sunrises, lush landscapes, and wondrous wildlife. We humans are biologically hardwired to be connected to nature (more on that in #3), and throughout human history we have been inspired and fulfilled through the unique, diverse natural beauty around the world. This inspiration isn’t just a feel-good philosophical inspiration (though, who doesn’t love to just feel the warm fuzzies when you see a baby animal or take in a breathtaking view) — it’s a literal contribution to the evolution of our species through ideas like biomimicry and circular systems design. It's also no wonder that one of the most watched TV series of the last fifteen years was David Antenborugh’s Planet Earth series.
This collection of videos from TED Ed perfectly explores the wonderment of nature — not just in our environment but truly in an interconnected look at the nature of stuff, the nature of design, the nature of collection action, and of course, the nature of change.
People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a pleasure. - David Attenborough
3. The human brain needs time in nature to restore itself — and thrives when exercising outdoors.
There is mounting evidence that time in nature has huge benefits to the human brain and our bodies. While most attention has been given to the psychological impacts of nature on human well-being, like increased happiness and creativity boosts, other benefits like reduced hypertension and cardiovascular disease, and even lower risks of chronic conditions like asthma, diabetes, and obesity have also been found.
Over the last 10 years, we’ve learned that healthier soil microbes yield healthier humans (although, Marco Polo noted in 1272 in his travel diary that the people of Persia’s foul moods were attributed to the soil and conducted his own qualitative study by importing soil from Persia to his banquet hall!) and that three days in nature basically resets your brain. Additionally, exercising outdoors (just a walk will do) has shown improved cognition and increased neuroplasticity, which interestingly helps slow aging.
Nature is beyond crucial to our personal health and wellbeing, as it provides all the foods, air and drinkable water we need to exist! Complex systems all interact to allow for plants to photosynthesize, create oxygen and filter water. We all are in an interdependent relationship with nature, and as long as we ignore that basic fact of life, we continue to ignore the need for political and cultural changes that will not just protect nature but also find incredibly regenerative solutions that enable us to live within nature and continue to advance our civilization into the future. Technically the services provided by nature are called ecosystem services, and there are more than one could imagine all working together quickly and tirelessly to help life on Earth flourish. So, next time you take a breath or eat a strawberry or drink water and get hydrated, take a moment to think of nature and all the services that the giant ecosystem of Earth provides for us for free.
Nature’s oxygen factory
Every second breath of oxygen comes from the ocean
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) recently declared that nature is in a state of crises too. Aside from the links between coronavirus, climate change and nature's destruction, nature itself is seeing species being lost at a rate 1,000 times greater than at any other time in recorded human history, and one million species face extinction, making this time what scientists call the sixth great extinction. The only difference is it's not a meteoride this time — instead, it is us who are responsible for this mass extinction event. Scientists have also found something akin to an insect apocalypse, with bees and other pollinators being killed off in the millions.
“Healthy ecosystems can protect against the spread of disease: Where native biodiversity is high, the infection rate for some zoonotic diseases can be lowered,” says United Nations Environment programme (UNEP) biodiversity expert Doreen Robinson.
So yes, it’s absolutely time for nature not just today, but every single day, from now until we figure this shit out and implement transformational systems change.
To further celebrate and help you get activated to support the global transition to a sustainable and regenerative economy, we are having a flash 50% off sale on everything over at online.unschools.co for this week until June 12! Use code: timefornature all week (ends midnight 5th June GMT time)
As the world starts to reawaken from its months of in-house sheltering during the COVID-19 crises, there are calls from around the world for the rebuilding of the economy to be done through a green and sustainable pathway. The lockdown has shown many people just how urgent our sustainability needs are. There are many links drawn between natural habitat destruction, climate change, air pollution and other environmental issues connected to the rise and devastation of a pandemic such as COVID-19. The head of the UN called for a global green recovery, and many governments are seeing the links between the climate and the COVID-19 crises. With recovery talks emerging and governments around the world beginning to propose new budgets, we thought we’d take a look at who is (and who is not) focused on implementing sustainability initiatives in their COVID-19 response and future planning.
Dan Meyers via Unsplash.com
Right before this crisis, the EU voted to approve the Green Deal, which sets out ambitious plans for a clean and circular economy that has no new net carbon emissions by 2050. This pandemic has emphasized the urgency of implementing the Paris Agreement, with Germany and the UK collaborating to virtually lead the the 11th Petersberg Climate Dialogue earlier in April, in which they, along with 30 countries, discussed how to begin recovery with the caveat of climate protection being linked to the economic perspective. The EU’s proposed Green Recovery also highlights the need to protect biodiversity and invest in “sustainable mobility, renewable energy, building renovations, research and innovation, and the circular economy.” While there isn’t unanimous agreement among all nations of the EU, there is certainly a majority that are in favor of using the European Green Deal as a framework for recovery, leading to rich discussions and (hopefully) favorable outcomes.
“The restart can lead to a healthier and more resilient world for everyone.” - U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres (Source)
As usual, the main pushback against green initiatives is coming from a fiscal perspective (these are the people who created the reductive, linear economy based on the hyper consumption loop, after all). We saw this happen in 2008’s recession as well — carbon dioxide levels drastically dropped and then resurged with a vengeance due to carbon-intensive stimulus spending. As such, hundreds of the world’s top economists have banded together to advise that we learn from the 2008 crisis and choose more wisely this time by investing stimulus spending in climate action, stating that “post-crisis green stimulus can help drive a superior economic recovery.” This resounding call for a green recovery is also heard from the general populace, with over a million EU citizens sharing their support for green investments. Specific countries are also putting in measures such as France offering subsidies for bike repairs to entice people to bike rather than drive.
“The current crisis is a stark reminder of how closely human and planetary health are interlinked - only together can people and nature thrive. A green recovery means restoring nature, protecting our environment, and accelerating the transition to a carbon-neutral and resilient economy. MEPs must lead the way." - Ester Asin, director of the WWF European Policy Office (Source)
Markus Spiske via Unsplash.com
Aside from having the leader many of us want for our own countries in Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (The Atlantic hailed her as “the world’s most effective leader”), New Zealand has given personhood to a river, prioritized wellness as part of their economy, and now they are looking at ways they can rebuild in a greener and more sustainable way. For example, in the $50B recovery budget that was just proposed, they’ve allocated $1B toward environmental spend, creating 11,000 news jobs, and $430M is included for unemployed people to help clean up rivers and restore wetlands, as well as $300M is being allotted to prevent loss of biodiversity. To further improve energy efficiency, New Zealand is also investing $56M in their heating and insulation program, which simultaneously improves citizens’ health and thus reduces their vulnerabilities to diseases like COVID-19.
Dan Freeman via Unsplash.com
Politics and science continue to be at odds in the US, with environmental science particularly taking a hit since the current administration took office in 2017 and proceeded to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, roll back regulations on emissions in favor of the fossil fuel industry, and aggressively cut trees on public lands, among many other actions that have drastically changed and reduced US environmental policies. A bright spot came about, however, when the Green New Deal was proposed in 2019, led by the popular Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. While widely rejected at the vote, the Green New Deal continues to be a powerful framework for progressive ideas and is currently being praised by scientists for its relevance to the COVID-19 recovery. While as a whole the US is falling behind on the world stage in this matter, a few progressive states like California are talking about how clean energy jobs can be significant in economic recovery, and thought leaders are at least envisioning what the future of the US could look like with green initiatives in place. For now, it’s still a fantasy, but we remain hopeful.
Researchers from University of Massachusetts working on the potential of growing crops under solar panels panels and the mutual benefits with agriculture (via Unsplash.com).
China and South Korea are leading the way in investing in sustainable recovery among Asian nations. With a total of $7T pledged as economic stimulus, China is heavily investing in infrastructure for electric vehicles, renewable energy, smart cities and smart grids, and healthier cities via focusing on reducing pollution, implementing stricter emissions standards, improving health facilities, creating more space for exercise, and promoting road safety.
South Korea has emerged as an international leader in pandemic recovery. It became the first country to hold a national election amidst this pandemic, and as a result has championed a 2050 carbon neutrality goal, along with proposals for an impressive green recovery. Publishing a “climate manifesto” and giving nod to the EU’s Green Deal for Europe and the US’s Green New Deal, the plan includes “large-scale investments in renewable energy, the introduction of a carbon tax, the phase-out of domestic and overseas coal financing by public institutions, and the creation of a Regional Energy Transition Centre to support workers transition to green jobs.”
Seoul by Daniel Bernard via Unsplash.com
While Canada has come under scrutiny for being off course on its Paris Agreement Goals, the pandemic recovery could certainly catalyze more urgent climate action. One such initiative was unveiled in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s announcement that corporate relief money will be awarded on the contingency that companies commit to climate action. They’ll be expected to “publish annual reports on climate investments, detailing how they plan to reduce their environmental footprints, and how their operations support the country’s commitments made under the Paris climate agreement.” Other leaders are urging clean energy investments, and Vancouver’s mayor is part of a global task force committed to supporting a recovery that helps the transition to a sustainable, regenerative, low-carbon future.
Ali Tawfiq via Unsplash.com
At the UnSchool, we are deeply committed to creating tools and resources that support the transformation to a sustainable, regenerative and circular economy. We see a strong need for more leadership in companies, governments and many organizations.
So, we are working hard on a series of new online learning systems around executive and business leadership. Over the next few months, we will be unveiling a suite of new tools and learning programs to support the rapid uptake of progressive changes to the way we do business.
Stay tuned to find out more!
We are excited to announce the face-to-face, capacity-building workshops and programs that we will be running in 2020!
We have four great programs planned for a European summer, with each program located at our beautiful Brain Spa campus in sunny Portugal. But for our flagship Fellowship program, we are heading out to Bolivia in late 2020!
All of our 2020 programs are open for applications now. We review applications as they come in and send out offers on a rolling basis until each program is full (except the Fellowship, which we will start reviewing and sending offers to in April).
Our programs are always small groups — the farm-based programs usually average between 6-10 changemakers, while the Fellowship has 18-20. So, if you are keen to join us this year, then do get your application in as soon as you can!
We are kicking off the summer with a 3-day bootcamp on the Circular Economy, hosted June 11-14 on the CO Project Farm. This is perfect for anyone wanting to really gain the knowledge and technical skills to advance aspects of the circular economy, like policy, product design and business structures.
On July 20-22 at the CO Project Farm, we will host our Disruptive Design and Activating Change Masterclass. This program dives into the full Disruptive Design Method and provides the tools and agency needed for activating positive change by design.
From August 17-21, Leyla will host our yearly intensive Educator Training program on the CO Project Farm. Perfect for people who are currently tracking to Educator Certification (or wanting to start!), this program shares all the insights and approaches we use at the UnSchool to share systems, sustainability and design methods for activated changemaking.
Head out to the CO Project Farm from September 1-4 to activate your career as a systems designer for the circular future! This 3-day advanced training on circular systems design focuses on life cycle thinking, circular design decisions, and repair as core design strategies for achieving the circular economy.
Our workshops and programs offer transformative experiences, advanced practical tools and a community of incredible like-minded humans to vibe off of — here are some of the things that people who have attended our programs say about the experience:
A special report on exploring our digital footprint
In case you missed it, last week we shared that we had invited investigative journalist Laura Secorun to research the digital footprint of our communication strategy. The UnSchool is always looking at the ways we engage and interact with our own community, and the greater community of the world in general. One of the goals for the research that Laura did was for us to take a look at our own practices and apply changes where necessary and feasible to have more intentionality with our communication practices.
We attempt to lead by example in all aspects of our work, and our digital footprint is no exception. For us, we are using the term ‘digital footprint’ differently to how it has been used so far to describe the data we leave behind as we use the internet. We are connecting it to the ecological footprint methodology which looks at the impact of our individual and collective actions on the planet. The report explores the social, economic and environmental impacts of the main social media and communication platforms that we use to run the UnSchool.
The outcome of the report provided by Laura is that we have made a few transitions with the platforms and communication approaches we use. Leyla has written a sustainable communications policy and we will continue to explore and adapt the things we do online.
We have moved the majority of our communication over from WhatsApp to the more privacy-conscious Telegram. We are also reviewing our online storage, going through the many many folders and drafts we have and mass deleting and decluttering, keeping only current working files and archiving completed projects via physical hard drives. The less space we can take up digitally, the better — so we’re taking on a minimal mindset when it comes to file storage!
We are also reviewing ways to transition out of Google, with a couple options that have servers hosted in more privacy-conscious countries. This will be a bit of a longer process, as the Google system is optimized to be integrated into so many parts of an organization's systems — what makes them convenient and easy to use also makes them complicated to divest from. Like many small organizations, we use the Google suite for email, presentations, project planning, spreadsheets, documents, storage, and calendar management. Finding a service that efficiently and beautifully replaces these functions with a minimal environmental impact and positive social benefit might take a bit more time, but we’re committed to finding a great solution (and always open to suggestions!).
As a general practice, we use our tech as long as possible and repair it when needed. Our friends at iFixit.com are great support in this, as are local repair companies in our own cities as well. Leyla has a Fairphone, which is available to her region, and the rest of us are crossing our fingers for it to become more widely accessible.
We also make sure to pay people fairly and promptly, have a region-specific and needs-based scholarship program, and continue to re-examine the way we conduct business on a regular basis, adjusting as we learn new information and as more options become available. We have always avoided paid advertising and will continue to find new ways of connecting with our current and future community in ethical and sustainable ways.
Our primary external digital work consists of connecting with alumni and promoting programs. We have a diverse, global and incredibly talented alumni pool from both our online and face-to-face programs — there are thousands of you now! Being such an international group of changemakers, we depend on the internet to supply digital programming (via Thinkific for our online school, which we are happy came out looking good in the report!) and to support making connections between each other.
We have been relying on Facebook and Instagram for community interaction, but in part based on this digital footprint report, we are making a transition out of heavily engaging with these platforms and invite you to come along with us.
While we will continue a low-impact engagement on FB, IG, and Twitter (once a week, unless we have an important announcement), we will be moving most of our communications with you all to LinkedIn and good old fashioned email. The professional upskilling focus of LinkedIn is more suited to what we are looking to achieve and support, and it gets us mostly out of Zuck-world. Email means we are talking directly to you instead of via a third party platform, and we use Squarespace for email communications, which also came up good in the report.
From now on, you can find us most often at the following places:
unschools.co — best place to apply for new programs (all of 2020 is up now!)
online.unschools.co — all our digital courses, books, games available 24/7!
UnSchool LinkedIn Main Group — your go-to for all things UnSchool
LinkedIn Creative Systems Changemaker Group — join the 1200+ members already there!
UnSchool Journal — our main email to you, with a weekly journal and updates
If you are pursuing certification in one of our three certification tracks, you will have an invite to a private LinkedIn group for connecting with other trackers. If you are signed up for the program and haven’t received an invite, send an email to emma@disruptdesign.co to get in.
We’re looking forward to this lighter weight digital life, and hope to see you on LinkedIn!
A few months ago, the UnSchool asked me if I would like to research the impact of their digital communication strategy after taking a workshop and discovering the holistic perspective of systems and life cycle thinking and considering how this could be applied to the digital world in which I work as an investigative Journalist. I jumped at the opportunity, not just because I am an investigative journalist who loves digging up facts, but also because I am an Internet addict.
I try my best to be a conscious consumer: I don’t eat animal products, steer clear of fast fashion and regularly juggle piles of loose produce to avoid using plastic bags. Yet I still stare at my computer screen for hours on end, without much knowledge of the consequences of my online habits.
The UnSchool’s project helped me realize that, as much as it feels like it when I’m bingeing Game of Thrones, the internet is not an alternate universe. The internet is very much physical, with similar impacts as other consumption choices. What appears to users as ethereal is actually a vast material infrastructure connected across continents and oceans by cables. Each video, picture and tweet is created with devices that require the mining of rare earth minerals or stored in servers that guzzle up the worlds electricity supply.
According to International Telecommunication Union, the ICT sector is currently responsible for 2% of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions – equivalent to the aviation sector. Swedish researchers believe that, by 2030, this number could reach 23%.
The internet isn’t very democratic either. Autocratic regimes around the world control what their citizens do online by blocking websites, like China does to Wikipedia, or creating barriers to access, like Uganda does by taxing social media services. Even in democratic nations, the majority of us operate online through platforms owned by a handful of immensely powerful for-profit companies that often abuse their power. YouTube, for example, was recently fined a record $170 million to settle allegations by the Federal Trade Commission stating that the platform illegally collected personal information from children without their parents’ consent and then used it to target ads for said minors across other Google services.
As a consumer, however, it’s very difficult to untangle this mesh of negative externalities. For one, you need to understand the technology underpinning our digital lives. Carbon footprinting alone depends on a myriad of factors including type of content, platform chosen, efficiency of both network and servers as well as the type of energy used to power them — be it fossil fuels, nuclear or renewables. Online video, for example, is extremely carbon dense, making up 80% of the world’s data traffic. So, YouTube is bad, right? Well, not so fast. A compressed video playing on a phone and viewed on YouTube, whose servers are largely powered by renewable energy, produces significantly less emissions than an HD video played on a desktop computer from Netflix’s servers, which uses only 17% renewable energy.
Even when the technical specs are easy to compare, most platforms operate internationally, and the socio-political consequences of their policies can vary wildly depending on the context. In my home country of Spain, Facebook is yet to be involved in any political scandals. But in Myanmar, where a military campaign of ethnic cleansing has forced over 700,000 Muslim Rohyinga to flee their homes, the UN found Facebook played a “determining role” in spreading misinformation and hate speech that led to violence.
Combine all of the above with the breakneck pace of tech innovation and a tendency to idolize Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and what you get is consumer apathy.
Yet just because our digital lives are complex doesn’t mean we can’t navigate them in a more empowered and sustainable way. To get you started, here are some of the key lessons I have learned during my time researching the UnSchool’s digital impact.
Whenever you use an online service for free, worry about your privacy. Facebook and Google don’t sell your personal data because they are trying to be evil — they do it because it’s their business model. In 2018, they made $55.8 billion and $136 billion in revenue respectively, mostly from targeted advertising.
Ads are not fundamentally bad, but providing detailed profiles on millions of users to un-vetted third parties who can then monitor their behavior in real-time is an enticing proposition for undemocratic agents. That’s how Facebook ended up allowing Cambridge Analytica to harvest data on millions of unwitting Americans. When the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigated the issue, they found the company had repeatedly violated a 2012 order barring Facebook from deceiving users about its privacy practices.
If privacy is your concern, you may want to consider divesting from companies whose main product is your personal information, and instead, try alternatives like MeWe for networking, DuckDuckGo for search, ProtonMail for e-mail and Signal or Telegram for texting. You can find more of these recommendations in the report that I wrote for the UnSchool (which will be published here in the next few weeks).
We have all seen images of Silicon Valley’s famed startup offices, featuring ping-pong tables, juice bars and in-house yoga. The world’s biggest tech companies, however, also sub-contract people around the world, often to manufacture their devices and moderate their content, yet their working standards are a far cry from those of HQ employees.
Recently, dozens of Facebook and Twitter sub-contracted moderators have come forth to complain about their terrible work conditions, in the United States and also India and the Philippines. As exposed by the documentary, The Cleaners, these workers are exposed to extremely traumatic imagery, with little to no psychological support, leading to PTSD and depression.
To ensure you don’t condone forced or unsafe labor, consider researching the conditions in which your gadgets are manufactured (news reports are a good place to start) or how your content is policed, and then decide if you wish to continue to use platforms that systematically put their employees’ health on the line.
Cloud storage may save trees from being logged for paper, but that doesn’t make it carbon neutral. According to Justin Adamson, a Stanford graduate in Atmosphere and Energy Engineering, storing 100 gigabytes of data (about 100 average movies) in the cloud each year would result in a carbon footprint of about 0.2 tons of CO2 (based on the U.S. electric mix) — the equivalent of flying from New York to Los Angeles.
So if you want to safeguard your files in the most carbon efficient way, consider using physical hard drives. You can also opt for other cloud storage options or web hosting services like Ionos that are powered largely by renewable energy. Get into the habit of regularly de-cluttering your digital closets, ensuring there are no useless apps, redundant back ups or old movies that can be permanently erased to lighten your carbon footprint.
Phones use less electricity than computers, so it’s environmentally efficient to use them to answer e-mail and read the news. But when it comes to their manufacturing, phones are major polluters. According to a study from McMaster University, by 2020 the ecological footprint of smartphones alone will surpass the individual contribution of desktops, laptops and other displays – largely because of the mining of rare materials needed to build a new device.
The problem is that smartphones also have a much shorter life cycle than the rest of devices. So try to keep your current phone for as long as you possibly can, and if you can not fix it, dispose of it responsibly – e-waste is incredibly hazardous and often not recycled. If you have to buy a new one, prioritize ones that can be easily repaired and check the “GreenPeace Guide to Greener Electronics” (Fairphone and certain Apple products lead the pack).
The tech sector is brilliant at marketing new products as upgrades and must haves, but that’s not always the case. The same study that exposed smartphones’ ecological footprint found that, on average, new models with larger screens have a worse carbon footprint than their smaller predecessors.
Disrupting an industry can also disrupt ecosystems. Blockchain technology has long been hailed as the answer to many world’s biggest trust issues, including ethical finance, fake news and electoral fraud. But such a change may come at a massive environmental cost, particularly when it comes to mining cryptocurrencies. According to a paper published on Joule, a scientific journal for energy research, the annual carbon emissions associated with the creation of Bitcoins alone are close to those of countries like Jordan or Sri Lanka. Some even claim it is the new oil.
The Internet is not going to single-handedly push humanity to mass extinction. E-mail saves trees, video conferencing saves car and flight miles, and the economic benefits of free access to information are virtually incalculable. The Global e-Sustainability Initiative even says innovation in communication technology could lead to emission reductions in other industries, amounting up to five times the size of the ICT’s carbon footprint.
Sustainability is always a trade off and the same holds true for our digital sources. As mentioned previously, Facebook and Google may be actively undermining the free market, and the FTC is currently investigating them both for possible antitrust violations. Yet Facebook and Google are also exemplary leaders when it comes to promoting environmental sustainability in the tech world. The first is the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world and the latter has been powering 100% of its global operations with renewables since 2017.
The key to navigating this maze is staying curious. As an individual, take the time to track your habits, read news about the industry and make sure to support platforms that act in accordance to your values. As an organization, think of following the UnSchool’s example. Do an independent audit on the impacts of the tools and processes your team uses and then set up new policies to align your online actions with your sustainability goals and ethical values.
Each small action counts. So instead of rushing to share this article on social media, consider going for a stroll instead. The planet will thank you for it, and I promise I won’t be offended.
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Next week we will release the report Laura wrote, along with the actions we are taking at the UnSchool to address our digital footprint.
There’s no denying that we live in the age of busy — we are continuously on the go, living amongst a chaotic frenzy of personal responsibilities, appointments, leisure activities, and whatever else is demanding our presence and attention. But the way we move has led to some devastating impacts for our home planet and for all the people who inhabit it, like soaring carbon dioxide emissions and dangerous amounts of air pollution. Reducing these emissions is, without a doubt, a matter of life or death, as at least 3.7 million people die each year as a result of outdoor air pollution, and transportation currently contributes 23% of all carbon dioxide emissions.
We all have to get places, and the impact we each have on climate change and air pollution is directly attributed to our transport choices. You can opt to drive less, share your ride, and swap to electric. Let’s dive into how the Anatomy of Action (AoA) explores the different ways you can move around your community to swap to having more intentionally positive impacts.
Humans around the world are sitting more than ever before in our human history, and much of the push to a sedentary lifestyle involves a long commute paired to work that is paired with sitting at a desk all day. These sedentary lifestyles have quickly taken a toll on human health, with over 300 million adults around the world being categorized as obese.
Then there is the environmental impact that all this individual vehicle use is having, but there are many ways to transport yourself from one place to another, offering a perfect opportunity to use your body to get around. Human-powered transport, like walking, biking, skateboarding, are great for a variety of reasons; it’s much cheaper, cleaner, and better for your general health, and the increase in more human forms of mobility often increases road safety. According to this research, “Increasing median daily walking and bicycling from 4 to 22 minutes reduced the burden of cardiovascular disease and diabetes by 14%, increased the traffic injury burden by 39%, and decreased greenhouse gas emissions by 14%.” By just cycling to work, you reduce your chance of cancer by 45% and cardiovascular disease by 46%. In many places around the world, walking and cycling are the norm, but more can be done to enhance the infrastructure to ensure our cities are more human transport friendly. For example, introducing sidewalks in a city can reduce serious traffic injuries by 25%.
Personal car transportation contributes huge impacts to air pollution and to your carbon footprint, so whenever you can, swap your car rides to human-powered transport options to help reduce these stats, to save costs and time, to reduce noise and congestion, and to encourage a shift in the way we design cities and move around them.
Pre-check and choose routes for walking and cycling, give yourself extra time, get exercise, increase your productivity and health and wellness, and reduce your transport impact
Engage with green spaces and support urban conservation projects in your community by using public nature spaces for moving around, like bike paths
Give your productivity and personal wellness a boost by walking or cycling instead of taking short personal car rides
Start a group of people commuting to work at the same time to make a walking or bike ‘bus’ if safety is of concern
Swap short drives for walks or bike rides (or learn to rollerblade, skateboard, or scooter if you want a cooler way to get around)
Support local government initiatives to introduce better urban design, walkable cities, and mass public transport systems
It’s true, sharing is caring! Not only does sharing car rides when you have to take them reduce emissions, but it also saves money. Transportation studies put “the annual cost of congestion at $160 billion, which includes 7 billion hours of time lost to sitting in traffic and an extra 3 billion gallons of fuel burned.” Or, consider this German study which has calculated that “a 10% increase in the modal share of walking and cycling in urban areas would mean that the German GDP would go up by 1.11% by 2030, representing €29bn, based on German GDP in 2012.”
Of course, ride sharing will have positive impacts on air quality, too, which is a crucial point of intervention given that in 2014, 92% of the world population was living in places where the WHO air quality guidelines levels were not met. Rather than taking your car, by walking, cycling, or taking public transport like trains and busses, you not only lower your carbon footprint but also invest in the services to keep them functioning. There are numerous case studies that show the positive flow-on effects of investing in design for human-powered transport or ride sharing — like this one from Portland, Oregon that found “the number of miles of bikeways (lanes, paths, and boulevards) increased 247% from 79 in 1991 to 274 in 2008. This coincided with the share of workers commuting by bicycle rising from 1.1% in 1990 to 6.0% in 2008.”
Join bike, scooter, or car share services if your city has them
Use public transport and give extra time to yourself (read a book, enjoy music, meet someone new)
Join rideshare apps or start collaborative commuting with your neighbours or friends
When using on-demand taxi services, opt for the green option (if available) and the ride share option
If available, consider intercity or intercountry rail services over short distance flights
In addition to using your own body to get around and ride sharing, you can opt for electric forms of mobility to help reduce the harmful emissions at the city level caused by petrol-powered transport options. There are multiple benefits of low-carbon mobility, like an improved economy, reduced spending on imported fuel, increased energy security, and of course better human health. Globally we are seeing a rise in electric vehicle use and charging stations, so now is a great time to find ways of swapping to electric.
Many countries are offering financial incentives for low-carbon vehicles, like the UK who provides “100% first year allowance for business owners up to 2021, UK Plug-in Car Grant of £3,500, Exemption from London Congestion Charge, Significant Fuel Savings vs. a comparable Combustion Engine Car and no car fuel benefit for company cars, and Scottish customers can enjoy interest-free loans of up to £35,000 (personal) or up to £100,000”. And it’s not just passenger vehicles that we’re seeing electric options pop up; battery- and fuel cell–electric trucks and buses, especially transit buses, are already in operation across many US cities and are continuously expanding their fleets, not just in the US but also across the world. In fact, the global adoption of electric buses is expected to triple by 2025.
Explore all the options available to you getting around and find which ones have the least impact
Adjust your routes so that you are going the least distance
Swap short distance drives for alternative modes of transport
Look for and ask about flexible working options to reduce your commute, such as working from home, video conferencing or later start times
See if there are leasing services where you can give an electric car or bike a try
Swap your fossil fuel car to an electric one
Use cleaner fuel when you can
Support government or business initiatives that provide alternative fuel and cleaner transport options for your community
There are no simple solutions to complex problems, and the transportation issues we face are indeed complex. While the global environmental issues may be big and sometimes overwhelming, they are the outcomes of many individual actions. So, the choices we each make as individuals, as workers, and as members of societies have the potential to reinforce undesirable actions or to create the opportunity for new, more sustainable solutions.
The actions outlined in the Anatomy of Action are are some of the top-level actions any individual can do to help support the global shift toward a more sustainable and regenerative future. No matter who you are, every action you take has an impact, so by taking these more considered actions, you can contribute to a global movement towards activating the SDG’s. There are many other things you can do; this list is by no means an exhaustive account of all the aspects of our lives, but all the actions in the Anatomy of Action offers a starter list that any individual, anywhere can take action on to help make a positive future for all of us!
Stuff! It is everywhere, all around us, fulfilling needs and helping to make our modern lives possible. But SO much stuff is wasted, useless, or unnecessary, and the impact of the material world is astronomical. Wherever you are right now, you can look around and see a bunch of stuff that has been manufactured, purchased, and at some point, will be waste - this linear economy has resulted in heaps of unintended negative consequences on the planet, many of which we are now seeing come around to hurt us - like ocean plastic waste.
It’s hard not to get overwhelmed when thinking about the amount of “stuff” in this world. The average American household contains 300,000 items, an average British 10-year-old child owns 238 toys but usually only plays with 12 of them, and 77 million automobiles will have been sold by the end of 2019. With the rise of cheap manufacturing and convenience-driven shopping (free 2-day shipping, anyone?), stuff is now as ubiquitous in our lives as food, only it doesn’t nourish and sustain us but instead, it often simply takes up space — first in your home, then in a giveaway box or most likely, a landfill, with 99 percent of stuff being trashed within 6 months! We have become obsessed with buying sh*t we don’t necessarily need, and the economy is fueled by the hyper-consumption loop that drives the faulty GDP system. That’s why, for the second category of the Anatomy of Action, we tackle how to improve our consumption habits with thinking beyond buying, slowing down fashion, and ditching disposables.
What’s behind so many of the negative environmental impacts we’re grappling with today? Although there’s no one singular, simple answer, we’d be remiss not to look at the linear economy that we’ve designed over the last century in order to meet human wants and needs. Our current economy is based on a waste-based system of production where we take raw materials and natural resources out of nature, process them into usable goods to meet human needs, and then discard them back into giant holes in the ground that, ironically, were often where we took the raw materials from to begin with.
This entire system is in opposition to the natural systems that sustain life on Earth — which are circular and regenerative — and it’s counterintuitive to the way we function as living organisms. For example, we all require nutrients to survive, which is part of the beautifully-designed system of nutrients cycling through bodies and back into the ground to grow the next generation of food; this nutrient cycle is one of the fundamental ecosystems that makes life on Earth possible. Basically, humans designed a broken system that needs waste to sustain itself, and thus everything is intended to constantly lose value after it's purchased. Our linear economy does not fit in a circular world, and we can instead find ways of circumnavigating this cycle and activating our agency within the economy by buying better things.
This needs to be emphasized when we start to think “Beyond Buying”, as we cannot sustain the wasteful, reductive linear economy and thus need to transition to a circular economy in order to shift the status quo of our consumption problem. While many people automatically think that transitioning to circular systems design will result in monetary losses, it’s actually the opposite in that a circular economy offers some huge financial incentives. Current research indicates that the material saving potential alone, for example, is estimated at 500 billion € per year for the European industry, and the job creation potential of remanufacturing and recycling in Europe is estimated at one million new jobs!
Along with rethinking how we consume stuff and implementing circular design practices, there are also huge opportunities in sharing, swapping, repairing, and repurposing the things that we already have. Consider the fact that on average, cars in North America and Western Europe are only in use 8% of the time, or that the average electric drill is used 6 to 13 min over its lifetime. It makes absolutely no sense as to why we all need to own so many items individually, and it’s much more practical to consider collaborative consumption.
Similarly, we’ve also become accustomed to a throw-away economy in which instead of repairing our goods, we discard them and then replace them instead. This isn’t all the fault of the consumer, however — 77% of EU consumers say they’d rather repair goods than buy new ones, and indeed, there are systems issues with planned obsolescence and enforced disposability that encourage this uptick in buying new devices. This is especially true with tech gear and the trend of replacing smart phones on an annual basis (there are now more phones on this planet than people!), which is a massive missed economic opportunity among its other issues. In fact, a United Nations University report estimates “the value of the recoverable materials in discarded electronics was $52 billion dollars in 2014 alone.” Similarly, if the industry were better regulated and made phones easier to take apart and recapture, then the cost of remanufacturing them could be reduced by 50% per device.
So, as you can see through this small snapshot, there are huge opportunities in moving away from this exploitative economy and moving beyond buying. This is, in short, what the circular economy is all about: meeting our needs with new sustainable product designs, service delivery models, and new approaches to business where we get better experiences with less stuff. To start, we can find ways of introducing things into our daily lives that have more value and last longer, reduce disposability, and maximize material recapture.
Whilst we wait for all producers of goods and services to adopt these new approaches, consumers of all walks of life can be more conscious of what they need, what they are buying, and how they value the things that fill our lives. Increasing the usable life by repairing, sharing, reselling, and reducing helps reduce the need for new goods. If you can, invest in goods with longer warranties and design durability, and find companies that offer buyback and repair schemes for their products along with swapping and sharing things you need. Consider what you need before you buy products so that you can ensure you acquire things that will last longer, be used multiple times, and are intended to be in the economy for as long as possible before being waste.
Consider what you really need and what impacts these have on the planet before making buying stuff and reduce what you buy
Continue or start sharing, swapping things like appliances, tools, clothes, talents and services
For new purchases, look into how you can get what you need via a service or a product that lasts longer and has been made sustainably
Find things with extended warranties and that can be repaired, and then make sure you repair things
Buy beautiful second hand things and find new homes for things you no longer want
For technologies and gadgets use them longer, repair and donate them and ensure you find a reliable recycler at the end of their life
Delete old emails and other files stored on the cloud (servers use heaps of energy)
Offer your technical skills and talents to extend product use, help others, and build a sense of community
Recommend and buy from companies that provide spare parts to repair, that offer take back services or use recycled materials in production
One of the most pervasive subcategories of stuff that accumulates and creates waste is found in textiles. Fashion is a hyper-fast, resource-intensive industry that impacts nearly everyone on the planet in some way. We all wear clothes not only for functionality, but also to express a certain style and identity. But with global clothing production doubling in the last 15 years, the fast fashion phenomenon exacerbates labor conditions (excessive dust, heat, rodents, lack of sanitation, etc.), and product quality is pushed as low as possible by brands to make inventory on a weekly basis. And then, after the newest styles are purchased for the thrill of newness and a low price, they often just sit in one’s closet, unworn. According to research by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, “...the average number of times a garment is worn before it ceases to be used has decreased by 36% compared to 15 years ago, and the same pattern is emerging in China, where clothing utilisation has decreased by 70% over the last 15 years.”
You know what happens next — after garments sit unworn in a closet for some time, they are then shipped off to the landfill whenever a tidying-up urge hits. Recycling isn’t happening: 84% of all textile waste is sent directly to landfills. Of course, all of this negatively impacts climate conditions, whereas “reuse of clothing saves 29kg CO2e per kg of clothing compared to recycling and 33kg CO2e compared to disposal.” When we configure the economics of this environmental disaster, we find that “globally, customers miss out on USD 460 billion of value each year by throwing away clothes that they could continue to wear and some garments are estimated to be discarded after just seven to ten wears.”
You can avoid contributing to this by breaking the vicious cycle perpetuated by constantly changing clothes by finding responsible brands that support the betterment of workers and the environment or by buying second hand. In becoming a conscious and responsible consumer through the power of your decision making, you will help the environment and society in significant ways.
Celebrate being unique - buy vintage, redesign old clothes, create a core basic or ‘capsule’ wardrobe, and be bold in your fashion choices
Give your clothes a second chance: share, reuse, repair, recycle, sell, and donate high-quality fashion for second-hand use
Think long-term: buy quality clothes that last and take care of them. Today’s new pieces are tomorrow's vintage treasures
Let brands know when you are not happy with their practices and help encourage them to move towards sustainable production
Use your consumer power to buy better clothes and to increase the availability of more sustainable fashion options
Ask brands about how best to take care of their clothes, how they produce and source, and how they are committed to sustainability
We have a collective global challenge unprecedented in the history of humans on this Earth. We have designed ourselves into a tightly-wound system of disposability that is wreaking havoc on the systems that sustain us all. No human is immune to these outcomes from our collective actions, as no one can deny that they need food, air, and water to survive and thrive. Thus, we are all implicated in the necessity to dramatically redesign our manufacturing, production, and consumption systems to be post disposable.
From the oceans to the air, our natural systems have become innocent victims of our hyper-disposable cycles of meeting human needs. This is not an alarmist warning — this is a biophysical realty of the planet we all share. The data tells the story here; with over 320 million tons of plastic being consumed globally and more plastic produced in the last decade than ever before, plastic is infiltrating all of our natural systems, especially the ocean with more than 8 million tons of it leaking into the ocean each year, thanks to poor disposal practices, broken recycling systems, and the lack of waste management in emerging economies where plastic is pervasive.
The UNEP reported in 2018, “Only nine percent of the nine billion tonnes of plastic the world has ever produced has been recycled. Most ends up in landfills, dumps or in the environment. If current consumption patterns and waste management practices continue, then by 2050 there will be around 12 billion tonnes of plastic litter in landfills and the environment. By this time, if the growth in plastic production continues at its current rate, then the plastics industry may account for 20 percent of the world’s total oil consumption.” And we’re just scratching the surface on how all of this is also impacting human health, as we’ve recently learned that 90% of table salts contain microplastics and the average adult consumes approximately 2,000 microplastics per year through salt.
All over the world, our daily lives are overwhelmed with single-use products and plastics, from packaging to beverage cups and bags. As shared by UNEP, "The most common single-use plastics found in the environment are, in order of magnitude, cigarette butts, plastic drinking bottles, plastic bottle caps, food wrappers, plastic grocery bags, plastic lids, straws and stirrers, other types of plastic bags, and foam take-away containers. These are the waste products of a throwaway culture that treats plastic as a disposable material rather than a valuable resource to be harnessed."
Disposable products are not just hazardous for the environment but also costly to remove and hard to recycle. By ditching disposables in whatever way you can, you are supporting the global movement to go #zerowaste and sending signals to producers and stores that we don't want plastic in our oceans and littering our streets. This is more important than ever before with the recent global shakeup stemming from China refusing to take more recycling — by 2030, it’s estimated that 111 million metric tons of plastic waste will be displaced due to this new law. But the good news is that from personal beverage containers to shopping in bulk and even making your own cleaning products, there are hundreds of micro actions you can take to support the global trend towards a post disposable future.
Swap daily disposables such as straws, bags, coffee cups, take out food containers, forks, razors, sanitary products for reusable alternatives, you will save money in the long run
Continue or start to buy at bulk food stores and bring your own containers and bags to take products home in
Carry your own vessel for water and hot drinks
Rethink food storage to eliminate plastic baggies and wrap, you can swap to reusable containers and beeswax wraps
Clean greener- from toothpaste to household cleaning products there are alternative and often cheaper ways of getting things clean such as bicarb soda and vinegar
Replace disposable hygiene products with reusable ones, such as swapping pads & tampons for the menstrual cups and moon pads
Consider ways to refill products like cleaning and household liquids in bulk to reduce packaging
Use your consumer power where you shop, eat, and work to voice the change you want to see and reduce disposability from our lives!
There are no simple solutions to complex problems, and the consumption issues we face are indeed complex. While the global environmental and social issues being big and often overwhelming, it is important to be reminded that they are in part the outcomes of many individual actions. So, the choices we each make as individuals, as workers, and as members of societies have the potential to reinforce undesirable actions or to create the opportunity for new, more sustainable solutions to emerge.
The actions outlined in the Anatomy of Action are the top-level actions any individual can take to help support the global shift toward a more sustainable and regenerative future. No matter who you are, every action you take has an impact. By taking these more considered actions, you can contribute to a global movement for a more sustainable future. There are many other things you can do; this list is by no means an exhaustive account of all the aspects of our lives where we need to tackle to meet the SDGs. But it’s a starter list that any individual, anywhere can take action on to help make a positive future for all of us!
Food! Delicious, terrible, gross, amazing — everyone loves it, we all need it, Instagram is filled with it, and it's the biggest impact of our daily lives, which is exactly why we chose it as the first action in our Anatomy of Action (AoA) set. Let’s take a look at the issues and opportunities that we all have with the food in our life, via the three action areas that we set out in the AoA: protein swaps, using all your food, and growing your own. Then pick and action and get started!
If you’re at all into sustainability, then you’ve surely heard that reducing meat consumption — which we have coined as “Protein Swaps” in the AoA to have a more positive, inclusive impact — has a tremendously positive impact on the planet’s health and the well-being of billions of animals and people. But before narrowing down on that, it’s important to point out that the staggering increase in meat production that we have all experienced in our lifetimes is a brand new phenomenon — never before in human history have we humans eaten so much meat. Experts estimate that total meat production has increased 4-5 fold since 1961, and in order to meet the demand, over 70% of the world’s farm animals are now factory farmed (including 99% of the animals in the US!). This massive uptick in meat production is accompanied by a massive uptick in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (and a huge freshwater footprint), with livestock and their byproducts accounting for at least 32,564 million tons of CO2e per year, or 51 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions. Which all makes sense when you discover that every year in the US alone, according to the US Meat Institute 9 billion chickens (yes that’s a B), 32.2 million cattle and calves, 241.7 million turkeys, 2.2 million sheep and lambs, and 121 million hogs are killed for meat consumption (here is a creepy real time kill clock).
Given the astounding snapshot of just how pervasive factory farmed meat is, there are, of course, many health and planet impacts that we are often blind to. Without going too much into the details, mass produced meat-based proteins contribute to desertification, deforestation, and nutrification (as well as the development of oceanic dead zones), all while subjecting factory-confined animals to heaps of animal cruelty issues.
It’s no surprise then that various governments around the world are encouraging citizens to adopt a more plant-based diet. For example, Canada released a new national food guide in 2019 that focused on plant-based eating, whereas the UK and the Chinese lawmakers have made statements about the benefits of reducing meat consumption. Similarly, New Zealand’s 2019 Sustainability Report also urges citizens to begin eating more plants, less meat, as did the popular EAT-Lancet Commission Report released earlier in 2019. The US, one of the worlds biggest meat consumers, is also seeing a change in consumer preferencing, with more people opting for plant-centric eating.
Swapping meat-centric food habits for meals with different protein sources is good for your health and for the environment. In many parts of the world this is already a way of life. The best way to re-shape our global food systems is for people to swap meat to plant based options. By making the switch to a more vegetable-friendly diet and being more selective in where your meat comes from (adopt a flexitarian or reducetarian diet!), you can improve your health, lower GHG emissions and reduce biodiversity loss.
#ProteinSwaps Everyday Actions
Swap animal protein for more plant-based proteins
Diversify your diet and cook more at home
Eat what is seasonally available
Opt for locally-produced foods; seek out local farmers and markets that offer sustainable produce
Talk with your friends and family about healthy and sustainable food options to encourage them to swap their diets too
Become an everyday/weekday vegetarian, vegan, or flexitarian
Try to have a rainbow of vegetables on your plate in every meal
Another enormous problem within our food systems that we examined through the AoA is the issue of prolific food waste — 1.3 billion tons are wasted each year, which is an incredible one-third of all food produced globally for human consumption. This isn’t just an ironic issue in the face of widespread world hunger; it also means that “huge amounts of the resources used in food production are used in vain, and that the greenhouse gas emissions caused by production of food that gets lost or wasted are also emissions in vain." And what about the end-of-life for this wasted food in landfills? Given that on average, the carbon footprint of food wastage is around 500 kg CO2 eq. per capita and per year, there are enormous environmental and fiscal opportunities in reducing food waste. In fact, it’s estimated by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation that the U.K. could save “USD 1.1 billion a year on landfill cost by keeping organic food waste out of landfills—this would also reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 7.4 million tonnes p.a. and could deliver up to 2 GWh worth of electricity and provide much-needed soil restoration and specialty chemicals.” For these reasons and more, the second action area focus of our AoA food exploration is all about using all your food.
Using all your food helps reduce food waste which, in trash heaps and landfills, leads to releases of leachates and methane (which is 30x times more potent than CO2). Food scraps and stale bread are not trash at all! They are filled with the building blocks of life-nutrients, which your body and soil can use (replacing fertilizers and chemicals). So, by getting organics out of open dumps and landfills, we can reduce emissions released into the air and give nutrients back to the soil to produce healthier and tastier plants.
#UseAllYourFood Everyday Actions
Design your meals to use up the entire food product
Buy only what you can finish or save — don’t waste food after all you paid for it. If you throw it away, you are tossing your money in the trash
When buying foods, avoid excessive packaging and take your own produce bags
Seek out "ugly" fruit and vegetables to give them a life in your meal
Manage how you store food to maximize freshness, such as using sealed containers in your fridge and pantry
Get (more) into canning, preserves, and freezing to extend food life
Make stock out of food scraps
Compost your food scraps
Share excess food to help ensure everyone has enough (there are many apps that help with this)
Find out what’s available in your neighborhood and advocate for communal composting and organic waste processing solutions
Of course there are many food options for a healthy person and planet, but our 3rd one for the AoA supports you growing your own food and connecting to where it comes from in order to save money and to reduce transport, packaging, and food waste. While we hear a lot of conversation about plastic water bottles and plastic bags — especially when talking about plastic bans — the lesser known truth is that food’s plastic packaging accounts for nearly 50% of plastic waste (!) as waste is generated along the entire life cycle of food products, from the growing practices through to the supermarket and home wastage.
By growing your own food, even if it only replaces just some of what you would otherwise buy, you can connect better to what you eat and reduce the impacts that occur from the growing, packaging, transport, retail practices and food waste. Producing some of your own food has multiple benefits so even a small amount of home grown produce is a great way to start.
Access to land and time to garden of course varies, so if you can’t grow your own food, consider finding local farmers and support them or join a farmers cooperative. There are many benefits to small scale community agriculture — better food, more nutrients, higher air and soil quality, pollinator plants for bees and inspects, and an enhanced sense of community.
#GrowYourOwn Everyday Actions
Farm, plant, and grow whatever you can, wherever you can
Start or join an urban school or kitchen garden
Connect with your food: find out where your food comes from and how it is produced
Regrow vegetables like leeks, carrots, and beets in your house in a glass of water instead of discarding them
If you can’t grow food yourself, support a local sustainable farmer or shop at farmers markets
Promote, develop, and support initiatives in your building, street, or community that increases your access to food-growing space
There are no simple solutions to complex problems, and the food issues we face are indeed complex. While the global environmental issues are big and sometimes overwhelming, they are the outcomes of many individual actions, and of course the decisions made by governments and industry as well. Food is certainly a vital area for progress and change which can start with us exerting our influence over the demand side of the system.
So, the choices we make as individuals, as workers, and as members of societies have the potential to reinforce undesirable actions or to create the opportunity for new, more sustainable solutions.
The actions outlined in the Anatomy of Action are the top-level actions an individual can do to help support the global shift toward shared good-life goals (check out the AoA action validation report to discover more). No matter who you are, every action you take has an impact.
By taking these more considered lifestyle choices, you can contribute to a global movement for a more sustainable future. There are many other things you can do; this list is by no means an exhaustive account of all the aspects of our lives where we need to tackle to meet the SDGs. But it’s a starter list that any individual, anywhere can take action on to help make a positive future for all of us!
By Leyla Acaroglu
When I talk about sustainability, a topic I have spoken about a lot over the last 15 years of my career, people often react in one of three ways: 1. they are really into the idea but don’t know what to do about it; 2. they are openly hostile about it, usually because they have had a bad experience with some form of environmentally-motivated actions/product etc; or, 3. they are confused by what it actually means and whether it is achievable, which makes them feel overwhelmed by it.
I try to remind people that sustainability is about the social, economic, and environmental considerations of what we do in our personal lives, the way we do business, and the government decisions that our elected representatives make on our behalf so that we can sustain the systems (such as food, air, and water) that every single living thing on Earth needs to survive and thrive. What it is not is a hippy-dippy, tree-hugging, wishy washy, anti-business concept that means you have to give up a lot and go back to the ‘dark ages,’ which is literally what some people who fall into the openly-hostile category have said to me. By being human, you need the planet, and as a result of our collective actions, the planet now needs us to alter damaging practices and replace them with more sustainable and regenerative ones.
I will be the first to admit that we have a whole bunch of historical legacy issues to overcome when it comes to sustainability, as, in the past, actions by environmental movements and organizations have accidentally pigeon-holed the ways in which people view and care about the planet. Whilst often very good intentioned, the use of fear and shaming have been two well-executed tools in a space that often ends up being polarized between people who ‘care’ about the planet and those who ‘don’t’ — which is very strange when all people need the planet to live and thus don’t really have the option to not care about it.
There are also many issues with the boom in greenwashing that we are still trying to shake off from industries who spend more money on marketing green credentials rather than doing them, and thus the resulting consumer cynicism from people who feel they were duped into buying crappy, often more expensive, so-called ‘green’ products.
Now, though, we are in a more sophisticated era of understanding the ways in which we can design products and services that meet human needs but don’t destroy the systems that sustain us all. That's really what the core of sustainability as a practice is — a better understanding of systems and how we participate in them, which then leads to more informed and creative decision-making around how we all live well on this shared planet. And by shared, I mean not just with all the 7.5 billion other humans, but also the biological miracle that is the diversity of all the different species that make Earth the only known life-sustaining plant in the universe.
The current trend toward circularizing the economy is, in part, a reaction to the phenomenal waste crisis that we have designed ourselves into. The sad reality is that yes, recycling is broken, and we have global supply chains churning out stuff designed for the dump every second of every day. With many people profiting off this linear system, it does seem hard to turn the tides on such a well-oiled production-to-waste machine.
But now, many of us humans are seeing the feedback loops from this by way of mounds of ocean plastic waste and air pollution, which is one of the world’s biggest killers. In fact, cities around the world regularly peak above the WHO safe living index, and recent studies have shown the link between air pollution and all sorts of cognitive issues like Alzheimer’s disease. And then there is the climate crisis, a massive, scary, overwhelming concept that is freaking many people out. So, what in all of this mess and chaos is one individual to do about this, when we are presented with so many issues in need of solutions like the 17 in the Sustainable Development Goals? How do we overcome the inertia felt by the magnitude of the issues at hand, when we see there are just so many things that need to be addressed and we are just individuals trying to live a good life? How on Earth do we do anything that has any impact at all?
Every issue holds its own solution, and that’s the case here. We each make up the world by the actions we take; the planet is in the state it's in not because we exist, but because we do the things we do each day. Sure, many choices are taken out of our hands and all industries and governments have a lot to answer for when it comes to obtaining a sustainable and positive future. But for each of us, we hold in our own two hands the opportunities to change the economy, as it is made up of all our individual actions accumulated as an economic outcome.
If you have ever worked for a company that sells goods or services, you will know that the trends in consumer behavior are the things that dictate the next steps for the company. So, let’s say you work for a large supermarket chain, and suddenly, people start avoiding overly-packaged products. When you look into why, you discover it's because of the concerns about ocean plastic waste and that there is a trend toward package-free products. So then, you make a case to your boss to have package-free options that meets the rising trend in consumer preferences. That is how the market works — actions breed reactions in the market — so if we want to be a part of designing a future that works better than today, then we need to redesign our lives to mimic the kind of future we want to live in.
The complexity of sustainability is in the fact that we don’t really have all the answers yet. There is much work to do on the technical solutions to meeting our needs in more regenerative and planet-positive ways, like how do we mass-produce carbon-free energy and provide power for transport devices as large as airplanes? But, the very fact that we discovered how to fly was a miracle not too long ago, so the future will result is these issues being addressed, once we have a more widespread acceptance of the base reality that all humans need the planet and that our actions have negative impacts on it that, in turn, negatively impact us all. There is absolutely no escaping this, no matter how much power or wealth you may have.
But, there are many things we can do, and I want to make it really clear that we each have agency and some kind of control over the future we create, even if it doesn’t seem like it at times. We make up the economy through our actions, and in turn, the economic system dictates what we value and how we live our lives. So, we are in a dynamic relationship that often feels as though the way things are is the way things have and will always be. But 10 years ago, smartphones were a brand new thing, and 20 years ago, we all had to plug our desktop computers into a phone line to access this new thing called the Internet. As such, in 10 or 20 years, the future will be very different from today, and I, for one, will be working to ensure that the kind of future we end up in is more equitable, sustainable, and regenerative than today.
This is my very long introduction to a project we have been working on with the United Nations Environment Program’s economic division. For the last year, we have been exploring what types of actions individuals can take that will actually have an impact, if replicated and normalized, as part of people's everyday lifestyle actions. The outcome is the Anatomy of Action, an initiative we will launch this week at UNESCO in Paris. We wanted to not only design something that supports lifestyle changes for sustainable living, but also base it on a deeper understanding of what is working, along with why and how to amplify it so that we get new types of behavioral normals that encourage positive shifts within the economy.
In 2016, I was awarded Champion of the Earth by the UNEP for my work with the UnSchool and my creative products that bring a science-based, innovative approach to sustainability. So it was fitting that we would find a way to collaborate on the complex and fascinating topic of sustainable lifestyles and how to activate more of them.
For this collaboration, my team and I started by shining a light on all the bright spots of organically-growing cultural movements that exist outside of the traditional sustainability or environmental movements — things like zero waste, minimalism, guerilla gardening, ride sharing, etc. We identified over 80 movements, categorized them into which everyday lifestyle areas they were addressing, and then dissected the actions that these movements were identifying and taking. Next, we searched for the last five years of peer-reviewed academic papers and studies to see which of these hundreds of identified actions have positive impacts if amplified out among more people.
This helped us refine the list of actions down into a more detailed action heat map, and from that, we developed the five themes that make up the Anatomy of Action: food, stuff, movement, money, and fun. Experts within the UN system then reviewed the long lists of validated actions and confirmed the high-level ones that we could share as significant actions that anyone can take to have a positive impact in their daily lives.
The resulting 15 sub-actions are all positively framed; for example, we are not asking everyone to go vegan (which is shown will have significantly positive impacts) but instead to ‘protein swap’, which everyone can do a few meals a week. We chose this intentional language because we know that globally, food options are very different, and health conceptions as well as cultural conventions are also very diverse. For me, a protein swap is achievable, and if we get more people doing this, it will encourage meat producers to move away from intensive factory farming and instead, produce high quality, ethical, grass-fed meat, which will result in a better place with many environmental impacts.
The action set presented in the Anatomy of Action shows everyday lifestyle swaps that fit easily into daily lifestyle choices. I drew heavily on behavioral and cognitive sciences to gain an insight into how to frame these actions as opportunities rather than losses, as the reality with sustainability is that it is a massive opportunity! For example, the benefits in swapping your car drive for human-powered transport are massive. Not only do you get exercise, but also the less cars we have in urban environments, the better air quality we get. Additionally, there is a lot of research as to when people disrupt their daily habits and rituals — usually when there are already in an altered life state, such as going on vacation, having a baby, or moving houses. This struck me as fascinating, as we often fall into rutted ways of doing things, and as the old adage goes, “A change is as good as a holiday,” because change often brings positive results for us.
Part of the Anatomy of Action asset set, Illustrations by Emma Segal. See all assets here
In designing and making the Anatomy of Action, I wanted to create a memorable, but simple memetic tool that reminds us all of the choices we make everyday. Nearly everyone has hands and we see them in front of us everyday, doing the things that make up our lives, so this reference is easy to remember when taking actions. But the critical thing is taking action! So to launch the initiative, we are challenging everyone to pick one of the actions, swap to it, and then share your habit disruptions on social media, tagging three friends to challenge them to get started too. Then repeat! For example, I personally moved banks for the UnSchool and started to move over other banks for my personal life because part of the research showed that divestment from banks and energy providers that are relying on the old carbon-producing industries could be done pretty easily. It takes time, for sure, but the outcome is investing in the kind of companies I want to see more of and divesting from the ones that need to change.
Keep in mind that, due to the need to reach a diverse range of humans around the globe who live among different circumstances, the final action set is simply a chunk of things you can start doing now, but there are MANY things you can do and that need to be done. The next stage in our progress toward a sustainable future is discovering the things that we have impact on, both in negative and positive ways, and then designing these so that they are more effective and efficient. That's exactly what we're doing with sustainability — we are researching and working to figure out where the impacts are and what we can each do to address these, in our lives, in our businesses, and through the actions we take everyday that have an impact on the economy.
We need many approaches to communicating, engaging, and activating a sustainable, circular, regenerative future. The Anatomy of Action is just one, but I hope it inspires you to reconsider some of the daily lifestyle choices you make, as well as how we each impact the economy and how, in turn, it impacts us, because the future is made up of our actions today. In doing so, we can all, over time, work to change the narrative of sustainability and design a future that works better than today.
If you’ve been keeping up with our work at The UnSchool, then you already know that we are all about activating systems change for a sustainable future by design. We work with people of all professional and personal backgrounds to support the rapid transition to being an activated creative changemaker.
Our approach is deeply rooted in a philosophy of systems, sustainability, and design, forming three knowledge pillars that hold up all that we do. All of our programs, projects, and practices have systems thinking, sustainability sciences, and creative design solutions at the heart. These three pillars wraps up into the Disruptive Design Method, which is a scaffolding that enables people to think and do differently when it comes to understanding and working to help solve complex problems. In fact, we LOVE problems and embrace chaos and complexity at the UnSchool, helping others do the same!
In this week’s journal, we are exploring in more detail our three pillars of Systems, Sustainability, and Design.
The world is made up of complex, interconnected, and interdependent systems, starting with the most important life-sustaining systems of all, the ecological system, Planet Earth, which is made up of the billions of individual yet interconnected parts that form the magical whole that we are all a part of. Earth's natural systems provide every single living thing with the resources needed to exist, and thus, it is in our fundamental needs to create things that meet our needs within the opportunities and limitations of Earth.
We live within a set of complex social systems that subtly govern human society, from education to government and everything in between. Social systems are emergent outcomes of our collective desires for success as a species. Social systems breed the human-created industrial systems that work tirelessly to manufacture the needs of our desires, and yet so many of us are oblivious to how they work and what impacts they have. It's often at the point of these systems intersecting with nature, where we mine resources to obtain the raw materials required to make all the products we use, that we see many of our environmental and social problems evolve. The industrial system brings all the wonderful tools of modernity at the expense of the natural systems that we all need.
Understanding and working within the multi-level perspectives that systems thinking enables is fundamental not only for making change, but also for being an active participant in the world and the design of a future we all want to live in. We use systems mapping and life cycle mapping to explore these connections, and one of the key tools we use for this is the three systems at play map (see above). This particular map helps people identify the types of systems that we humans have designed, as well as how they connect to the industrial systems we have created to meet our social needs. Mapping connections here demonstrates the reliance and destruction of the ecological systems that sustain the rest of the systems.
Within the Disruptive Design Methodology knowledge set, there are several systems-based classes: Systems Thinking; Language, Influence, and Effect; and Systems Interventions.
The ability to sustain life on Earth requires us to work within both the systems that nature evolved as well as the human-formed systems of society and industry. We all rely on natural systems for survival, which means that the imperative to enact sustainability is within all of us. No one can opt out of breathing, consuming nutrient-dense food, or drinking H20, so we are all implicated in figuring out how humanity can be a regenerative force on this shared planet, rather than continuing to extract and exploit the natural systems that sustain us.
The fundamental quest of our time is to figure out how to transform our global economy and society from a linear one based on value loss and waste creation to a circular economy built on regeneration, sustainability, and value-gaining systems. The knowledge and power we have acquired through the industrial and technical revolutions have formed the tension between nature and our human needs, but now we can transition to meeting our needs within the boundaries and systems of nature, if of course, we have the tools to understand, participate, and contribute back more than we take. That is the essence of the sustainability concept, doing more with less, and understanding how the planet works so that we can participate within its means and evolve from an extraction-based society to a regenerative one.
At the UnSchool, we embed sustainability into everything that we do, from post-disposable considerations in all our programs and our food philosophy through to our new farm-based rural regeneration campus. We don’t get everything right, but we are on a constant journey of figuring out how to do things in a more sustainable way; for example, we are currently exploring our digital footprint and developing a zero waste digital communication strategy as we recently discovered just how much of an impact each video watched and email sent has on our carbon emissions.
Learn more about sustainable practices in our Sustainability and Sustainable Design & Production courses.
Design is a powerful silent social scripture that surrounds us at all times; it influences our lives from the moment we are born until the day we die. Everything, absolutely everything that we encounter in our day-to-day interactions with the world is by design, and thus can be re-designed to meet our needs in more elegant, sustainable, and sophisticated ways. That’s why we have the Disruptive Design Method as a tool to support anyone being able to contribute to designing a future that works better than today!
To form usable goods and provide services, design takes all the materials and resources it needs from nature. Therefore, every action we take has an impact on the natural world, so designing better products, services, and systems is one of the critical tools for bringing about a circular, sustainable, and regenerative future.
Our current global condition of designing for disposability, overexploiting and undervaluing the raw materials and formed goods created in this industrial system perpetuates the unsustainability of our species, but through circular systems design, we can turn the tides on this trend. From this foundational perspective of design, we can approach the needs and reconfigure value to work within the natural systems that are required to sustain life on Earth, designing goods and services that not only meet human needs and desires in beautiful ways, but also add value back to the system that gives us all life, and support environmental regeneration.
The combination of these three pillars make up the foundational tools for thinking and doing differently, for understanding complexity, and for developing the propositions for a better future by design. With systems, sustainability, and design at our core, we design systems of learning and positive impact that maximize social, economic, and environmental sustainability through the understanding of the complex interconnected systems at play in the world around us. This enables us to design experiences that maximize positive change.
We translate these into all sorts of different things, reconfiguring our content and unique tools into learning systems like the Circular Classroom, our Fellowship Programs, and even our Living Learning Lab in Portugal. The beauty of having integrity-based models like this is that they hold regardless of the difficulties that you face, and for us at the UnSchool, our goal is to activate and equip people with the tools they need to agentize themselves to make more positive change in the world.
Agency is the outcome of learning applicable tools that you can activate in your world, and the one thing we need more of is people willing to take action to solve the complex problems we all face. If you are keen to make change, you don’t need to come to the UnSchool to do so, all you need to do is get started! But if you want to get the tools to make change, understand how to design positive interventions an be a force for good, then we have you covered at the UnSchool!
By Leyla Acaroglu
The current recycling crisis, where much of the diligently separated waste is not getting recycled, started in January 2018, when China announced that they would stop taking the world’s recycling through enacting their “National Sword” policy, which after more than 25 years of accepting two-thirds of the world’s plastic waste, suddenly banned the import of most plastics and other recyclable materials. This move not only stunned the world, but it also suddenly ripped the band-aid off that was holding together recycling as a viable solution to the single-use product proliferation around the world.
A year(ish) has passed since the new Chinese legislation came into effect, and their plastic imports have dropped by 99%, forcing the bulk of the global recyclables to be landfilled, incinerated, stockpiled on docks, cast out into the environment, or sent to other countries in the region. The latter is an equally unpopular move where many countries are now openly rejecting foreign trash. Experts now estimate that as much as 111 million metric tons of plastic waste will be displaced by 2030.
Recycling is a lovely idea when it works; in fact it's a fundamental part of the circular economy, after, of course, sharing services, remanufacturing and repair. But like any system that displaces the responsibility somewhere out of sight, the externalities come back around to bite us all in the ass eventually. Ocean plastic waste is just one of the massive unintended consequences of relying on a quick fix, which then, in turn, reinforces the problem you are trying to solve. Systems thinking 101: the easy way out often leads back in, and there are often no quick fixes to complex problems. Recycling as a solution has reinforced the problem, and now we are dealing with a ‘frankenproblem’.
There has been an unfair reliance on consumers to be the responsible parties in dealing with the rise of disposable items. This is after producers and retailers have decided, without consultation, to wrap everything in plastic or replace reusables with disposables, normalizing the use of single use items by claiming them to be more hygienic and convenient than their reusable counterparts.
There are many coinciding aspects with how this further exacerbates the issue. For example, take the issue of contamination (one of the motivators for China to stop accepting the world’s trash): many everyday items that can’t be recycled are mixed in with recyclables. Or soiled materials, like a coffee cups or food packaging, get in with clean items and then make a mess of the rest. Then there is “wishcycling,” when people who are so conditioned to “do the right thing” that they toss whatever they wish could be recycled into the recycling bin, hoping that the trash fairy will ensure that it gets recaptured and magically turned into something useful again (another spoiler: they don’t). Furthermore, there is no universal recycling system, nor are there practices to teach an ever increasingly globalized world how to manage the complexity of this diverse practice. Nearly every state and country has different rules about how to recycle. In some places it's rinse and separate, in others it's pop it all together (no need to rinse), and in others there are very detailed separation techniques for all the different types of plastics (identified by the small number at the base of the plastic item). So we have well-intentioned citizens getting lumped with the responsibility of deciphering what they should and should not do, whilst producers make add more complex materials to the system. Of course there are just the lazy people too, who throw whatever wherever, further increasing the contamination rates, and this just makes the cost of recycling higher and results in more recyclables ending up being dumped in landfill.
Good intentioned and well-trained recyclers the world over are up in arms over the news reports that their hard work to get things into the right waste streams is amounting to nothing. And countries around the world are sending contaminated loads of recycling back to their parent countries — often wealthy, consuming nations like England, Canada, Australia, United States, Germany, and the rest of Europe. What we have actually created is a system of dumping a waste legacy on developing economies, as few rich countries have localized recycling facilities to coup with the amount of trash generated.
Consumer waste and recycling is a broken system that can’t be solved by just better recycling alone. Don't get me wrong — recycling, remanufacturing, and repair all have their place in the transition to a circular and regenerative economy, but the reliance on a cure-all magic system that takes your old clamshell salad box and turns it into something just as valuable and useful is very far away from the reality of the current status quo. The undeniable issue is that we have created a disposable culture, and no amount of recycling will fix it. We need to remedy this illness at the root cause: producer-enforced disposability and the rapid increase of a throwaway culture being normal.
Single-use throwaway stuff permeates our day-to-day lives; it's hard to avoid a coffee cup here, a plastic bag there, some wooden chopsticks at lunch, or that boxed take-out Thai food for dinner. While it’s most prevalent in the food industry — bottles, cups, lids, straws, grocery bags, produce bags, cutlery, produce wrap, and even those single-serve little sauce sachets — recently, design for disposability has moved into the medical, transport, and government sectors just as much. Over the last 60 years since the invention of cheap plastics, and even more so in the last 15 years, since the rise in the cult of busy, we have literally designed ourselves into a disposable society.
I have written about this before in this article on Systems Failures: Planned Obsolescence and Enforced Disposability: “Many of the goods and services we all rely on are created with the specific intent to lose value over time so that the consumer is stuck in an enforced consumption cycle, which increases value for the producer, but not for the customer nor the planet. And the cost of dealing with all of this reduced value stuff is placed back on the customer and local governments in the form of funding local waste management services.”
That’s right, the decision by a producer or even your local cafe to swap to disposables is then costing you money in either general waste (ie landfill fees) or recycling — both of which are costly aspects for local government to manage, so much so that many are ditching recycling all together! The cost of running these cumbersome recycling systems is also one of the reasons so much plastic waste is escaping into nature via the rivers and oceans of Southeast Asia, as the rapid transition to disposable plastics has not been met by an increase in municipal waste management services.
Recently I illustrated the extent of how we don’t see the costs of invisible things in a TEDx talk in Lisbon.
Around the world, daily options for obtaining basic needs such as food and water have dramatically changed over the last two decades, from a reusable user experiences to a crappy plastic or paper single-use disposable option. For many, it feels cheap because it is, and it feeds into the speedy convenience-fueled lifestyles that currently dominates societies. But the long-term costs are much greater than the immediate cost cutting and time-saving perceived benefits. I know there are many hygiene benefits and that the bendy plastic straw help many people in hospitals or who are disabled, I get that a disposable diaper is so much easier than washing them, but the extent of disposable single-use products is fundamentally unsustainable. And the really insidious issue here is that we are all paying for this! We pay for the cost of a disposable lifestyle embedded in the cost of these services and products, pay for it again through local taxes, and then we pay for it collectively in the loss of natural environments like beaches and waterways. We pay for it when 90% of table salt ends up filled with microplastics, and we will continue to pay for it as long as we continue to believe that there are no consequences to our disposable addictions.
As awareness about environmental issues associated with waste has risen, so too has the quick fix of “make it recyclable” as a solution to disposability. This has validated the production of single-use product streams. It has given way to the myth of ‘good’ (paper) and ‘bad’ (plastic) materials, which is so problematic as all materials have impacts, but it also has distracted us from the real issue all whilst more and more products and services have shifted to disposable from reusable.
What frustrates me to no end is that so many agents in the system just deflect responsibility to other parts. The plastic manufacturers say that the brand owners don’t want to change, and the brand owners blame the customers who then blame their governments who then blame the retails or the companies, and the cycle of blame continues. The reality is that plastic is a fantastic material for durable products, like reusable packaging systems that can be easily sterilized and reused. For example, I was on a flight recently where the food was provided in a thick plastic reusable bento box that had a salad and a snack in it, no plastic packaging, simple box wrap (although they did have disposable utensils…) but it was designed to be washed and reused over and over again. Of course washing has its own impacts too, but there is always a break-even point that can be factored into the systems design. The design solutions are actually really simple and the infrastructure interventions often financially viable, but the will to make change by societies’ institutions is significantly lacking. Where are all the pioneers who will help flip the script on our disposable world?
In the meantime, the burden of change comes down to you and me and our communities to refuse unless it's reusable — to reject the system that has been thrust upon us by ditching disposables and demanding better products and services. Of course, this is difficult for many people, but each and every action you can take does send price signals through the economy. I recently heard of a large supermarket retailer trialing package-free dispensers because they saw a shift in the market, which is dictated by economic actions of people everyday. Simply put — we need a reusable revolution to get us out of the recycling mess.
Magicians use misdirection to direct their audience to see what they want them to see so that they can trick you into believing what they have done is really magic. This is very similar to the tactic used to get our society to a place where recycling symbolizes the height of environmentalism. Our living grandparents will laugh at the idea of waste; they will tell us that they most likely never even had a trash bin. What was life like before disposable plastic? It was a lot more washing up, by the ‘save and reuse’ practices that, just a few generations ago, were the norm quickly got designed out of the modern world with the advent of cheap disposable materials.
The big shift towards normalized disposability was initiated in 1970, when the first Earth Day was celebrated in the US, with this famous Keep America Beautiful ad: it features an Italian-American actor poised as a Native American who sheds a single tear as an oblivious passerby chucks a bag of trash out of his car window, into the street. Playing on people’s emotions, the ad then drills a message that we still have internalized today: “People start pollution. People can stop it.” It took two sentences to shift the blame and guilt on disposable items away from the producers of the new disposable economy and onto the citizens they had thrust it upon.
This ad and many others to come were funded by Keep America Beautiful (KAB), a front for a lobby group made up of representatives from the major beverage companies. The very strategic goal was to turn the attention away from the rising concern for the environment in a post-Vietnam era, as soda and milk bottles were swapped out from reusable ones (which cost the companies money in collecting and washing) to the disposable alternatives. The slight of hand trick was to make out as though the problem was not the calculated shift to normalizing disposability, but the acts of the individuals, who prior to this, were not used to non-biodegradable materials filling their daily lives.
It’s valuable to interject here a comparison of a recycling system that holds manufacturers accountable, rather than consumers. Such a system can be found in Germany, who is considered to have one of the best recycling systems in the world, in which it recycles nearly 70% of its waste. Many trace this success back to a package ordinance that was passed in 1991, in which it “required manufacturers to take responsibility for the recycling of their product packaging after a consumer was finished using it. This included transportation packaging, secondary packaging (i.e., the box around soda cans) and the primary packaging (i.e., the soda can).” Then, in 1996, the Closed Substance Cycle and Waste Management Act was established, and it “applies to anyone that produces, markets or consumes goods and dictates that they are responsible for the materials’ reuse, recycling or environmentally sound disposal. This act particularly targeted producers and encouraged them to focus on one of three waste management strategies: waste avoidance, waste recovery and environmentally compatible disposal.”
The contrast in policy and in recycling success rates here further solidifies that manufacturers should be held accountable for packaging and that the solution is sustainable, circular design.
Now that China is no longer accepting the world’s recycling waste, we need to have more efficient localized recycling systems in places that help to close the loop and bring about the transition to the circular economy. The challenge is how can you help make that happen? Additionally, closed loop service provision systems like the recently launched Loop, will help dramatically eliminate single use packaging at least.
We are always finding ways to help people make positive change at the UnSchool and overcoming the inertia that often seeps in when problems of this magnitude are presented. So, here are some really good first steps you can start with. Individual lifestyle swaps: get some small wins under your belt to motivate you and influence others around you, by refusing single-use, taking your own, asking for reusables, or refusing to buy something. This has positive ripple effects, as the more people who see a new practice, the more normal it becomes in society at large. It might seem futile, but bigger systemic impacts come through the regular consumption choices we make everyday. Look also at what you can do it your professional life by letting your workplace know you want to help them swap from disposables to reusables. Enough people doing this in the world at large will redesign the normalization habits of hyper-disposability so that it goes out with the trash.
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If you want to get started on designing for a circular future, you can download our FREE Post Disposable Activation Kit, a set of free tools that we designed to help you activate your leadership and make lifestyle shifts for a post disposable future, read my book on circular systems design, listen to this great podcast from the 99% Invisible, or come to an in-person program at the UnSchool to activate your agency and learn the skills of creative changemaking.
By Leyla Acaroglu
There is this painful, old-school mental image of a ‘treehugger’ — an almost derogatory term used to describe someone who cares about the environment so much that they just hug trees. I usually make jokes when I do talks about how I love the planet but I don’t hug trees, as they have spiders and could ruin my clothes. But silly jokes of my spider fears aside, my perspective on trees has changed a lot over the last couple of years, as I took on an abandoned olive farm, which is now the CO Project and started to regenerate it. The farm has some 150 established trees (and a couple hundred new babies we have planted), all of which I am now a custodian of. As a result, my appreciation of and fascination with trees has grown immensely. I still have not hugged a tree per se, but I certainly do talk to them!
The CO Project Farm olive and citrus trees
Firstly let me tell you how trees really are magical. Some of my several hundred year old olive trees have no insides, just a bark shell, and yet they burst into life every spring and drop a bounty of olives every year, despite looking as though they have no heart. Each autumn, when the weather cools, they become homes to all sorts of moss and animals and morph into these grandparent-like figures for all the life that needs shelter. The same goes with the fruit trees — they drop their leaves every year at the end of summer and appear to go to sleep. But, I have noticed that they are actually using all their energy to make tiny baby apples, apricots, or plums, and then, come summer, they burst with delicious delights that nourish and sustain our bodies.
Trees and humans have a very intrinsic relationship. We obviously eat their fruits, use their wood, and rely on them to convert carbon dioxide to oxygen and purify our air. To top it all off, they regulate the climate, keep soils from eroding, provide habitat to other animals, and if all that is not enough, they also apparently ‘talk’ to each other via secret underground networks!
So, when we decided to host out 10th Emerging Leaders UnSchool Fellowship program this upcoming November in Kuching, Borneo, Malaysia — a very rainforested area of the world — I wanted to discover more about how deforestation is affecting systems. You may have already heard of the issues with palm oil and the clear-felling that occurs to feed the world’s insatiable appetite for cheap oils (that end up in cookies, soaps, and many industrial processes), so in this week’s journal article, I wanted to explore the impact that deforestation has on all of us and find out more in preparation for our Fellowship.
Globally, we have cut down 3 trillion trees since industrialization, and it is assumed there are 3 trillion still standing. Since humans started using forest products, over 46% of trees have been cut down, adding to the climate crisis since, as we pump more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we also cut down the things that absorb and convert it!
Farming, grazing of livestock, mining, and drilling combined account for more than half of the world’s deforestation. The main drivers, however, for the destruction of the hyper-diverse Malaysain rainforest (home to the delightful orangutans) is paper pulp logging and palm oil, the latter being a cash crop that creates one of the cheapest forms of lubricants on the global market. There is also a significant amount of illegal logging for hardwoods that then end up making their way into furniture and outdoor decking. There are some international policies to attempt to curb this trend, but poverty and economic needs often drive people to find ways of still exploiting the forests.
The immediate impacts of this, such as biodiversity loss and wildfires which often affect monocultures rather than natural ecosystems, are increasing in intensity and further increase the loss of trees. Around the world we have seen many intense and deadly forest fires such as in California where over 100 million trees were lost in the 2018 fires. These kinds of extreme fires will only increase with the threat of climate change. Sadly, there are claims that fires are lit intentionally and even articles about firefighters starting fires so that they could get paid to put them out!
Overgrazing of native animals can also cause tree loss, but nature seems to have some smart resistance, such as the case of Acacias in Africa that developed a toxin in their leaves to kill off the over populated Antelope. Incidentally, the reduction in shepherds’ animals munching through the undergrowth has been attributed to the severity of the fires. However, the grazing of farm animals, such as goats (who I can confirm will eat anything, as we have 4 on the farm and if they had it their way, they would eat every leaf they could get their teeth on!) is part of some fire prevention strategies.
Trees are a keystone species in our shared planetary ecosystem, so cutting them down and destroying their systems is a detrimental blow to any ecosystem — specifically, us. From climate impacts to desertification, soil erosion, fewer crops, flooding, increased greenhouse gases, and loss of home lands for indigenous people, there is a whole slew of systemic impacts related to deforestation.
Not only is deforestation directly impacting us humans, but the destruction of natural habitats for plants and animals is another systemic effect that must be addressed. 80 percent of Earth’s land animals and plants live in forests, and right now scientists say we are going through the sixth great extinction on Earth, mainly due to the activities of humans (like deforestation) and overconsumption. Consider what happens to the soil when the trees are cut down. Tree canopies are a little bit like the hair on your head, which protects your skin from the sun and helps to keep you cool. Without dense tree coverage, the soil is exposed to the more sun which changes the types of things that can grow. If you have ever been in a forest, you would know that the temperature is completely different; we seek shade under trees when having picnics because they do a brilliant job of protecting what's underneath them. The loss of these tree canopies has been detrimental, with, in the last 40 years, roughly 40-50% of species going extinct and the greatest losses being in Asia and Australia (where I’m from). Biodiversity is what makes Earth, Earth. Without diversity, we have weak systems that are susceptible to disease — which then breeds a new onslaught of system impacts.
Something else happens with the loss of these tree canopies, too — all of the carbon dioxide that the trees were storing as they grew is released back into the atmosphere when the trees are burned. And this is no minor source of climate problems — the current deforestation rate is outpacing the sum of all the world’s cars and trucks on the road to add more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than automobiles do. Additionally, it’s striking to consider how beneficial trees are to carbon mitigation. One estimate states that tropical tree cover can provide 23% of the climate mitigation needed to reach the Paris Climate Goals by 2030. But with the current profitability connected to the consumption habits of us 7.6 billion humans here on Earth, it’s going to take a true systemic effort to preserve our forests as long-term investments into sustainability versus the current short-term profits connected to extracting forest-related resources for goods.
Yes, it is complicated. The drivers of clear felling, forest fires, and land clearing are many, from paper production, through to grain production for the livestock industry (many drivers for the clearing of Brazilian rainforest), wood products, the need for cash crops, or even the increase in the world’s desire for coffee and chocolate. These are all directly linked to consumption, which offers some scope for individual choice preferencing, so needless to say, the issues are multilayered.
Forests cover 30% of the world's surface (in contrast oceans cover 71%), so there is much scope for reversing the destructive nature of deforestation. India and China, two of the world's most populated countries, have made huge efforts to reforest, a solution that can have many benefits, like purifying drinking water, reducing carbon in the atmosphere, cleaning the air from pollutants, and providing economic opportunities for current and future generations.
On a personal level, you can protect the trees you have some sort of custodianship over. Buy land and allow it to rewild — take inspiration from the famed children’s book author Beatrix Potter, who purchased 14 farms and more than 4,000 acres of land in England. This kind of foresight can help to protect vulnerable land from development and support your own kind of carbon sink. If you can’t buy land (it's surprising how cheap abandoned farmland can be!), you can certainly help by planting trees in your community or supporting organizations like this one that are replanting forests impacted by deforestation.
Of course, making informed choices when it comes to consumption is an important everyday micro-action that you can begin taking immediately. Opt for plant-based proteins instead of meat (meat production is a big driver of deforestation), go paperless as much as possible, skip products that contain palm oil (unless you have concrete proof it’s been sustainably sourced), advocate for the rights of indigenous people, burn firewood responsibly, and continue staying connected to a community of like-minded changemakers who give a shit about protecting the world’s resources so that we have a future that works better for us all! If you really want to level up, learn more about this issue and get connected to people making change, then join me this November in Malaysia at our 10th Emerging Leaders Fellowship program.
Applications are now open for our 10th Emerging Leaders Fellowship program. Get yours in today to learn more about this issue and to discover the tools for making a positive impact by design. Applications due by July 12. Apply here >
By Leyla Acaroglu
Earlier this year, I was invited to attend the Fourth UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya. Politicians, innovators, and activists gathered to discuss the future of global sustainable production and consumption, looking at what the next stages are for creating systems of sustainability and circularity and how to unlock the consumption paradox.
Despite the meeting not obtaining the desired resolutions to help bring about the significant global restructuring needed for a healthy and sustainable planet, the uplifting thing was that finally, after many years, the discussions centered on the roles of design and consumption for how to achieve global social and environmental sustainability. I, like everyone else, have my moments of disillusion, where the hope gets drained out of you by the fatigue of complaints, problems, and inaction. So allow me to focus on the flip side to that: the changes I see rising from the slightly nerdy world of sustainable production and consumption.
Not too long ago, terms like “zero waste” were boring policy directives thrown around by government departments with long-term strategies like “zero waste by 2020”. But in the last few years, ‘going zero waste’ and sustainable living in general have taken on an entirely cooler persona as a lifestyle trend of young, hip Instagrammers and savvy YouTubers are all helping to make this a movement and trend that now anyone can get involved in.
Yes, there are like any movements critiques of the gender politics and the validity of the claims of those who are promoting this lifestyle trend. Years ago, there was a claim that there was a growing trend called LOHAS: Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability, and that people would actually start to make economic decisions based on the issues that matter to them. So for me, the Zero Wasters are the living incarnation of this marketing prophecy. And even more so, it demonstrates that the actions of a small group of people can have big impacts on the economy.
A zero waste lifestyler is someone who actively reduces their waste consumption by designing their life to combat acquiring things that are wasteful or will end up as trash, especially avoiding all disposable and non-recyclable products and packaging. Someone embracing a zero waste life usually plans meals in advance to avoid convenience packaging, and ensures they always have a reusable water bottle, coffee cup, straw, and bags on hand to actively refuse disposable items. This names just a few and varied everyday actions these lifestylers take to avoid contributing to the global waste pandemic.
These types of actions aren’t really new; they were well-practiced as normal before the lifestyle of hyper-convenience encouraged runaway disposability, beginning in the 1960s. So, the challenge hasn’t been finding alternatives as much as it has been rebelling against the current status quo.
Many of the heroes of the zero waste lifestyle movement share incredible stories of only making one small jar of actual ‘trash’ a year, often shared on social media through active lifestyle design and adopting simple everyday changes. Composting organic waste from their homes, proactively purchasing reusable products, or even making essentials like toothpaste at home are all part of their day-to-day practices.
While there are aspirational leaders in the movement who are very much tied to the brand of zero waste, the key takeaway is that a person who actively seeks to reduce consumption impacts through conscious micro-actions across several different areas of their lives is a positive thing that should be encouraged. Not just because it helps bring about a new normal around reusability in society, but because it helps change the economy. When many micro-actions are being replicated, it has impacts on the goods and services that end up being made available to all of us.
This can all be seen in the rise of products and services to meet the needs of the zero waste community. Putting aside the questionable environmental credentials from a life cycle perspective of many of the products, and just looking at the shifts in the economy, we can see change — positive change toward a new type of normal, whereby people are activating their agency to help solve the global waste crises.
There are now dedicated zero waste stores in many major cities around the globe (not just in obvious hipster strongholds like New York!). Modern plant-based restaurants, and even entire shopping centers that have sprung up to accommodate this growing trend of plastic-free, package-free, and zero waste consumers who are interested in sustainable consumption options.
As a result of many different interventions, companies have also started to embrace the global trend toward sustainability. We are seeing leaders emerge in the circular economy in some sectors, such as apparel, consumer goods, and furniture. The Loop circular delivery service was just launched this year, and the biggest IPO in two decades was Beyond Meat. Ikea recently announced that they would be 100% circular by 2030, and Lego is working on a plastic-free brick. These examples show a growing demand and substantial shift towards the normalization of products and services that go beyond recycling and start to move us into position where further positive disruptions can occur.
I know, there is still a shit ton of work to do to solve the complex social and environmental problems that occur as a result of the global supply chain marketed to quickly meet every immediate desire of the human needs. Walk down the aisles in any supermarket around the world, and it's obvious that the vast majority of product providers are yet to catch on to this massive cultural shift underway, where consumers are conscious of their impacts and want to avoid investing in wasteful plastic-laden unsustainable products and services. But, the shifts we are seeing are encouraging and should be highlighted.
Waste is the dark side of consumption, and despite two solid decades of zero waste policies, and many different approaches from cleaner production to eco-design and sustainable consumption, and now the circular economy, we are still seeing a global increase in waste generation. And not just in plastics clogging the oceans, but in high-tech trash, textile, and food waste.
The issues with waste is that no matter how much recycling or waste management is put in place, more waste is generated than can be dealt with. Many emerging economies have limited or minimal waste management systems, and many big Western countries have absconded their responsibility to manage their own waste efficiently, just exporting it to an emerging economy. Like the case of the Canadian trash that the Philippians refused to take on, or as evidenced by the collapse of the recycling industry after China refused to take the world’s plastic trash any longer.
There continues to be a significant trend in converting reusable products to disposable ones, combined with the painful reality of planned obsolescence in high-value goods, so many aspects of our daily lives are now marked by single or low-value use products. Thus, going zero waste is one defiant act that anyone can do to take a stand against this. The reality is that what we spend our money on impacts the economy. Just like investing in renewable energy increases the value of that industry, the same is said for every product or service. We get more of what we invest in.
And let’s not forget that all of this comes down to design. The World Bank estimates that at the current rate of increase, we will see 70% increase in waste generation by 2050. This is all by design. Waste, whether it be in trash or recycling, is a design flaw, so even with the rise of waste rejection, we have a significant trend to contend with. Products are designed to break, and systems are designed to increase disposability as they cut costs and respond to customer concerns of health and safety. A significant part of the entire waste/pollution/unsustainability problem is that we have designed a system that incentivizes waste, and that is why we need to design for a post disposable future.
Design is also an incredibly powerful part of the solution. We can design for a future that meets our needs in sustainable and regenerative ways, and it's no wonder that the waste backlash is coming at a time when people are more able to design their own lives and share these behavioral and cultural shifts online to audiences of others willing to buck the status quo. This new generation of active consumers, be it zero wasters or minimalists, they are exerting their personal interests on the economy. This is helping to challenge the dominant culture of hyper-consumption and instead showing ways of living a more intentional and purposeful life.
I have spent years researching ways of effecting change, and the one thing I know to be true is that change is constant, but it also takes time. Many people are not willing to even try something new because they think that it won’t serve them well, but when they do actually enact a habit disruption and discover that there was not a negative outcome, they often then adopt the new change and share it with others. Change is socially contagious, in both directions on the positive/negative scale.
Change is often hard to see whilst you are in the middle of it, and it is even harder when it’s a resistance to the status quo. The global changes toward a sustainable, regenerative, and circular economy require multiple different actors shifting their behaviors and patterns in diverse ways. In the case of zero waste living, it's all about agency and having ownership of your own impact. More so, it is contagious, as the power of social influence kicks in and people see the positive outcomes that making these types of changes can have.
When enough people validate the new actions, it’s a free pathway to the new outcome! To be sure, there are many challenges ahead of us when it comes to sustainability, and major corporations are still far behind in the trend of adopting the significance of the changes needed to adapt to a circular economy. But the progress is real and transformative. The question is not if, but when will we see the tipping point of change where we, as a collective species, start to design goods and services to be a positive influence on the planet?
It's never too late to start swapping unsustainable daily decisions to more considered ones, and in fact, there are five simple actions we can all can start anytime.
Swap out some meat for plant-based proteins
Ditch everyday disposables such as cups, plates, bags, and take-out containers
Invest in the things you want to see in the world by buying repairable and long-lasting stuff (and make sure to repair it when it needs to be fixed!)
Opt for low-carbon mobility options like biking, mass transit, or ride-sharing
Move money from high-impact industries to renewables through swapping energy providers, banks, and investment portfolios
By Leyla Acaroglu
The lightweight and easy-to-produce nature of plastic has made it globally ubiquitous in a bazillion forms. As we are all becoming too aware, these cheap conveniences have negative impacts on the natural world and there is a growing trend in public policy actions to ban certain plastic products. Whilst there are complexities in implementing bans, there is an interesting conversation to be had on how different countries around the world are taking legislative action to discourage the use of some types of disposable plastics (like bags, cutlery, and styrofoam containers), and how impactful this is for activating change and moving toward a circular economy.
Today, the average North American or European person consumes 100 KGs of plastic each year, and half of the world’s plastic has been produced in the last 12-15 years. The statistics on just how many disposable plastics are used and end up polluting the environment are staggering. With four trillion single-use plastic bags being used around the world each year, we are drowning in plastic waste. With a collapsing recycling industry, there is clearly a strong need for a systems change to support the functional delivery that plastic products bring us, but without all the disposable consequences.
As you can imagine, things aren't always as simple as they seem on face value. Banning bags and straws can help in some ways to curb the tsunami of plastic waste, but bans alone will not address the real underlying issue: the global normalization of disposability and expectation of convenience that has become a central aspect of our fast-paced, hyper-consumption-fueled lives. Furthermore there is the important question, of what replaces the plastic products, and what impact these alternatives have?
Just some of the bans include: European Union, Mexico City, New York, Kenya, United Kingdom, and Costa Rica to name just a few. The World Economic Forum counts 127 countries with active bag regulations in place.
91% of plastic waste isn’t recycled (source)
Only 1% of plastic bags are returned for recycling (source)
It costs retailers in the US alone $4 billion to give away “free” bags (source)
12 million barrels of oil are required each year to make plastic bags for the U.S (source)
There is more micro-plastic in the ocean than there are stars in the Milky Way (source)
8 million tons of plastic flow into the ocean each year (source)
As many as 8.3 billion plastic straws pollute the world's beaches (source)
Ingestion of plastic kills an estimated 1 million marine birds
Ingestion of plastic kills an estimated 100,000 marine animals each year (source)
There are 46,000 pieces of plastic in each square mile of ocean on average (source)
1 million plastic bottles are bought every minute around the world — and that number will top half a trillion by 2021 (source)
The average person eats 70,000 micro-plastics each year (source)
The top three contributors of micro plastic waste in the oceans are car tires, fibres from wash cloths, and small plastic beads from body care products (source)
If plastic consumption increases at its current rate, by 2050 there will be 12 billion metric tons of plastic in landfills (source)
Scientists have found plastic in human poop (source)
The thing that makes plastic so incredible as an ‘everything-material’ is the same reason it's a nightmare for the natural environment — it's lightweight and indestructible. The lightweightness means that bags and bottles blow out of trash cans, and float on the ocean surface until they land on beaches. The indestructible part means that the stuff stays around for a very long time. The actual number of years it takes for plastic to break down is unknown, as all plastic in the world has only been around since the 1960’s when we started to mass produce it for everything.
We are in the middle of not just a backlash to disposable plastics, but a significant cultural shift and transition to a circular economy that even has the Queen of England on board with the need to detox from disposable plastic. She recently announced that Buckingham Palace will go plastic free after watching David Attenborough’s Blue Planet series! 18 months ago, China introduced a ban on all imported plastic waste, which has sent the global plastic recycling market into a tailspin. To get a full rundown on this, listen to this fantastic podcast on 99% invisible that explains the history of plastic straws and the public health concerns that fuelled their mass appeal in the U.S.
The mounting issues are encouraging countries and companies around the world to respond to consumer outcry about not just waste washing up on beaches, but on enforced disposable culture that we are now entrenched in. There are many reasons why we need systems change for a post disposable future and a circular economy.
The European Union just banned a list of 10 everyday disposable plastic products (interesting they avoided bags!?), and there are hundreds of various types of bans in place around the world, ranging from microbeads to expanded polystyrene (EPS) to single-use plastic bags, straws, cups, and utensils.
There are many different ways countries are legislating disposable plastics. Some have a total ban, which basically says if you are caught with these items you are in deep doo doo. Kenya, for example, has the highest with a $38,000 fine if you are caught with a plastic bag (which incidentally has created a fascinating black market for bags).
Taxation is also used to disincentivize product use; often referred to as a “bag tax”, countries like Australia, Sweden, the UK, and many more are using this approach. This is a bit of an easy way out - in a user-pays system, many people with the means will continue to pay the small inconvenience tax (often around 5 or 10 cents), whilst people who are less economically mobile will be burdened with the cost. Then there are also partial bans where certain regions within a country have imposed bans.For example, in the US there is not a total ban of plastic bags, but there are cities that have total bans (like San Francisco). This also applies, in some countries, to plastic bans in religious, historic, or natural sites, as in the states of Goa and Gujarat in India.
Banning plastic cuts off the problem at the source, so at face value, and according to statistics, these bans present an effective and sustainable solution. For example, some widely shared figures tout that Ireland’s bag tax that was imposed in 2002 has led to a 85% reduction in plastic bag litter there. And, according to reports from San Jose, California, their 2011 ban has led to plastic litter reduction of “approximately 89 percent in the storm drain system, 60 percent in the creeks and rivers, and 59 percent in City streets and neighborhoods.”
While these numbers seem promising, things start to get a little more complex when you examine them through a systems mindset. Bans can misdirect the perception of what the problem is; in the case of bags, it vilifies plastic, but many of the alternatives put in place do not fit into a circular economy and are equally as problematic from a whole systems perspective. Paper bags are not as strong, so they are often double bagged. When you look at all the processes that go into making them (such as growing trees, cutting them, bleaching and processing them, and then manufacturing the bag), you start to see that there are ecological impacts at other parts of the system.
Additionally, we’re beginning to see plastic sales increase in other areas as an unintended consequence of bag bans; in California, for example, plastic garbage bag sales increased 120%! This is due to consumers needing bags for things they previously reused their plastic grocery bags for, like collecting household waste and picking up pet waste.
The issue with all of these products being banned is the disposability of them. Paper straws or wooden chopsticks may conjure up more eco-friendly sentiments, but they still cause significant issues when they are designed for single-use outcomes. Banning one product breeds a market for a new one, and then the question is in whether the new one will end up being better than the last disposable item. That is the sustainability question that needs to be answered from the start as we move toward circular design solutions that fit into a circular economy.
Even with items that are designed to be reused, like cotton tote bags, we have to be mindful of the life cycle impacts here too. The Danish Government recently published a LCA of grocery bags, in which they found that you’d have to use an organic cotton tote bag 20,000 times more than a plastic grocery bag in order for it to be better for the environment due to cotton manufacturing impacts like water use, damage to ecosystems, air pollution, and more.
Bans are also interesting to consider from a behavioral perspective. On one hand, they create a new type of normal for people and allow society to shift perspectives on certain things — like the fact that hyper-disposable products are not good for any of us. Bans also force innovation, as people will have to find new ways of meeting their needs. But on the other hand, when something becomes harder to get, it makes it more valuable, which leads to a rise in workarounds to getting the thing that is no longer readily available. What is even more interesting is the physiology of bans — people get really irate when they have something taken away from them. In both Singapore and Australia, for instance, there was a big controversy when the supermarkets tried to ban bags, and a small percentage of very vocal people claimed this was a violation of their rights.
Dissecting the issues with plastic bans here at a high level reinforces the need to examine problems and proposed interventions through a systems lens and a life-cycle perspective in order to avoid creating more problems. While the destruction imposed by plastic makes us all want to jump to a quick-fix-solution, we need to suspend the need to solve and reframe the conversation by emphasizing the real issue of disposability.
Only time will tell if bans help ensure the disruptive shifts we need to get to a better future, but in the meantime, we can all examine how we contribute to disposability in our lives and implement micro-actions to support a sustainable future. As for bags, the best answer for now is simply to reuse the bags you have, no matter what type, over and over and over again. For some ideas on getting started with a post disposable lifestyle that fits into the future circular economy, download our free Post Disposable Activation Kit at UnSchool Online. or take our class on sustainability that covers life cycle thinking.
By The UnSchool Team
We can all agree that there are fundamental failures in the global food system, with over a third of all food produced being wasted and millions of people being affected by food deserts. What systems changes could be introduced to create solutions in different ways?
From extreme hunger, under-nourishment, and food waste through to how we grow, process, transport, and consume food, there are plenty of opportunities for improvement throughout the many sub-systems of the global food system. In this UnSchool Journal article, we’ll take a detailed look at the EAT-Lancet's recent report that explored whether we could feed a healthy diet for a future population of 10 billion people, while remaining within planetary boundaries. We’ll also take a high-level look into the burning question about how you can swap up your food choices to contribute more equitable, sustainable food systems change around the world.
The EAT-Lancet report is the first time, we have had scientific targets for both healthy human diets and sustainable food production, based on a rigorous, comprehensive review of the most recent scientific literature. The team behind this report is the EAT-Lancet Commission, which is a part of EAT, “a non-profit startup dedicated to transforming our global food system through sound science, impatient disruption, and novel partnerships.”
The EAT-Lancet Commission is a team of 37 multi-disciplinary scientists from 16 countries who set out to tackle the systems issues of hunger, obesity, and environmental degradation by discovering how people should eat to solve all of these issues — keeping in mind that we are projected to rise to 9.8 billion humans on Earth by 2050. The result of their efforts shares an important micro-action that we can adopt as individuals to work toward a better collective whole via systems change: the “planetary health diet.”
Visualize a plate that is halfway filled with fruits and vegetables. Now, on the other half, imagine whole grains, plant proteins like lentils and beans, and unsaturated plant oils. Note that while being plant-based, it’s also a flexible plan, and it does allow for modest amounts of meat and dairy (as well as a little added sugar) — although being vegan and vegetarian are both options for healthy individuals and a healthy planet.
The most important focus for planetary health lies in the reduction of red meat consumption, due to the major environmental impacts associated with livestock farming. As reported by WEF: “According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, emissions from global livestock account for 14.5% of anthropogenic (from human activity) greenhouse gases, while the World Bank chart above shows that, in 2014, 70% of freshwater withdrawal was used for agriculture - projected to rise by a further 15% by 2050.” Of course, minimizing red meat consumption is also optimal for human health, given that eating high amounts of red meat is associated with higher risk for type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke and certain cancers.
While loads of research was conducted in order to arrive at these new guidelines, the gist of the planetary health diet as a means to create food systems change remains pretty simplistic: increase consumption of nutritious plant-based foods (fruits, veg, nuts, legumes, and whole grains), and decrease consumption of red meat, sugar, and refined grains.
This doesn’t seem too radical to us, as we have already adopted a vegetable centric food philosophy at all UnSchool events! Our recent collaboration with the UNEP shows the five areas of everyday action you can take to reduce your footprint and contribute to a more sustainable life.
Diversify your diet to include more plant-based products, and cook more at home
Increase your intake of plant-based foods and explore the joys of non animal protein rich options like beans, chickpeas, lentils and peas (they are delicious!)
Embrace a flexitarian, reducetarian, vegetarian, or vegan diet
Shop for local seasonal food that is produced sustainably, such as your local farmers’ market or package-free store
Buy sustainably produced foods. They may cost a bit more, but if you invest in quality over quantity, you are offering a better impact to your health and the planet
Buy only what you can finish, save, or cook in bulk to freeze, in order to avoid food waste and avoid adding methane into the atmosphere
Avoid excessive packaging by buying fresh and taking your own reusable packaging and bags to stores. Re-use any packaging as long as possible if you are not able to avoid it in certain cases
Ask for healthy and and sustainable food options from your the people you buy food and other products from
Grow some food yourself by starting or joining an urban garden, community garden, school garden, or kitchen garden
Support organizations, policies, and programs that promote sustainable food systems - speak up about them, ask questions, and get involved
To read the full report Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems (Walter Willett et al.), visit here. To discover how to reframe sustainability and think critically about everyday impacts, check out this course at UnSchool Online.
We have worked with loads of organizations, especially ones with acronyms like TED, IDEO, AIGA, UN, along with a bunch that have normal names, too. We work with small to massive organizations, academic institutes and individuals around the world, all with the unifying desire to turn what they do into something better, more positive and sustainable. We also work closely with executives and CEOs, as well as Human Resource and Sustainability Managers. If you want to make change, we are here to help.
