It’s so easy to duck into the supermarket to pick up a few things for dinner, or to do one big shop to get it over with, but there are lots of good reasons to shop local. Buying from your local green grocer, butcher or bakery has many benefits – from keeping your dollars in your community, to being positive for the environment through reduced distances your products need to travel to get to you.
As well as supporting local business by shopping local, even more opportunities to buy direct from farmers are popping up through farmers markets. Not only can you buy fresh, you can chat to the person who actually produced the food!
Other markets are popping up all the time where you can source items made locally. Whether it be homewares, clothing or accessories, check out what’s on in your area. Read more
Food waste has been a hot topic lately. We have learnt that Australians throw out 20% of the food they buy, which equates to every household throwing out $1,036 worth of groceries every year[1]. With many families struggling to make ends meet, and with people on the streets wondering where their next meal will come from, this just doesn’t seem right.
On a global level, roughly one third of the food produced in the world goes to waste[2]. This is shocking on a humanitarian level, as we see people in many countries (as well as our own) starving, but also on an environmental level as the resources that go into producing that food also goes to waste.
Charities like OzHarvest are helping where they can, by collecting and distributing food that would normally go to waste to those in need. Read more
Plastic – we use it every day, it’s so convenient and useful, but it’s also one of the biggest sources of waste in the world. We use plastic for so many things, and a lot of the time we use that item once and then throw it away, like plastic water bottles, straws, glad wrap, shopping bags and packaging for the produce we buy. Plastic is a big part of our day to day lives but a significant amount of the plastic we use ends up in landfill, or as litter which makes its way into our water systems and ultimately our rivers and oceans, causing havoc and death to wildlife. Once in the environment, plastic can last up to 1000 years, continuing to cause damage far beyond our lifetime. Read more
Hello there!
I am excited to be writing about my new adventure – my mission to help reduce, reuse and recycle! For a while now I’ve been making small changes in my life to reduce the amount of plastic I use, how much food I throw out, where and how often I shop and how much I buy. I’ve found that by changing my habits, one at a time, I am reducing how much I throw away, and ultimately – my impact on the earth. I am being more mindful of my choices as a consumer and what I actually need (does all that stuff really make me happy?) and this has led me to want to write about what I’m learning and how easy it is to make some changes that seem small for one person but that can make a big difference at a collective level. Read more
