APPS FOR GOOD

TECH TO MAKE SUSTAINABLE LIVING JUST THAT LITTLE BIT EASIER

BEAT THE MICROBEAD:

Scan barcodes with this app to avoid buying products containing harmful plastic particles that can kill marine life.

ZERO WASTE APP:

An amazing resource to locate eco-friendly stores, cafes and restaurants, farmers’ markets, composting locations, water refill stations and zero-waste groups across the world.

ECOSIA:

This impressive search engine donates 80 per cent of its ad revenue profits to tree-planting programs around the world.

OLIO:

Lets you share excess food with your community. Whether you’ve got a bumper lemon bounty or you’ve overcatered for a party, it helps cut down on waste.

GOOD ON YOU:

Rates fashion labels according to their environmental ethics. There are more than a thousand to pick from.

OROECO:

Tracks the carbon footprint of your everyday activities, such as the length of your shower or how you journey to work.

SKEPTICAL SCIENCE:

You know that uncle who’s always trying to convince you that climate change isn’t real? This app will rebut all his arguments.

RECYCLESMART:

Everyone knows cardboard goes into the recycling bin, but what about your old laptop? This app shows you how to recycle more than 170 items, from the mundane to the tricky, in more than 500 Australian council areas.

SHAREWASTE:

Save your vegetable scraps and pass them on to someone with a compost, worm farm or chickens.

I’ve long been fascinated by the flow of consumer goods into our lives and how that changes the earth’s prospects. For many years, I’ve been carefully scrutinising this rapid transit of “stuff”, and then trying to figure out where it comes from and what the impact of this “stuff” is. Somehow my strange pastime has transitioned from a hobby into my profession. From 2004, I spent 13 years being an eco agony aunt in UK newspaper The Observer, answering readers’ questions on everything from recycling to whether the corrupt Brazilian government spelled doom for the rainforests. It was a hugely exciting and galvanising period for a new form of sustainability that was bringing together 30 years of earth science and mixing that data with ethical consumerism. We were really trying to develop a new blueprint – or “greenprint” – for life; one where every individual could make better decisions and place the world at the heart of those.

Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have ignored the creep of plastic over those 13 years. Increasingly, the ubiquity of plastic packaging and the inability or unwillingness of retailers to tackle the influx was driving my readers crazy. More than half of my Observer postbag was taken up with recycling and packaging conundrums. On a literal level, it was also hard to ignore: every Sunday the magazine containing my environmental musings would be generously wrapped in a particularly annoying plastic film.

The old journalism adage “follow the money” became, for me, “follow the oil”, and as we now know, a lot of that oil becomes plastic. So I followed the plastic, sometimes literally. I pestered CEOS in boardrooms and I staked out local landfill dumps; I joined beach cleans and I helped to release turtles back into the wild. Some of this I’ve documented in newspapers and on TV. All the time, my readers kept writing to me with a certain amount of anger about the surfeit of plastic in society.

I heard from many women fed up with plastic bags attaching themselves around the heel of their shoe on a windy day walking down a high street. From time to time, I would get to debate plastic pollution with representatives of the plastic industry’s members’ organisation. My adversaries seemed to me to be perpetually bad-tempered, or perhaps it was just that they certainly made it clear that I was an irritant (far more annoying than plastic pollution). In one surreal exchange I took part in on radio, a plastic industry representative tried to argue that a plastic bag levy would be downright dangerous and actually increase the amount of plastic that society used. The plastic industry allied with major retailers and manufacturers who were heavy plastic consumers. The message was loud and clear: they were producing plastic packaging in all its glorious formats, from plastic bags to takeaway cartons, because the consumer wanted it. Plastic packaging was convenient for all of us, and ungrateful naysayers like me needed to get back in their box.

I realised that I had to prove that most consumers did not want excess plastic in their lives, and that many were also extremely angry about having to deal with it. Back in December 2005, I persuaded four families to save their rubbish for a month to demonstrate exactly what they were throwing away over Christmas. Every piece of waste the families collected was weighed and analysed, and plastic was by far the dominant material. We were particularly alert to overpackaging, where plastic had been used unnecessarily.

One of the most horrible examples we found was a shrink-wrapped coconut from a major grocery store chain. Given that coconuts famously arrive in their own protective shell, I argued this was unnecessary waste. The retailer fought back on two points: first, that the plastic film was necessary in order to attach a metallised sticker with a barcode, and then – when this didn’t fly – that the fibrous hair of coconuts might be inhaled by customers, and therefore constituted a health and safety hazard. We talked. Eventually they agreed to stop shrink-wrapping their coconuts.

Any sense of victory was short-lived, however. The following week, another reader contacted us to say that the aforementioned retailer had moved on to shrink-wrapping cucumbers. I began to feel like a crusading greengrocer, forever doing battle on unnecessarily plastic-packaged fruit and vegetables. But I did learn something valuable from these encounters. I realised then, in a way I hadn’t realised before, just what a grip plastic had on our everyday lives, and I started collecting data that would eventually lead to strategies to help households stop the flow into their lives.

12: THE AVERAGE NUMBER OF MINUTES A PLASTIC BAG IS USED BEFORE BEING THROWN AWAY 2.7: THE NUMBER OF TONNES OF RUBBISH EACH AUSTRALIAN PRODUCES PER YEAR

One of the things that emerged for me from working with the families back in 2005, and every other time a household has been kind enough to let me move in and root through their dustbin, is just how complex our recycling system is. It seemed obvious to me that some of the actual plastic wrappings on everyday products had become so complicated that you needed a PHD in polymer science to understand which bin they should go into.

I came across a piece written by and for the plastic packaging industry that shed some light. “The average consumer probably has no idea that the packaging of a typical product he or she might pick up weekly may have as many as six layers of plastic and can sit on the shelf and remain fresh for several months, possibly up to a year.” The penny dropped. It was not for our convenience – no consumer in their right mind wants food in their refrigerator for a year – but for the back-of-store convenience of retailers. Plastic packaging was being applied with increasing zeal because it was cost-effective and made life easier for retailers and manufacturers, who neatly argued that it was ultimately in our interest because the packaging resulted in lower food prices overall. This may well be true in part, but we were, nevertheless, left to deal with the consequences: 90 per cent of the cost of collection, sorting and disposal of plastic packaging is borne by us, the householder, through our taxes and rates. Meanwhile, the burden on the environment is incalculable. Key to turning the tide of this waste, and one of our missions through writing this book, is to level that playing field.

Our plastic problem has become entrenched in society, and extremely complicated. Unwrapping and shedding the plastic meant feeding into a complex, patchy waste infrastructure with a multitude of recycling systems and bins and boxes that confused almost every householder I met.

I began to realise that, for many people, plastic pollution is an extremely emotional issue. It affects them in a way that climate change doesn’t always (the challenge of communicating the danger of an atmospheric gas that you can’t smell and aren’t aware of was always going to be a tough call). I was moved to tears watching a Sky News special. A man in his sixties showed a reporter the plastic that had washed up on a beach in the west of Scotland. He had lived there all his life, and matter-of-factly pointed out the typical dystopian hillock of water bottles, tampon applicators and crisp bags tangled up with seaweed on the shoreline. He pronounced it “a disgrace”. Then he began to cry and I found myself crying too.

We weren’t crying for ourselves, but for our grandkids, or someone else’s grandkids. I don’t have children myself, but as an environmentalist I get the opportunity to fight for yours. Ultimately we’re all headed in the same direction. We’re all trying to avoid crushing, abject failure. And, if you’re looking for the definition of human failure, it’s surely bequeathing to future generations a world trashed beyond repair. It would add insult to injury if that should occur through making bad choices about stuff like plastic food wrappings. It doesn’t bear thinking about. This is an edited extract from Turning

The Tide On Plastic by Lucy Siegle ($29.99, Hachette Australia)

PALM IT OFF: DOWNLOAD THE CODECHECK APP AND SCAN BARCODES TO SEE IF YOUR ITEM CONTAINS PALM OIL, THE HARVESTING OF WHICH CAUSES DEFORESTATION AND CRUELTY TO ANIMALS. APPROXIMATELY 80 PER CENT OF THE ITEMS BURIED IN LANDFILL COULD BE RECYCLED