MY SUSTAINABLE LIFE

I FIRST STARTED LEARNING ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT at school, and decided that in my little corner of the world, I really wanted to do my best to give back. When I was 11, [my family and I] started working together on JUST Water [an ethically sourced and bottled water company]. DOCUMENTARIES ARE THE BEST SOURCE OF INFORMATION when it comes to these kinds of topics.

An Inconvenient Truth and An Inconvenient Sequel by Al Gore, and Before The Flood by Leonardo DiCaprio, are three of my favourites. Knowledge is key. If you have the information, then you know how to make a difference and what you can do in your life to change things.

I MET AL GORE AT A TED TALK a few years ago and loved how he spoke about the environment. Without him, I don’t know if I would have ever started JUST and began this journey. David Attenborough is also someone I really look up to. It’s the words we use around sustainability that put people off. It’s really about life and death, and about how our way of living is being threatened. When I talk to my friends about it in this way, then it levels the playing field and they can see it from a place that makes sense.

I TRY NOT TO BUY ANYTHING NEW unless I need some inspiration, or if there’s something that’s genuinely amazing. Right now, I’m buying second-hand clothing. I like to use clothes that other people have worn, so you give the items two lives and they can exist onwards and not end up in the ocean. To make a change, we have to create a closed-loop recycling system: a recycling economy where products automatically go back into production. We have to start making new products out of old things. If we do that, and if we can stop the production of plastic, then we can make a difference.