Welcome! Join Susanna Hasenoehrl - The Sustainability Speaker, Tim Wade - who speaks about winning through change, Michelle Mouille - founder of the Sustainable Mai Khao Foundation, and myself, as we discuss the many ways we can all contribute individually and collectively, to reduce our impact on earth. This is how we can all contribute to ensure we do not face the worst possible outcomes of the climate crisis, and it starts with each of us.
We can all make a difference – in our actions and in sharing the message to our communities. We must reduce, reduce, reduce, in all areas of life.
This is first in a series of podcasts on this topic. We're starting with how we can each make a difference, then we’ll move onto business, and finally, I will gather some experts to talk travel and tourism.
Don’t forget to share your feedback and ideas, and if you feel like giving the podcast a star rating or a comment, I’d be super grateful.
You can connect with my guests:
Susanna Hasenoehrl - https://thesustainabilityspeaker.com/
Michelle Mouille - https://www.facebook.com/sustainablemaikhaofoundation/
Tim Wade - https://www.timwade.com/
Some of the research discussed – we’ll add more in the blog, as not enough space for all of it here.
Reduce consumption and educate community
https://www.atidymind.co.uk/easy-ways-to-simplify-your-life-and-reduce-consumption/
https://environment.co/6-ways-to-raise-awareness-about-environmental-issues/
https://www.reservations.com/blog/tips-tricks-budgets/carbon-footprint-travel/
Plastic and "biodegradable' plastics
https://www.greenqueen.com.hk/green-claims-misleading-plastic-report/
Story from Costa Rica on coffee pulp
To get in touch with me, all of my contact details are here https://linktr.ee/andreatedwards
My book Uncommon Courage, an invitation, is here https://mybook.to/UncommonCourage
My book 18 Steps to an All-Star LinkedIn Profile, is here https://mybook.to/18stepstoanallstar
Welcome! Join Susanna Hasenoehrl - The Sustainability Speaker, Tim Wade - who speaks about winning through change, Michelle Mouille - founder of the Sustainable Mai Khao Foundation, and myself, as we discuss the many ways we can all contribute individually and collectively, to reduce our impact on earth. This is how we can all contribute to ensure we do not face the worst possible outcomes of the climate crisis, and it starts with each of us.
We can all make a difference – in our actions and in sharing the message to our communities. We must reduce, reduce, reduce, in all areas of life.
This is first in a series of podcasts on this topic. We're starting with how we can each make a difference, then we’ll move onto business, and finally, I will gather some experts to talk travel and tourism.
Don’t forget to share your feedback and ideas, and if you feel like giving the podcast a star rating or a comment, I’d be super grateful.
You can connect with my guests:
Susanna Hasenoehrl - https://thesustainabilityspeaker.com/
Michelle Mouille - https://www.facebook.com/sustainablemaikhaofoundation/
Tim Wade - https://www.timwade.com/
Some of the research discussed – we’ll add more in the blog, as not enough space for all of it here.
Reduce consumption and educate community
https://www.atidymind.co.uk/easy-ways-to-simplify-your-life-and-reduce-consumption/
https://environment.co/6-ways-to-raise-awareness-about-environmental-issues/
https://www.reservations.com/blog/tips-tricks-budgets/carbon-footprint-travel/
Plastic and "biodegradable' plastics
https://www.greenqueen.com.hk/green-claims-misleading-plastic-report/
Story from Costa Rica on coffee pulp
To get in touch with me, all of my contact details are here https://linktr.ee/andreatedwards
My book Uncommon Courage, an invitation, is here https://mybook.to/UncommonCourage
My book 18 Steps to an All-Star LinkedIn Profile, is here https://mybook.to/18stepstoanallstar
This is an AI transcript and will have errors.
Hi, it's Andrea Edwards Welcome to uncommon courage, the podcast where we'll be having the conversations we need to be having as members of the human collective. This is all about how do we come together create the future that we want for humanity. Today, we're going to be doing the first in a series of podcast where we're going to be talking about what we can all do to be contributing to make the world a better place through our actions, our purchases, our decisions, and so much more. We're going to make it personal. And then we're going to move into a business focus. So let's get stuck in
common.
Well, hello, my lovelies, here we are, I am so stoked to be doing this podcast today. The one of the questions that I get asked all the time from people is what can I do to contribute to the climate crisis. And a lot of people feel useless. They feel like they've got nothing to do. And there's so much that we can all do. And if the vast majority of us do the basic things better, we can make a real big difference. So today, I'm very excited to have three of my friends who really care about the environment. They're so passionate, they're all acting in really, really different ways. They're all making a massive contribution. And I'm delighted that they've all joined us And my guess, Suzanna, Michelle, and the fabulous team wait. And I'm going to ask each of them to introduce themselves. And to tell you more about what they do. So Suzanna, do you want to start here? So hello to everyone from Singapore. My name is Susanna hassanal. And I'm the sustainability speaker. Previously, I worked many years in the tech and digital industries and most recently in agriculture and food as well. So I'm very excited to share a few tips that I've learned along the way here with you today. Typically, I work with a lot of different kinds of companies, I advise senior leaders and also all different kinds of teams to to think more sustainably and to embrace climate action as part of their daily work. Also, Michelle? Hi, I'm Michelle. I'm South African, but I've been living in Phuket for 22 years. So it's pretty much home now. During the time I've been here, I've been teaching you know, teaching English as a foreign language, mathematics as well, as well as doing homeschooling, homeschooling my own children as well as others. But my main passion has been working with environmental projects, I worked as the coordinator for the Michael marine turtle foundation for a few years. And I've now opened up my own foundation called sustainable Michael, we focus on beach rubbish, managing the beach rubbish, and separating the rubbish recycling it finding solutions to upcycle. And of course, to reduce the rubbish through education campaigns and knowledge. So I'm very excited to be here today, as well, and just share some ideas and information and things that I hope will be useful in your life and hopefully, things that everyone is able to do in their lifestyle to make a difference. And you're doing an amazing job, Michelle, thank you hard job to the amount of trash that gets washed up in Thailand. And Tim, yeah, Hi, everybody. My name is Tim Wade, I speak and train leaders and teams and organizations across the globe. With regards to leading change, and in particular leading change with regards to projects that are happening within the organization from the people side, how do you get the people on board? How do you lower resistance to change? How do you lead it effectively? So that gap between implementing the change and receiving the benefits is lessened. And that change is sped up and your people are on board? And not fearful of it? How do we equip leaders to be able to do that, and I I'm not really running anything environmental, except for the fact that I just think it's a sensible thing that we should all be doing for for ourselves, for our planet for our children, for our businesses, as well. And to that end, I've just been running my business in such a way that we kind of practice what we preach, and we make sure that we're helping organizations and worthy causes in different parts of the world through the work that we do by the giving that we choose to do, because we can so yeah, that's kind of why I'm here and I've written some blog posts and articles and and infuse that into some of my speaking with regards to offsetting and stuff like that. Some of those things I will talk about a little bit today. Cool. And for those who haven't met me before, because they might be connected to one of our lovely guests. My name is Andrea Edwards. My brand is the digital conversationalist so I work with large agencies and I work with their senior leadership teams and their employee base to get them to own their voice on social media with a mindset of service and integrity. I talk a lot about the giving economy and I am encouraging everyone to stand up and raise their voice on
issues that matter most in the world. Our recently published a book called uncommon courage, which is all about helping people to understand how we can sort of get to a place within ourselves where we can get to the right mindset to deal with the challenges that we face in the future. So that gives you a bit of a feel for who I am. But let's get started. So we're going to come up today with 20 tips that everyone can do. And we're going to take it one by one we might duplicate. So we've all come up with 10. So that means we'll probably do another podcast. So let's kick it off. With Susanna starting. Well, I like to always start with food and coffee. So I'm going to share with perspective that around that. And after that, I'm going to be expanding into the role that we have as consumers, not necessarily in terms of what we eat per se, in too much length. But in terms of absorbing the marketing claims that we are bombarding on a daily basis. So how to deal with greenwashing is one of my favorite topics where I'll be sharing my tips, then now I'll be diving into the work of our professional lives. So what can we do at our workplace to advance the climate cause? And what about our money that we're saving for our pensions? And for the rainy days? How can we make use of that in the interest of the cost of the climate agenda? Finally, how are we living, cooling heating insulation, as one of my other pet topics, so I'll be sharing about all these topics in a little while, it looks like you've stolen a couple of my ideas already. But for the coffee one, if you don't make the point, I might add a point onto yours rather than lose that one. So it's good. All right, Michelle. Okay, as I'm working on environmental projects to do with recycling, reusing, reducing things like that, most of my tips are going to be about that how we can do it. You know, it's simple, simple things that we just need to think about. And I'm sure it's possible for everyone to do it. I'll also be focusing on direct projects we can do and things we can do, directly related to environmental protection, things about our homes, like Suzanna said, things about heating and cooling and how we can reduce at our homes. And also, as I mean education, things about sharing knowledge, because it's the only way we're going to get there if we all share the good things and the tips and the solutions and ideas we have, you know, and listen, of course, and then put them into action.
For me, I'm going to be talking about I sort of categorize it as what can I do as an individual? What can we do as part of a company or an organization? And what can everybody do on a sort of a global, more globally expandable scale? Then I've got some ideas for what if I don't want to do anything?
And so how do I reach out to those people that don't want to change? How do I reach out to those people that are like, I'm not really interested in this? So what can you do to influence those people in your circles that won't be listening to this podcast? Because they're either not aware or not interested? And how can you get through to them. And I think that's super duper important. And I had to use the word superduper. Because I don't know, I just wanted to use it. And then I want to see how that's typed out an E book. And then the final thing is, I want to have some random, easy, cool ways to either offset what you're doing, or influence others to do the same. And things and ways that you can scale your impact to a much larger level. That's easy and reasonably entertaining. Cool. That sounds great. We should also come up with a list of wonderful organizations that are doing great work like B one g one who Tim and I are both part of a huge part of them as well. Suzanna, v one g one, not here, but I'd love to be they make being green easy. So I've decided when I approach this, there's just so many ways that we can do it. And so what I did was for the last few years, I've really been auditing the way that my family lives, and really conscious of the impact that we have as a family. And obviously, we all come from privileged backgrounds, privileged countries, not necessarily wealthy. That's not what I'm saying. But we are more privileged than most people in the world. And people like us are the ones who are making the biggest contribution. So I've come up with a whole bunch of different ideas of the sort of things that we started to do, everyone can do them. And if we can get the majority of people to do these things, we can create massive, massive impact around the world. So that's my focus, basically what we've done as a family. Alright, shall we kick it off with the first round setting with Susanna? Sure. What I'd like to start off is my favorite topic, food. And I really like to encourage everyone to try a new vegetarian meal. So this could be something from the Indian cuisine, or maybe also, for instance, from the Thai cuisine, lots of lovely vegetarian options there. And if that's not your thing, why not try something with from the category of so called alternative proteins, you know, your burger without the beef, and they're like, you know, I think it's time now to explore new dishes.
Your tastes. And you can do that in a very environmentally friendly manner. Just give it a try. I completely agree with you there. And that's also one of my points. But the point I'd like to bring up is about managing your waste. You know, we need to think before we buy, firstly, do we really need those things? I'll get to that in my second point. But basically managing our waste, making sure that we dispose of our waste properly, and finding out what happens to the waste. Most people think when they throw something in the bin, it's going away. They're throwing it away. Where is the way we need to find out a bit more about what is happening to our rubbish isn't being put on a landfill? Is it being recycled, basically be aware of what's happening? Things like food waste, that's always a big problem here in Phuket, I think 60% of the waste that goes to the incinerator is food waste. So we could compost, you know, there are many composting machines that you could use even in an apartment, or have chickens like I do. So we need to basically have full thoughts from the shop to the bin before we buy a product and also do our best to make sure we sorted things we recycle it, we dispose of it mindfully. And like I said, Just find out what happens, you know, find out what happens know a little bit more about your waste, and then you can manage it properly. I am going to add on to this because that's one of my points. And I think I can elaborate on yours, not make it a separate point. But one of my points is love brought in Michelle, you were the one that actually introduced me to rot, reduce, reuse, reuse, and then rots being added to it, but 1/3 of all food is wasted. And that's enough food to feed every single person on this planet. So food waste is a huge issue. The challenge is the food waste is ending up in landfill as she was saying, Michelle, and in many countries, this is the largest category of material that's reaching landfill. The problem is as it breaks down, it's releasing methane. Methane is 28 times more powerful than co2 over 100 years and over 20 years, it's 80 times more potent. So we've got to reduce methane across the world, it seems one of the fastest things we can do to create impact in the environment. And when it comes to global warming, so if everyone could start to love their rot, and that means if you're in a house, get yourself composter and start making it part of the process of how you live as a family. If you're in a villa or an apartment complex is many, many people are especially across Asia and in the big cities get together as a community invest in a composting solution for your community. And for businesses. The signs are the restaurants, the strips of restaurants, if they're all composting, leftover food, the compost that is created can be used in home gardens, public gardens and forests. Obviously, in farming, too, we all need to be looking at working with councils in countries where councils are an effective thing, communities where that's more relevant, which is definitely the case in the developing world to create composting solutions that benefit everyone. We've got to get food waste out of the landfills, and it will make a massive contribution really massive contribution, we've got to get the methane down. Things like egg shells. If you wash your egg shells, crush them up, put them in the garden, they're in fantastic as well for helping your plants grow. So rather than making that as a separate point, I just added on to yours, because I think it sort of builds on what you were saying. And I think we should all feel free to do that. Yeah. All right, Tim. Thanks. Okay, well, I just reordered mine a little bit just to stick with the food theme. And this first one was about how do we get more people talking about this? How do we get those people that might not be talking about it, but they're influential, or just our friends and our circles talking about it. And I thought, well, the best way to get anybody talking about anything, weirdly enough, is over food. And so I've got this recipe book that I picked up, and I'll show it to those people who can actually see this on video. But it was by Julia tertian called feed the resistance recipes and ideas for getting involved. And this was about activism on various political, pseudo political levels. And I just thought, okay, that's kind of cool. And then there was a piece in there. And that was just the way of theming a cookbook, but I just thought it was fantastic. There's a piece in there where they were talking about, she was talking about how business incubators are helped all these women set up kitchens around the place to be self sustaining for their communities and get them out of poverty, etc. And there was a comment in here, which says, community building requires the collective movement of the community. And we must all be engaged in setting the table that we hope to sit at, we have plenty of work to do, and we intend to be well fed while doing it. And that gave me the idea. Actually, why don't we have a dinner party, you know, haven't did a party, invite your people around, you can make green curry, and some of the vegetarian dishes without announcing to everybody that's going to be vegetarian, because they might have a dental appointment instead of turning up. But they can be pleasantly surprised with the food that's on offer. And the variety of it and some of the conversation points. You might say, you know, we're going to have some conversation points for the night and you can just create a gamified give him cards, talk about various things. Just go What do you think about this? What do you think about that? And just get the conversation going. You don't have to answer everybody's questions. You just have to say Well, what do you think about that?
As people are starting to explore, and you don't have to preach to them, either, you just need to ask them the questions to get them thinking. Because once people start thinking they're going to start seeking the answer. And I think we need more people to start seeking the answer. And so to do that, we need to be firestarters of the conversation. And one of the best places to do that is breaking bread, having dinner together, and having a bit of a conversation to get it going. So one of my ideas is have a dinner party, talk about compost, at the end of it about the waste that came from that dinner party, what's leftover, where would this usually go, what was taken in creating it, the protein, the meat free proteins that are in the dishes, the ease of salad, have some recipe cards, hand them out, I mean, there's a bit of prep that goes into it, but it could be really fun. And you can get your whole family involved.
Still talking about the social connections around food and trains, I mean, I absolutely love my coffee, and I love going out to have coffee with my friends or business associates, and so on. And that's another opportunity to create these conversations. So here in Singapore, imagine you walk down to a coffee shop with your friend. But sadly, the truth is that most coffee shops here, serve coffee in disposable cups, right. And if you want to change that, if you want to challenge that, at that point in consumption, you have to be really quick, you know, so you go there order. And like immediately, you need to tell this stuff, I would like to have my coffee served in a proper mock or cup or tea cup, whatever. And often, they do need to put a little bit of effort into it. But if you just kind of let it go, it won't happen. And why you kind of kindly asked the staff not to use the disposable cup, you bring this up with your friend or colleague and say, Hey, isn't this important, you know, to reduce the waste, and we can make the difference here and now. And if they then tell you, Oh, we don't have that kind of non disposable cups, you might actually cancel your order right away, and say, Okay, I'm going to go to another coffee shop. But of course, even if that happens, you know, do remember to send the management or node give feedback to the stuff, you know, don't, don't just walk away, and gauge and Okay, if things really go wrong, you know, it's obviously good idea to have a like some kind of container, a bottle of something with you. So that if you really want to have coffee there, you can have it in your own cup, I really liked that just being really engaged with waste, you know, the day to day and not accepting it just wanted to. So again, which I'm not surprised that we're going to be overlapping here. But food waste is one of those issues that I've been doing a lot of research on. If food waste was a country, I don't know if you guys know this, it would be the third largest emitter after the US and China. So it's a huge issue. And when you think of food waste, it's not just the food, it's the energy to grow the food, package it up transported its distribution, we've got things like ugly food that have been thrown away, so all of that energy is wasted. And obviously if it goes off in the supermarket before we buy it, it's wasted. So just to give you an idea of how much of an impact we could make. If we reduced food waste, it will prevent 7.4 1 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions every year. So this is a reduction of six to 8% of the total greenhouse gas emissions. So it's massive. So how do you reduce your own personal food waste, you've got to plan your meals right shopping lists never show up when you're hungry. We all know that one right? Use leftovers and freeze the food in your fridge before it goes off. Check the fridge before you go shopping. Rather than getting into the habit of buying the same things every week and not checking that you will actually use what you've already bought that week before. Create recipes for what you've used and everything that's already in the fridge. The highest emissions come from meat and fish. So making sure that there's no waste there is obviously critical and getting red meat in particular, when it comes to emissions, it's the meat that creates the highest emissions, getting them out of your diet is absolutely critical. So food waste is obviously a big topic for all of us. Hey, can I jump in on that one. Especially with regards to your fridge, one of the things that we did is we got a little container like a drawer, and we put it on one of the shelves in the fridge and anything that was coming close to its expiry date or we needed to eat it because I gotta say the veggies that stay down in the veggie thing tend to get thrown out in some water form. If we don't see it, we want the stuff to us to be visual. It's like a specials thing. It's on sale. And we've got this box in the fridge. This drawer just sits there with anything that we need to be using in the next day or two. It's usually in that drawer. So we want to if there's a cheese
We need to you, if there's some veggies that we need you, we just put it in that one. So that when I'm thinking, what can we make tonight? I'm thinking, let's use these ingredients first. And then think about other things. Otherwise, if I keep taking stuff out of the freezer, all the stuff in the crisper, is it getting soft? So that's a really simple one, make it visual, make it in front of you make it easy to grab, and there it is. Okay, Michelle, I think that's a very good idea, as well as the dinner party, I'm definitely going to try that it's a good way of sharing information. And the draw is yes, I think that's important, because my second point is about reduced consumption. And that's consumption overall. I mean, we all consume so much that if we start to really think about it, and I think also with COVID, it's given us time to well, personally, I'm sure for you guys, too. It's given us time to really think about do we need it? You know, do we need to buy that that outfit? Do we need to buy that? That chair? For example, can we just repair the one we have? Or be happy with the things we use? So it's all about thinking about, you know, do we have enough, and basically realizing we do have enough stuff, we can reuse a lot of things we can reduce. And it's time when we really need to do that right now. It's There's no use in just wasting, you know, too much is being lost by wasting. And, as I think it was Andrea, who mentioned this, think of what resources are used and what time is used. What happens if I, for example, want to buy a new pencil, think of all the resources and all the people and all the time and energy that was put into making this one little pencil for myself. I mean, it's a small example. But we need to be aware of that be more mindful about the things we use and how much time it takes. I know that's not an easy one, because we're in this consumer driven world where it's all about changing your iPhone or changing your whatever, every few years, but we really need to start thinking about is it necessary to change this isn't necessary to buy new things. And going back to something that Suzanna mentioned, when you buy things when you do buy a coffee, or you go buy a takeaway lunch, if you can bring your own, that's great, you know, try and bring your own box or your own jar or something like that. But if you don't try to insist that you do not want that straw before they put it in the cup, or you do not leave that bag, and of course in a nice way, never in a condescending way, you know, in a nice way. Like I always say to people, no thanks, I don't need that bag, I'm saving the cost for you or saving the planet or things like that. No. So just in a nice way, tell people you don't need it. If you buy food, takeaway food, you always get all these sources with it, and spoons and napkins and straws, which you maybe don't need. So it's just about us deciding and putting our foot down and letting people know we don't need that. So that's about reducing our consumption. And there's another point that I will bring up with that a little bit later to do with, you know, being mindful about what we get and how we can reduce. We're all we're all nodding here as you speak. All right, Tim, this is a really simple idea that I think a lot of people may may have touched on or seen or been involved or already, but in your office, why don't we just get rid of all the disposables, including disposables for guests, the water fountain, no, no cups sitting there, to be thrown out at the you know, the water cooler thing, there's no cups there, you got to bring your own coffee cup, or have some cups from, you know, buy some cups that can be washed up and reused. And, and if you can get your staff involved in the washing up from time to time, which they may or may not want to do, but you get them involved in it. They can feel like they're participating in the solution, rather than just giving more work to the cleaning lady or the cleaning, man. How do we just get rid of disposables in the office all together? So usually, it'll be in the cafeteria area of the office or the water cooler. Those sorts of places that the foam cups and the little plastic or paper cups gone. All gone. Even the paper napkins gone. And if we're going crazy on that one, then eventually I'll start talking about printing. printing. Yeah. All right. So my next one is we're still sort of sticking on the same theme. But I thought I might lose this one when Susanna was talking about coffee, but it's a different one. So if you are buying a coffee machine or you're upgrading your coffee machine, please make a commitment to any buy coffee machines that use beans or powder, no more coffee pods. These single use coffee pods have created a waste explosion all around the world. There's a lot of artistic representations of it. Now I know companies like Nespresso are doing a lot to make the whole process more sustainable but because the work always sits with the consumer to send the pods back, which of course is going to create emissions with postal, it's not a good solution. And when the works always on us most people don't bother doing it. So the best thing is try to have a coffee machine that's actually got the coffee in it. It's always better to do it this way and try and buy big bags of beans because it reduces packaging but even if you can go to a place where you can buy the coffee and get it put into your own container. So there's no
produced once you got your coffee ways, put it in your gardens, or set up a community coffee waste collection point if you're living in sort of a complex and apartment complex to centralize the coffee collection, obviously, if you're in a strip of restaurants have a have a coffee collection for the for the entire community, and then partner with councils or foresty forestry Commission's gardens, organic farmers, and set up a system where that coffee waste gets sent to where it can be put to the most use. Now, in Costa Rica, there was a recent example, where wasted coffee was put on degraded lands, and these lands or rapid regeneration within two years. So here's just an idea, the place where they put the coffee poll group 80% of canopy cover in two years compared to the area that didn't have it, which only grew 20%. And the canopy was also four times taller than the area of land that didn't have the coffee pot put on it. So the research is ongoing. But looking at the crisis we've got around the world with trees, and all the fires that are going on around the world, if we could start getting the waste from coffee and making sure it goes out into the land, especially degraded land. And if we could do this on a global scale, all the restaurants individuals, we would make a massive difference in the fight that we're facing in the world right now. So that's coffee. Hey, actually, a quick shout out to Keith coffee k iith. I was wandering around great world city here in Singapore and kids coffee was sitting there, you know, in their corner hoping that people are going to come buy some coffee. And they had a couple of coffee bags, or just the paper bags with written free coffee on it. And it was their grounds for making coffee that they'd collected and put in a bag and said and it was free for your garden. So exactly what Andrew was saying this coffee shop was was putting the coffee stuff out there. Now when it when you see free stuff, I don't know about you, but I'm drawn to it. And so I was drawn to this coffee shop. And I was like, wow, Santa Monica. Yeah, take it, it's free. It's great fertilizer free garden. And I just thought what a great idea for coffee shops to do how they can get immediately involved, as well as create attraction for their customers, because in that one shopping center, but there must have been six different coffee shops yet these are the ones that were making an effort and a difference that was in your face that actually would attract a certain group of people and make the difference when when all things being equal, I would choose a coffee from them. I mean, the same principles apply basically to all food waste. I mean, I think we've come quite disconnected from this, you know, natural cycles, but whatever we kind of eat and what's left over should actually go back to the Crown's Yeah, coffee beans are of course great, but everything else. So the idea of Composting is ever so important and also helps to reduce the emissions elsewhere. Because otherwise, we do need to produce a lot of fertilizer moving around there. Also emissions coming from fertilizer application. So the more of the organic food waste and other organic waste, we can work back into the soil, the greater the benefits overall. So on that note, with regards to composting in particular, so, Suzanna, you're talking about how important it is for food waste to be composted. And, Andrea, you talked about how it's important to have a composting plans with regards to if you're living in a house or an apartment, and Michelle was talking about managing the waste in the first place. I have heard about composting solutions for apartments that you can keep in your apartment that aren't necessarily going to smell or have problems and stuff like that. Can is anyone got more information about those about how much space do they take up? Are they do they smell? Is it healthy? Is it wise to have it in the house? Anyone got some solutions with regards there any info about that? Michelle, I've seen I've seen many recyclers that you can keep in an apartment. It's about let's say half the size of a printer printer that you'd have the standard printer you'd have on your desk. So it's pretty much about this size, a little box and you put your food in daily and everyday you can collect the chips that comes out like sand chips, it's dry, it has no smell. And it's really really quick. It does it by itself, which I find quite amazing. I haven't seen one in real life, but I've just seen it on YouTube. And I will get the link and send it to everyone just to have a look. What I have is a recycling to recycling boxes actually three, it's a set that was made by the University, the environmental and science department. So it's basically three boxes made out of chipboard. The bottom one is has a little door and that's where we get the compost Okay, and let me start from the top. So you have the first one, the first one with the lid and it has holes that have been drilled into the side and at the bottom it has a grill so things can fall through. So you put leaves
At the bottom, and then you start filling up your your compost, your composting mix, which is basically it's like a starter Earth, it can be cow manure, and leaves, which you could buy from any garden shop. Okay, so that's the first layer, okay, then you put your food on top of that, when your food is completely the food scraps has completely covered that layer, you add another layer of compost, and you just keep going until it's full. And what happens is over time, and with the elements and the ends and the worms, and whatever happens in there, it starts to fall out the bottom to the next level, and then eventually to the bottom box. So within one month, you can start having compost, and it really doesn't smell that bad, I put it outside in a covered area thinking it would smell bad, but it really doesn't have a bad smell at all. Because this composting starter kind of blocks off all the smell. And everything is you know, is composting very beautifully. So this is something you could do if you have a house. But if you have an apartment where you're worried about the ants and things like that, I would recommend the small composter that I first spoke about, I think our key is got a benchtop one, haven't they, it's just a small one that everyone can have in the kitchen. I mean, there's plenty of the solutions around we've got this big monster out the back that's full of all sorts of goodness, we recently emptied it, oh, my God, the stench was out of control, but I don't care, you know, we've got it, we're good enough space to be able to do that. So there's so many different ways you can do it from a small, like an old barrel that sort of been cut up, and can be spun all the way through to the high tech, you know, so it doesn't have to be an expensive solution. But the most important thing is its it doesn't go right dig a hole in your garden, and fill it up and then cover it up, you know, but the most important thing is it doesn't go into landfill. Sorry. Also, if people throw it into their bin along with the plastic bottles and everything, who is going to want to sort through that to recycle it after a few days, you know, so it all just goes into the bin. So it's very important that we from from our homes from our kitchens, we start to already separate the rubbish. And whatever we are separating for the recycling people, we need to clean it. For example, milk cartons, milk bottles, wine bottles, all of that needs to be cleaned. Because if you just put it like that in a recycling container, it's going to be filled with and it's going to attract rodents, pests, things like that. So it's managing your waste while it's still in a very small quantity at home, so that the people who do collect it have this big Belk this big Bell called recycling things to deal with. But it's clean already. Because whatever, it's dirty, they're not going to take the time, they're just going to throw it away. And then it would have been a waste of your sorting anyway. And then we've got countries like Australia where we know that, you know, everyone's got all these series of bins where you put your green waste in mine and your recycling and the other and your rubbish, your rubbish bin is typically used smallest bean. So a lot gets done for people but still going that extra mile. And Michelle talks a lot about this about keeping making sure it's clean. So that when it gets to the place, because still only 90% of all plastic plastic worldwide is recycled, right? So you know it just because you're putting it in the right bin doesn't mean it's actually going to where it needs to be going and being used in the way it needs to be used. So that which relates back to your first point, Michelle, about understand where your trash goes, follow the journey of your trash, because I think most people who think it's being taken care of will be quite shocked if you can even go that extra step and make sure that you send certain items to the right place that's so it's going to really be recycled. I think that is great. Maybe not everybody wants to take that step. But for example, we very much working with that now with sustainable Miko because we clean the beaches, we separate the rubbish into eight different categories. And then we ensure that let's say six out of the eight is going to a place that's where the rubbish is going to be actually upcycle into something useful. So it doesn't just end up back in the landfill washing back into the sea and back onto the beach for next week's cleanup, you know, trying to manage the full circle if you're really interested in that not everyone is as I've seen, as you've seen, but we have to stop being interested in it because this is our world. And we don't have a plan B or planet B as as I've seen, you know they've written so we need to think about on the cleaning your your recyclables. The tip I would add them one thing we've done here is we we got ourselves a rubbish bin that's small enough to get so we live in a small apartment in a high rise block. And so that's why I was interested in asking about the composting and, and sort of a bit nervous when you said put down your net and well that's obviously not going to be in the house. So So then, with regards to washing the recycling got to make these things easy. So we've got a rubbish bin that you can step on and the lid pops up. And my idea you don't line it with any plastic bag, because you're putting recyclables in there. And if they're going to be clean, you don't need to line up with any plastic bag. But you need to put that rubbish bin that Recycle Bin close to the sink. So the idea is when you were about to throw it out, you just rinse it in, give it a bit of a clean and then pop it in the recycle bin. And if your Recycle Bin stinks when you taken it out, it means you haven't cleaned
Those things properly. So that's your clue about your cleaning. And if it smells Okay, and so I haven't had to wash the recycle bin, because it doesn't smell because everything's clean. And then I just take it and it's on wheels. So I roll it down outside, go down the lift, roll it outside to the Big Blue giant recycle things that they have in the communities around the place, and the inside comes out, and I tip it, tip it into the thing, and then into the big giant Recycle Bin, and bring the thing back up and started again. So the idea is to create new habits like that, we got to make it simple. Got to make it easy to do, if it's something that's hard. And the challenge is, there's a rubbish chute. So my option is I can just throw it in the rubbish chute, and I don't have to do anything. That's the easiest option. But the rubbish chute is now at least seven or eight steps further away from the recycle bin, which is right next to the sink. So make it easy, make it accessible, and it's more likely to make it a habit. A token about making it easy and easy, like dealing with food waste or other other ways is not your favorite thing. Let's remember there are plenty of great organizations that carry out this kind of work, which we can support financially and otherwise, still on the nodes of food waste here in Singapore, we have these grass roots organization called divert for second life that actually goes on with volunteers into food stores and restaurants to collect food, which is about to expire, but which is still safe to use just that that commercial operation doesn't have a use for it. So what I'm doing right now is actually not doing that food collection or distribution myself. However, I'm helping these organizations to reach out to more organizations so that we can, you know, divert more food for going into incineration here. So my tip is really to find organizations that do this kind of work, support them financially or otherwise, if you don't really want to do it yourself. I love I love that. So in Thailand, Indonesia, and I'm sure that they're spreading out across the rest of Asia, there's a group called scholars of sustenance, so SOS and their food rescue organization. And so what they do is they, especially with the hotels, they have partnerships with the hotel, so we go to our breakfast buffet and all that food gets wasted. So SOS go in and take that food, they then take the food, and they give it to people who need who need to eat that day. So a lot of the charities and the communities. So obviously, in the economic crisis, when the pandemic, SOS can't really rely on the hotels because they don't have as many customers. So what we're doing is we're getting people to cook for them so they can distribute that food. And they restaurant, so it's not rescue, but all we're getting the businesses, the tight local Thai businesses where people are paying for them to cook food for SOS to hand out to the communities, but Food Rescue is definitely a huge opportunity. And if I can add something about SOS, what's what what impresses me too is that they provide the containers. So they will say we can pick up the food, we'll drop off the containers, you know, so that you can put the food in there. So they're also looking at food waste, and also reducing packaging. So hats off to them. But just on the on the food recyclers that Suzanna was talking about as well, the food bank, Singapore also does this sort of stuff. They reduce food waste by rescuing meals. And it's one of the projects is sitting in be one g one.com that you can support. Like Susanna said, if you if you don't want to do it yourself, you can always support somebody who's doing it for 35 us cents, you can help them rescue a kilo of food going to landfill and creating the methane that Andrew was talking about. So the letter B, the number one, the letter G, the number one.com. They've got lots of different projects like this, that you can get involved with, as well. And you can get your team involved with too if you're a leader in an organization, have your team choose projects to support that aligned with some of the things that they're thinking about that can make a real positive difference, and then have everyone discuss it at the next team meeting. And it really creates awareness in a really interesting, interesting way. I like that one. Okay, so I'm going to add to the I think we're on the wrapping up the third point, I don't know how many will finally have here. But it doesn't matter. It was all an experiment doing this this way. Money is understand plastic recycling. So it's sort of we're constantly sort of expanding on points being made. One of the biggest confusions that I see his knowledge of what can and can't be recycled. Also, people believing stuff is recycled when it's not recycled, which is making a lot of people very cynical about recycling. Especially when we know that only 9% of plastic or plastic that's ever been created has been recycled. So we've got a long way to go recycling perspective, the technology is definitely developing. But in developing countries This is even bigger, a bigger problem because a lot of the trash gets dumped from wealth gantries gets in the waterway
In the oceans, and you know, just the infrastructure just isn't there to deal with it. So we've got some big problems to tackle. But when it comes to the oceans and rivers that are full of trash, we need to turn off the tap of what's going in there in the first place. And that's on all of us to just significantly reduce what we do. So if we can understand the plastic that we're buying, and its potential for recycling, I think that would make a really huge difference, I'm going to include a link, but when you buy anything with the plastic, anything that's plastic, it'll have a symbol on it, which is called the universal plastic resin symbol. And it's three chasing arrows that are forming a triangle. Now most people see that image and they think that automatically means it can be recycled, it doesn't, they've always, it always comes with the number one through seven. And to give you an idea, so number one is petal PT. And this is the sort of plastic that's used in single use bottled, bottled water, that sort of thing. It's easily recyclable, but only 20% is actually recycled. And that's a problem of getting to where it can go to be recycled 2345, I won't talk through them all, then you get up to six and seven. And then they're two of the worst categories. So if you can avoid buying the bad categories of plastic that can't be recycled, you're already going to be contributing, and then making sure that the ones that can be recycled, you take the ownership of getting it to where it needs to go to be recycled. And, you know, we were talking earlier about trying to make it as easy as possible for everyone. It's not working, right? It's not working, it is easy as possible in so many countries, and that plastic is not being recycled. And then it's extremely hard in other countries, and it's not being recycled. So we have to solve the problem. And the best way to solve the problem is to get as much plastic out of the consumer choice, but only get the plastic that's actually going to be able to be recycled, and then taking the responsibility to get it where it needs to be until we can solve the bigger problem of how do we effectively recycle plastic. That's my third one. Can I jump in with a story of hope. And that is there's an organizer Michelle, you might be really interested in connecting with these guys, too. They're an organization in Indonesia called classroom of hope. And what they do is they get recycled plastic bottles and other plastic bits from beach cleanups. And they process them into bricks, plastic bricks, from which they make classrooms. So that organizations called classroom have hope. It didn't Indonesia, because of the tsunami, earthquakes and everything else that devastated a lot of the classrooms over there. One of the solutions was we need to build more classrooms. And they were building temporary ones. And then they needed for the temporary ones, they were using the plastic that was available in the debris to help them build the classroom. And so they were they were taking ocean trash and turning it into a classroom wall, which is just amazing, really, that create something so amazing out of that. And, and for organizations wanting to support a cause like that, again, this one's on the big one platform, it's like you can help them for as little as nine cents of brick. So go check it out. If you want some more information, we'll include that in the E book, presumably, but it's fantastic. These sorts of organizations as well. That's really interesting. And I will definitely look them up. Because the whole idea is just to you know, see what we can do with the rubbish we collect, we collect so much and we do not want to send it to the incinerator. So for example HDPE plastic, the lids of bottle tops, we collect those, we wash them, dry them and send them to precious plastics at Blue tree. They have this precious plastics machine which shred the bottle caps into this type. It's like tiny flakes. And then they put it into another machine that heats it up. And then they pour it into a mold. And they make incredible things like these turtles that can be used for cardholders, they make earrings, toys, and they also making a skateboard. And we plan to make rubbish bins out of this material, you know, make like these, what do you call it like pieces of plastic that have been put together to make a kind of a strip and then make a rubbish bin out of that. So there's a lot being done with HDPE plastic, but I would like love to find out classroom of hope, what kind of plastic they're using. And as Andrea said, it's important that we are all aware about the different kinds of plastic. I mean, I know it's only for those who are really interested and want to dig deep. But if we know that there are different kinds, it will also affect what we choose, you know, if we check take an orange juice in this particular container or that particular container. So it's something that everyone every consumer needs to become more aware of. I think if we really want to move forward, we mustn't always think it's up to someone else. That's always the problem. People think it's someone else's job. But it's all of us. We're all basically in this boat. This is how I put it when I speak to people in general just for them to have an idea. We're all on this boat that has holes. Some people are making the holes. Some people are plugging the holes. Some people just don't
And they're on their phones. And so which one do you want to be, and there's only one boat, and we have everything on board to fix this boat. But we have to work together to make it happen. And it's quick. It's not later down the line, it is something super urgent, right? As we all know. But it's just about sharing that knowledge and making sure that people realize it is easy, we can do this together, and we need to do it together. Rather than thinking the government will do it for someone else. And take ownership. I just think that's such a big, big. I love the analogy, the boat, because the COVID is also got a boat as well, right? And we're not, we're not all we're all in the same storm. But we're not all in the same boat. So the boat analogy definitely works. But there's another group called plastic bank, where you take your plastic bottles in and you get money in return. So that's another one. That's IBM, supporting that. So that's an I know, in the Philippines, it's really happening. But the other thing that people forget is, if you're in a developed country, you pay council taxes, and then that Council is responsible for getting rid of the rubbish but the exponential rise of rubbish over the last few decades and exponential rise of plastic products basically cancels, can't afford to get rid of it, they just can't. So they can either increase the council taxes, which no one's going to be pleased with all we have to come up with a solution, working together as communities, whether you're in a street in an apartment building, a strip of shops, a strip of restaurants, whatever, working together as communities and saying this is what we're all going to do together. I think that will make a massive difference. But sorry, Susanna.
Now wanted to talk a little bit more about the importance of building knowledge as consumers because there's all a whole range of labels out there. Also when it comes to plastics or alternatives to plastic. So the term bio degradable, what does that actually mean? I mean, it sounds nice and to a product, especially a disposable product that you would conveniently have it sounds like a better solution. But then again, we have to question what's the timeframe in which this, let's say packaging is biodegradable? Is it a year? Is it the 10 years, 100 years, you know, there's, there's all shades of biodegradability there. And then of course, if you are living in a place where it's not going to be composted or something like that, where it goes into incineration, for instance, they actually doesn't really matter that much. I mean, the concept of lifecycle analysis of actually considering all the different emissions and environmental footprint on all the different stages of producing something, consuming something and then disposing it, you know, will be the right way to consider the total carbon footprint or emissions footprint. But obviously, that's not so easy. But I would encourage everyone to really question these labels. There's a lot of greenwashing, a lot of labels and terms that don't actually mean so much in reality, unfortunately, that's a tough one, isn't it? Because you know, the expectation of people to understand greenwashing. And I, I think it the obligation has to go back to the business and it has to go to the marketing, the advertising the PR departments to stop participating in this. Not everybody in these roles has done it. But like, when you look back, you know, some of the most successful sort of campaigns around the fossil fuel industry, is PR, advertising marketing, right? And it's confusing people, it makes it harder, makes people frustrated, they don't know where to start. But, you know, the response to be really, really has to go back to those businesses, you know, just to stop doing it, right. I agree. But I do think that we as people, as consumers have a role to play, you know, if something kind of sounds dubious, unclear to us, you should question it, and and, you know, we should all demand those answers, we should all demand clarification as to why is company a saying that, you know, this is better or greener or more natural, right? I mean, every pool, right? Yeah, I mean, if we let it slip, it will slip and then at some point it becomes accepted. So I do think we need to stay vigilant. So I would urge anyone and everyone who comes up with a kind of green sustainable statement that doesn't quite ring through to actually call that out and to demand evidence for such a claim. the fashion industry in particular is also something that is I think, quite problematic some some reason studies have shown that 80% of their claims are well not really evidence based. Obviously in the in the oil and gas industry. For instance, Shell has claimed that by you know, by buying this option for green offsetting, you know, carbon offsetting you be driving your
car without emissions. And actually, the advertising regulators in the Netherlands have now ruled that just Bullock's. And that shell must stop doing that. So in summary, we have to be vigilant, we have to call out we have to question. And in the process we will learn. And if you're capable of understanding the greenwashing and what's going on, making sure that you're sharing that on social media and making other people aware, I think that's it's an obligation than anyone who is capable of going past the bullshit, basically, it's their obligation to share that on with their community who may not have as much access to that knowledge and, and that insight as they do, but we know when it's wrong, yeah, not all of us need to become expert in all of this, you know, material sciences, and so on. But, you know, we can reach out, we can make some noise and help him the process of finding the real evidence and an assessment of these things, we should harness the power of trolls and take them from trolling about stuff that doesn't help anybody and redirect their energies in their troll Enos to trolling these organizations, because that would be pretty amazing. If it actually you bring up a great point, because because what's the strategy of the trolls? You know, that Yeah, kind of that silence it. But they also, you know, always ask you for evidence. All right. So why not do the same? Well, the other thing that the trolls do, we're trying to get clicks, right. So there's a lot of a lot of trolls who don't believe in what they're saying. They're just sharing information, and creating outrage so that they get more money from Google. So if we can sort of create some sensation around the environment that they can get, they can make money from maybe they can be friends. Yeah, be nice. No troll under the bridge. Everyone has to gain from something. So what can we offer? You know, but I'm sharing knowledge. Yes, that's definitely one of the points that is so important. You know, there's so much information out there. And people choose whatever, you know, interest them to find out, but they are equal, like we should change our bad or eco events. If something is coming up, or problems or solutions, like we're doing right now. I think solutions are very important. And also to make this topic urgent, popular, and also cool or trendy. You know, in the past environmental things, especially with the teenagers, I mean, I have teenagers like yourself, Andrea, and it's not very cool or trendy to have a beach cleanup, right? But how can we get into making the younger generation and even people who are on social media more interested in doing this? How can it become something that's firstly urgent, but also something that can bring likes and can make an impact wherever one is doing something, I think target the teenage girls to come to the beach, beach cleanup and the boys will follow.
Just based on that actually, I love your idea of sharing about events that are happening and being a bit more vocal about fun cool events. So for example, this international Coastal Cleanup Singapore is doing a is got this deal where you can hire a kayak and kayak about the bay or about around that one of the islands and stuff like that for a few hours. And you pay for it with rubbish that you pick up along the way. And so it's like and you're paddling about. And the whole idea is it's a it's a cleanup, you're going out there to do a cleanup and there and you get to paddle around on the kayak, which is, which is pretty cool. So that they're sort of combining what people want to do. I want to an adventure, I want something different, I want to get fit. I want to get out there and be in nature and stuff like that. And and at the same time you're doing some good, and it's offset by you know, you, it's not costing anything, saving. Yes. So events like that are pretty, pretty cool. If they can keep going. You're in Phuket they have yoga or bootcamp teamed with painting up the beach. So that's a really fun way or a fun outing for people or downward dog and pick up a bottle.
And also, we do also educational camps. So children come and they learn English for free. You know, the children from the village who can't really afford to pay a monthly so they have like a conversation course, maybe 30 minutes or one hour and afterwards, clean rubbish on the beach and speak about it in English. So it's getting to doing two for the price of one. That's what I meant about giving people something that they can do the sustainability side in return, you know, we give English please clean the beach, and it's a win win situation. I love it. It's stacking good is what I call that. I've got another one based on that actually. So one of the things that we did a little while back was decided to collect the bottle ring balls from cans. And it's because church was collecting the wrinkles for something in Thailand to turn into prosthetic limbs or something rather, when I actually went and did some research that the people in Thailand
We're turning the ring poles which had a different quality metal apparently, into the prosthetic limbs where we ended up just saying, actually just send us the cash, we need to buy the proper metal for the prosthetic limb. And it doesn't make any sense that you post a whole bunch of aluminium ring poles or whatever is on an aeroplane and send it over to us and pay for the postage. And then you may as well save the money on the postage and send us the money, as well as get the recycling done locally, and get some cash for the ring poles, and then send us the cash and we can buy the metal here to pay for the limbs. It's all very complicated. Anyway. But what had happened in the meantime, before I discovered all that I've got tons of wrinkles in tons, but a lot of wrinkles sitting in the kitchen. I then went well how can we? What can we where do we get the wrinkles from so we started to talk to coffee shops to say can you give us the wrinkles, you know the little things from a tin can. And, and so they were collecting it, they were collecting it for because we knew them, they'd be our local coffee shop, they would collect them. For everybody else. When they collected the cans, they would pull the ring pull off and collect it for us. And then I talked to Skye, I think it was and she had this poor lady that was part of her community that she was looking after. And said if we give the wrinkles to her, she can take them to get them to recycle, get the money for them, that will help her. So that's what we ended up doing. We ended up not worrying about the prosthetic limb people in Thailand, but we we decided we're giving the wrinkles to this local lady who could then sell it and use the money for you know, for next meal sort of thing. And so we've got still got coffee shops, weirdly enough, they're using a plastic bottle and a big coke bottle. And they're putting the wrinkles in that and they're giving us full bottles of wrinkles. There are ways to do it. And there's ways to get the community involved, I guess where we can stack good by doing one thing, which is recycling and another thing which is helping the poor. And and and give people dignity and purpose and stuff like that. Absolutely. That's wonderful. Sorry, Andrea. So that is wonderful what you're doing because you were speaking earlier about helping people in your neighborhood, rather than trying to help people far away. sending it to Thailand was a great idea initially, because of good they were going to do with it. But it's true. When you think of their missions, the the postage, and all of that the fact that you can help someone close to home is wonderful, you're still recycling and you're helping someone get food and live so good on you. And everybody can do that. Exactly. wrinkles are one of those things that there's so many uses for them. And if we could all work out what they are and how we can make that happened. So I bought these beautiful bowls from Vietnam, which are wrinkles threaded together. And completely unique, right? It's something you'd sort of put your makeup in, shredding out plastic bottles, turning them into bathmats, turning them into wall tiles, plastic roads, bike paths around the island, you know, there's so many things you can do, you know, and it's just about working out, what are they and then working? How can we make that happen? Or how can we train people in those skills, especially in the economic crisis, it's hitting this region. Okay, my fourth point is saying no to single use everything. So the bigger focuses, and it sort of extends on a lot of what's already been said, but the biggest focus is always on single use plastics. And I actually think we need to really start recognizing that single use anything is bad for our environment. So say for example, you know, if you live a life where there are, there are things in your life that exist for a mere moment, before they go into the trash. So getting takeaway at lunchtime when you're in the office, when we're back in the office, obviously, takeout containers, getting thrown away, things that I don't have to deal with anymore, but goodie bags that kids parties used to drive me nuts, because our full of cheap plastic toys to make them look fuller. And those toys didn't even last a day. Things like balloons. So if it exists for a moment of, of suppose joy, and then it's in the rubbish bin, they should I mean that we should have global legislation that this stuff, it shouldn't be allowed to even exist anymore. And we know that there's towns and cities in China, where this crap is made and and shipped around the world. But we all have to start saying no. So anything that is created to exist for a single purpose, for a matter of moments, hours, even days, we should say no more in our lives. And this is just being really aware of everything that's in your life, and not bringing it in anymore. When you go to the shops when you kids ask for stuff when you go into those cheap do to dollar shop. If it's not going to last, especially if it's plastic, and it's going to sit in the environment for 1000 years. We've got to start saying yes to this stuff. And we can all we can all do that and we can all contribute to that. So that's my fourth. Yeah, just say No, exactly. Alright, so let's start with our final round.
And it's been beautiful, actually, we've kind of all overlapped and stuff. And we're building on each of the ideas. But there's a lot here, and I hope that people are listening to this can really take something away. Alright, Susanna, what's your number five, I would like to switch gears a little bit. We've been talking quite a lot about what we can do in our, in our private lives and in our immediate communities. But I'd like to focus a little bit about what we can do at our workplace. So I would like to suggest all of us to become either a climate advocate, or at least, and our Sean provocateur, at the workplace. So how might this work? So imagine you're in a meeting, whether in person or in zoom, and you discuss some kind of new business plans, for instance, or budget, or whatever it is. So what you can very easily do is to ask the question, how does this affect our carbon footprint? The better way to do this is actually not just to do it by yourself. But in advance of that meeting, maybe find a friend, find a le a nice colleague, who will back you up in that situation. And I'm saying that you don't necessarily even always need to have these answers. But it's up to us to initiate such discussions to initiate further research and contemplation into how would our businesses do how what happens at our workplace is actually affecting the world, because, and I really recommend this, because the leverage that we have through our companies can be so big, I mean, companies buy stuff for millions or billions. And you know, we have such a bigger immediate leverage in changing some of those decisions than in our personal lives. Which is not to be you know, I'm not condescending here. But you know, if we want to have some scale and impact, we need to stop becoming more active, initiating these conversations at workplace, I want to, I want to immediately jump in and support that idea. And I want to make it really selfish for people. So one of the programs that I developed and is called promotion, pay rise, it's a course to help people get a promotion and a pay rise to triple their salary and get promoted twice in 18 months, because that's what happened to me. And so then I sort of deconstructed worked out how to do it. One of the ways that, that I, I suggest in there, it's one of the aspects is about increasing your visibility, and in the workplace and getting involved in projects, and one of the ways you can immediately increase your visibility, is to make an appointment with the CEO, or the CFO or the CMO. Or if you're any of those, and go and and say I'd like to talk to the whoever that that person is in that position, about exactly what Suzanna was talking about, about our carbon footprint about our carbon was climate responsibility. And, and those aspects. Now, if your organization doesn't have a spotlight on these areas, at the moment, you you will basically be putting up a flag for yourself. So say I could be involved in that. And that can raise your profile in the organization. And it can certainly get you a lot of attention across a lot of different influences within the organization, which can increase your chance, depending on how you do it can increase your chance of getting that promotion and a pay rise. If you do it badly, it can increase your chance of exiting
the organization. But if you do it really well about you know, you've got the best interest of the organization at heart, because the world is starting to look at these metrics. And the world is starting to assess organizations based on how much they care about this, and that it's beyond just a marketing push. And when people talking about greenwashing, it was it was to make it look like they're doing something when they aren't. But to actually be doing something and have it aligned with our corporate values, then you become an ally that Suzanna was talking about. She was talking about finding an ally, but actually you become their ally, you become the enabler of being able to bring this to be able to help protect the organization because of this. And if you actually contact Suzanna, she will help you work out how it will save your organization money, which is usually when the CFOs head explodes. We have to do all this stuff to help you know isn't going to cost a fortune. Actually, it's going to save a fortune. But you need to talk to Suzanna about the the details a bit of a shout out there for you, Susanna. But yeah, but talk to Susanna because she will work out the KPIs and the metrics and everything else from a corporate level to be able to make that happen in a really, really interesting way. But when you put your hand up and say what about this, there'll be some tools and resources that you can help with of course, but that's going to increase your visibility in the workplace and it
Going to and if you're really passionate about it, it's going to give you a project to lead or at least be involved in, that will have high visibility and being involved in high visibility projects helps you get a promotion and a pay rise. If you know about promotion, pay rise, go to sharp and.me if you want more about. So that's sh, RPI en.me. And if you want more about Suzanna, she'll probably give you her details now. Well, absolutely, thank you very much for that team. So the sustainably, the speaker.com is where you find me. But what I would also still like to say is that, you know, don't be shy. And I think if you start talking about climate at workplace, perhaps first at the coffee shop where you have refused the disposable cup, but I think you'll be surprised how many people actually support this agenda. And and I found that, you know, this topic is actually the one way you can make some, let's say unexpected friends also at workplace because in so many people's hearts, this is something that really touches on them touches on their children's future, it can almost become kind of the, you know, the the chitchat, you know, where you can almost open up conversations, you know, with with anyone and your stranger and and make immediate connections, asking, you know, is not a concern for your children, perhaps First, if not to you do have teenage children or something like that. So climate conversation is, is an opportunity to make immediate and lasting connections. The one thing I'd say with the business, there's been a lot of talk. So Amazon, the employee sustainability advocates within Amazon, some of them have been fired for raising, raising a ruckus, the shareholders have decided that they're not interested in making Amazon sustainable. So these employees really speaking up, because of course, it's about the future of their children and their grandchildren. But the one, the one way that I really encourage in the business is get executive sponsorship, there will be somebody in your organization at a senior level that gets it that understands the problem. And they will be happy to support a group of employees that want to move forward. So get executive sponsorship, if you can't, even if none of them are currently awake, which I'll be amazed because soon those people will be getting sued for their inaction, complications and the consequences are starting to brew. But yeah, fine, find an executive sponsor, and you'll be able to move faster as well. Now, what's what's really happening right now is that you've got a range of
progressive companies, and a lot of them come from Europe or so perhaps us to a degree, but they're starting to ask their leaders here in Asia of Hey, what are you doing about climate? What are you doing about sustainability. So the timing is perfect now, to start talking about this topic and put a stake in the ground and say, Hey, I can actually help with this, I want to support this, the demand is rising there. And a lot of the executives are under a lot of pressure to actually start doing something about this. Now, that's a really interesting point with regards to somebody being if you're looking for a new leadership team to come in and champion something, one of the things on their past history that you that they might be looking for, is have you implemented climate positive change throughout the organization before because we're looking for somebody to also do that. And champion here, because we need to move quickly. Because we need to play catch up. Now, that may be a few years from now. And it could be people looking for this now. But if that's a skill that you don't have yet about bringing in climate positive action for your organization, it might be something to add to your resume pretty quickly. So getting involved in these sorts of projects, is a sensible move. I mean, Andrew, we were talking not too long ago about Deloitte sending what 330,000 of their people off to training in an environment climate change school, climate change school. So consulting firms are seeing a massive need. Now there's two things there. One is the consulting firm sees a massive future need for these skills in organisations. So Deloitte are sending their people out to learn these skills to be able to teach and charge others. But secondly, it's a great good news story for the marketing department right now, to be able to say, here's the good stuff. We're so committed with sending our people to, to school. So even though it's and we're partnering with organizations to be able to make this happen, so they're, they're getting a multi win in this. Plus they're going to make money back from charging your organization if you don't do anything about it now. All right, Michelle, your your fifth and final point for today. Are we on fire. Here we are. Right? Yes. Well, it links up to this too. And I completely agree what everyone has been saying about making that difference in the world.
workplace and connecting all stakeholders, you know, speaking to the CEO and speaking to people in high positions as well as people on the ground, to get everyone on board to move forward with this. And to let everyone think that it's not just your idea that you're going to do. It's something we're going to do together as a community, as a company, as a hotel, etc, as a business. And it is becoming urgent and it is becoming something that people are realizing they need to do, which is very exciting for all of us. It is a very exciting time now, because I think changes will happen. It's always it's been we've been leading up to this for some time now. And now with COVID and everything that's happening, people are reassessing how they want to move forward. What kind of world are they are we are we heading for what kind of village we want, when the tourists come back, things like that, you know, very much looking at that in Phuket. But something I'd like to add to that is also for everyone, and especially in these big corporate companies to look at traveling is before COVID proof COVID time, people were just traveling so much. And when you looked at flight radar, the app, for example, on your phone to see planes, there were so many planes flying everywhere around the world. Now, I know it's not always possible to reduce our flights, but we could plan in a better way. For example, I think of expats living in Phuket, for example, Andrea, there are so many expats here to stay for two or three years and then leave to a different part of the world. So while you're in Asia, let's see the places in Asia when we go on holiday. And when you move to America, then let's see the places around there. So let's try and plan ourselves. So we take holidays in the region where we live. I know that's not always easy, because people want to go home to see families. That's another story. But as best as we can, let's try to travel mindfully. And not only by airplane, it can also be by car. For example, if you have to go shopping, or you need to get something in town, try and plan three or four or five different things to do on that same day. So that your trip to town is worth it. I think about this a lot because I live 40 minutes away from from town, you know, so when I go, I got to make sure I get everything done, so that I don't have to return the next day. So it's about traveling mindfully planning. Like when you plan your your food shopping, whatever you plan, just like be more aware of what we are doing, where we are going and what is needed. So that we once again, reduce and only buy what we need and only go as often as we need. When we put this content together. I will I will add the growth predictions for airlines. Yeah, so I've got the growth in it. It went from like 2 billion flights at the beginning of the 2000s. To this this year, it was supposed to be 4.6 billion. And by 2048 was supposed to be eight point something billion, right. And I've got the exact data, which I can include in in sort of like the blog, the growth was astronomical, and the majority of it was coming from China, Thailand, Indonesia. So as more and more people get the ability to fly. So you're absolutely right. But business travel was always the big one. And its growth was exponential as well. And I think businesses now that people haven't been able to travel, they're getting used to online conversations, like really reducing that because Airbus will not be launching its emissions free plane before 2030. So you know, these, these aerospace engineers haven't solved the crisis. And because they've been making too much money, so they're just building new planes, right? Because everyone's buying them. China was building an India we're building a new airport a week at the beginning of this last decade. So you know, it's been out of control, tourism's out of control, it's all out of control, we need to all live smaller. Again. All that said, as soon as COVID restrictions really globally come down, there is going to be this giant rubber band effect of everybody quickly going traveling like crazy. Again, because they've been pent. It's a pent up demand. So it's probably pretty good to get clear on your values about that now, and sort of make some decisions before we get emotional. So make me because the emotion will be we can go even even and I found this with myself. Singapore's talked about the bubble opened up with travel to either Brunei or Germany. There were the two options. Brunei, Germany, and I was like, Germany then. So.
So, because I've been to Brunei, recently. Big. Okay, so now let's go to Germany and I will be doing Germany, be Christmas in Germany and all this sort of stuff about the possibility of going to Germany because there's this like desire to travel. And it was like, how can I get my brothers from England to Germany so that I can actually see them again? And my parents kind of get out of Australia and all this sort of stuff. And I was just like, well hang on a minute. Do we need to go to Germany? No, we don't. Let's just wait. There is sacrificing our future. And I think like I've gone through a mourning period of sacrifice. I know what I need to do in the future. So you know when you travel, you know
our parents, our family are in the UK and they're in Australia. We want to say them after this is all over, but travel less go for longer when you're there, catch trains, electric vehicles, you know, just be conscious of of what your contribution and obviously offset, although the growth is the growth continues as it is, it doesn't matter how much we offset, we can't balance it out because there's just too much growth. But if people are offsetting, at least they're conscious of it. It's those people who are flying around without even thinking about the need to offset that we're trying to get through to in a sense, what's your final one, Tim? I did promise at the outset that we'll be talking about a bunch of different things that I don't think we're quite got to, but we will get to over the course of this series, I suppose. So on that I've been flipping between them. And I think I'm gonna end with something really simple. And it's a trip to IKEA or IKEA. Now, I don't know whether Suzanne has got a horrible report on them or a good one, I'm not sure but for me, it's it's replacing your paper towels at home with normal towel. And going back to in particular, the ones that we got were the ones called kurama k ra Ma, they're about $6 for 10 of them, and they're actually baby burping towels. So they're a little square towel that you can put over your shoulder and baby can burpple over it and you can check it in the wash. And I'll cost of paper towels, which we used to buy quite a lot of paper towels, it was just one of the things was Toilet Paper Paper towels and, and this both toilet paper and paper towels have gone down substantially. Since we did two things. One was we bought these little towels from IKEA, which have lasted us forever. I mean, they they've lasted us for this, I think this is our third year of using these ones. And we bought 30 of them, which we didn't need to buy, we probably only needed to have bought 10 or 20. But we bought 30 of them. 20 probably would have been enough because you use them you chuck them in the thing and you pop it in the wash, and then they're back in the box again. The other thing we did was we bought up a bit a little bit a little squirty bump thing for our toilet for $160. Which completely I mean, I'm I don't know, this is a bit of a weird conversation. Although I always end up turning everything into toilets. I wrote a children's book about toilets. Everything is part of our big when stuff is sponsoring toilets. I don't know what it is about toilets. I used to make toilets when I was at boarding school and send it back to my parents in Malaysia. They're a little bit sort of perplexed as what was going on. I've had discussions with people about how they wipe their bum and other places with toilet paper. Do they are they scrunches or folders? And then there's this whole ridiculous debate. But for me, it was like a boxing glove of toilet paper. I don't know what that sounds a little bit awful. And with the squatty bump thing, you hardly need any all you're really doing is drying. You're not removing debris is the probably the lightest way I could say it. You're just drawing it from the squirt Enos. So that investment in the squatty bump thing. BJ I suppose they called and and the cheap ones. It's just a little mechanism. You just sit there and it's not the $10,000 Japanese one, it's $160 el cheapo one. It was completely fine. And it has saved us It has paid itself back many, many many times over in toilet paper. Because the amount we use now is very, very small team. I'm not really the expert on the on the toilet paper topic. I'll skip that.
Yeah, but I didn't want to comment on your point about you know, for instance, how do we try our hands after we wash them and you know, there's plenty of handwashing happening right now. And they hear where we live in Asia usually it's it's it's paper towels or air drying, obviously both have their own footprints but a my home country, Finland what what's perhaps the most commonly used method in public toilets is actually they have a roll of, of cotton fabric. So just go there. And you know, it gives you a fresh piece of that cotton towel. And then you know, it gets rolled into the system. And then they obviously like industrially wash it and bring it back. And and this has been the norm for a long time. So I didn't know the details. But I think that some clever people have thought this through cleverly, and probably ruled out that this is the most sustainable way of drying your hands. So I think you're already into something with those IKEA hand towels there. Yeah. I mean, we had those Rolly ones in the 70s. I mean, they've been around for a million years. So I think it was just how do we convenient how do we whatever it was. Makes a lot of sense. But at home yeah, those little towels are super simple. Michelle, did you want to add to Tim's bottom comments, he really has written a book about poo.
Well, I think I completely agree with
That's a kind of bid a, you know, here in Thailand, we have a water shower or toilet shower, which is just basically, as you know, like like a like a hose pipe in a way with a header at the end. And that does help a lot to reduce toilet paper. And it's also more hygienic. So I think that can be a great thing. If people install that in their homes, it doesn't take much investment, it's just having an extra tab on the side of your toilet and extra water inlet and getting one of these
gadgets to install. And it definitely does save a lot. Also, I wanted to add about IKEA, something very interesting about them is that they use fishing ropes, the PP fishing ropes, which are the thick white ones, they use that in their furniture. So they basically recycling the the fishing nets, mixing it with other materials to make some of their furniture which looks like wood. So I would definitely support them, I need to find out a bit more about that project. But they have a lot of gadgets that are very useful, for example, cupboards that you can build yourself. And you know, I think they do a lot environmentally that we need to look at. And as they are a big company, it's great to see them doing something for the environment. That is but I don't know if you guys are familiar with what they were doing in the past that their supply chain for wood was so bad that they weren't monitoring it. So there was a lot of old growth forests being chopped down illegally in, especially in Eastern Europe, into IKEA's wood chips. So they actually got a very bad rap there for a long time. I do think they're doing some good things. There's some new initiatives just recently they've been announcing they seem to be moving in the right direction. And the handheld thing that Tim was talking about, since our boys were small they 13 and 14, now, we bought a lot of washcloths from just face cloths, whatever you call them, wherever you are, we have them at every meal still to this day, we have about 2030 now in a drawer, and we wet them and there, there are napkins. And so we reduce Yeah, it's again, just reducing waste wherever you can. And but paper towels if you do need to use them. If they don't have any oil on them, you can put them into your compost to toilet roll holders, any paper waste paper all go into the compost. So that's another good reason to compost as well. All right, so I've got my last one. Yeah, really. And it was mentioned earlier, and this is a really big one for me, we have to make fast fashion a thing of the past fast fashion. I mean, just the fashion industry, full stop has been growing more and more out of control for the last few decades. And throughout the supply chain, there is abuse of the workers and the environment. I don't know if you guys have been paying attention to the garment workers in Asia, in Cambodia, and, you know, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, they were basically dumped at the beginning of the pandemic, unpaid. You know, there's these shipping containers sitting on port still, you know, the big brands that didn't pay for those things. And women in those sort of industries, when they get dumped, they get forced into roles like sexual slavery, domestic abuse, because often the people that take care of the family, so it's, it's a brutal industry. And the fashion industry has never taken responsibility for the supply chain, which is something that's always infuriated me, but they pollute in poorer countries. So the only way that we can get them under control, and we all need to do it is we have to commit to buying less, we have to buy higher quality, we have to wear our clothes for longer. And we should be looking at natural fabrics like cotton. However, if you're going to wear cotton, you need to understand that it's a it takes a lot of warm water to produce cotton. So you've got to wear it at least 150 times before you can cancel out the emissions of its production, we need to be looking at natural fabrics right across the board. Because synthetic fabrics are full of microplastics. And every time we wash them, it goes into the waterways. Babies are being born with plastic in their bodies. Today, we're all ingesting a credit cards worth of plastic, and our washing and our fashion habits are a big part of that. So the other thing is the majority of fast fashion ends up in landfills. There's a an article in Africa just recently, just mountains and mountains of our wasted clothes that we might have worn once and then we throw it out because it's not fashionable anymore. You know, I was born in first of January 1970. The way we think about clothes has changed so much. And it's the fast fashion, fast furnitures the other side, IKEA was definitely part of that. But we have to change the narrative on fashion and access. And we should be saying to famous people, you know that the idea that you can wear a gown twice, you know, and people are still having conversations about It's ridiculous. So let's start boycotting the fashion companies that are getting the message. They don't have a fully sustainable business model. They don't take care of the humans in their supply chain. They don't take care of the environment in their supply chain. But all of us need to start thinking differently about fashion and how we dress and make them
last longer, and stop being slaves to this, because it's a, it's just slaves to marketing and it's, it's destroying the environment, and it's something we can all do. So that's my final one. That's so true. It's about managing our waste and reducing our consumption.
Very hard to tackle that. But I think with time and with people realizing it, and also with the fact that people have less money right now, with the crisis, it's maybe exactly the time to look at it, and only buy what you really need and repair. Yes, take care of things, get your shoes fixed, buy better quality, make it last longer. You know, people are by going out buying these cotton tote bags for their food shopping, and they lost bet 10 times if that. And then they just throw them out. No, don't throw them out, fix them, you got to use them 150 times how can you make sure it can last that long? Buy good quality one, you know, just always been conscious. And I think that's a theme all the way through? Isn't it today, just being conscious of what we consume paying attention to what we do, right? Yes, the final thing there would be also help your local council be champions of this too, because they probably want to, I mean, just yesterday, we went through the storeroom. And there was a big box full of big carry bags, you know, like just bags that we collected from exhibitions or whatever was just bags that you could take to the shops and fill up and bring back. And far too many, I don't want them sitting in the storeroom. So we chose the ones that we want to keep. And the rest of them we took down to our bus stop. And there's at the bus stop, there's a wall with all these hooks, where you can put excess umbrellas, excess bags, excess things that other people can just take, if they needed a bag or umbrella or something like that. And it's great, that's fantastic. Especially when it's raining, it's great. But it's great. If that, that, you know the thing then moves and other people get to use it, it may as well be being used. And if it's biodegradable, it's gonna end up being flakes. So it may as well get it out there and getting somebody using it. That's perfect, right? You go to the bus stop, you've forgotten, you forgotten your shopping bags, and it's raining. You know, just take their shopping bags. That's brilliant. I love that, you know, when when this pandemic is over, I'm going to get all of our fabric face masks, and I'm going to find a local artist, he's going to sew them together and create a piece of artwork. A quilt. Yeah, exactly. Right. You know, but like everything you know, but like just throwing it out. Like a lot of people just throw stuff out got too many of those bags, I'm gonna throw them out. And when you throw that out, it's gonna end up in landfill somewhere. So what can you do with everything that you've got? You know, if we can all think about that and work that out. So we've got less waste. Anyway, guys, I hope you've enjoyed what we've been talking about today.
We're going to create some content out of this. guy's going to do another one. I've got more that we didn't talk. Yeah.
Let's, let's the next one be really, really simple, practical things that people can do. You know, I've got one where I talk about vinegar, how you can use vinegar. That's one of my tips, right? And this is No wonder I want you to talk about your home garden as well, because I think that's a really good one. So let's do that. Let's do that next time. And then the next one, let's do business, I've got plenty more for that I kind of started with this was for people read it. This is for people individually that they can do with their family at home in their communities. So it's a good start. But yeah, I just wanted to say, for possibly for the end of the podcast, or the ebook, is Here's your challenge. Your challenges, we've presented a whole bunch of ideas, they're written down an E book, you can just click the link and grab the copy of the ebook. No, yeah. You have to wait for the ebook. Yeah, no, but I'm just saying that, okay, if there's an E book, if there's a link, you can click it. If there isn't, you don't click it, whatever it is. But anyway, if there's been some ideas that have sparked some ideas for you, then choose one or two or three of those to implement this week, implement them, it's no good having great ideas, not doing anything with it. So your challenge is to implement one idea. And once you've implemented that idea, and it started to it's in play, then implement the next one. But you got to start with one. So your challenges, choose one and implement it. Or if you're playing this with your team, or you're playing this with your family, is to have them choose their favorite, which one is their favorite to implement? And can we implement that and maybe if it's a team meeting, come back in a week's time and see what where we progress with their implementation, because if we don't check back in, then nothing will be done. So it's like present on what you've implemented present on anything that you've, you know, somebody's gone off and spoken to facility saying, Can we change this behavior, or whatever it is, and then and if it's with your family, it's like saying, okay, so you know, next Friday night, let's, let's at dinner, let's just update everybody and what you've done and and everybody
Now, here to help. The idea is make it fun gamified. But what have you need to do, but take some action? Because only with action will the change happen? Otherwise, we'll be far more intelligent people doing the same old thing all saying this social media context, we could do a bit of low teen so we run this session, we could list all the ideas as like, what's your favorite? What are you going to do next week? And yeah, I think that could apply quite nicely, very nicely. People add to it, you know, so there's, there's so much information out there and ideas, and if people can be a part of it, so it becomes like an ongoing, blog or or page where people can add to it. And we can share ideas, it can be great to make your idea and become, you know, get invited to the show. That's it. Or we could do letters to the editor sort of thing. So we could read out the ideas. And the other thing is for organizations that are selling things like BDS or IKEA, I mean for IKEA, we might have to edit out the bit, but how they were evil in the past? I don't know. No, we don't. It's public record. But But if it But no, I'm always talking about them sponsoring some element of it, or at least getting involved to say, you know, squirty, bomb machine, people will come and install everything else. And they're going to give 10% of it to the classroom for hope, or some cleanup campaign or something like that. And you know, we're creating with stacking good.
Whatever happens is great, but I guess my clarion call my call to action for everybody was take some action. Yeah. Otherwise, you've wasted your time and hours and everybody else's, just do something make make the change that's going to make the world even better, because you're in it. And we can all do it. Everyone can do it and over, I can contribute. Alright, Michelle, did you want to say something before I wrap up, I just want to say you know, a lot of people think it's a big situation, a big thing that we cannot manage, just like the everyday person cannot make an impact. But everything we do is making an impact even me using one less straw is making an impact. So everyone must value what they are doing and value that it is important that all comes together like a big puzzle, many, many pieces make the full picture. You speak very visually telling a lie. All right, so thank you guys so much for joining us, I hope everyone's really benefited got something from this, I think the the overarching message is really starting to be much more aware of our consumption habits, especially those of us who were brought up in the wealthier countries, which are making the biggest contribution to the prices, let's do what we can, you know, this is this is the future I want my children to know, a clean ocean and clean beaches. And I want to say all children, I will to flourish in the future. So it's, we can all come together and do this. And that's what this is all about. So thank you for listening. And we will we will reconvene in a couple of weeks. I think maybe that suits everybody. All right. Yeah. Leave your comments. Leave your comments, leave your comments. Unless you are a troll. If you are a troll, you can leave your comments. Be a be a troll for good. Yeah, and go and troll the organizations to help them change. Exactly, exactly. Sorry, I can jump in just speaking about the children. People always say the next the next generation will do it, the next generation will make changes. I think that's really unfair, isn't it? Yeah. And that we haven't got time for the kids to grow up. We got to we got to do it now.
And continue it. Yeah, cuz, Michelle, if, if that's true two generations ago, who said we are going to do it? We're right. If we do it, I mean, I I fully support the, you know, all these recommended actions. And I think we all need to do our part. But let's not stop challenging the system. You know, let's realize a lot of these choices, we don't really have always the choice or it's not the convenient choice or the economic choice. We need to change the system as well. So how we get to discuss that, as well. I think that'll be the business one, definitely how we can contribute to the systemic change, but we need it as well. Yeah, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Suzanne, I'm looking forward to hearing him as well on, on how an organization can change their behavior to seem like they're doing a great job here in Singapore, but still be abusing everything in other countries that aren't as aware, for example, so I'd love to hear your thoughts looking forward to it. Alright, say guys, when you get going? We can certainly
comment.
Thank you so much for listening. If you made it this far. I think if we look at the overarching message, it's about all of us, especially those of us in wealthy countries, reducing our consumption and reducing our waste and being more mindful with what we do with our waste. Thank you so much to Susanna, Tim and Michelle are really appreciate you guys joining and their contact information will be in the show notes. We're going to publish this as a blog soon with all of the different areas that we
disgust and we're planning to come to back together in about two weeks to cover basic things we can all do in our lives and in our homes. And then the next stage we'll be talking about it from a business perspective. Leave a comment with your ideas. If you want to join us, you're welcome to do a quick shout out to Priscilla Joseph who's taken on the role of editing all the items of the hours. I really appreciate it. You're doing a great job and Gary Kraus at Legion music, Paquette who's done all of the original soundtracks for the podcast and I love them and if you're interested in where I share information, I've got two websites Andrea edwards.com and uncommon dash courage.com. see you for the next one. Cheers.