Greenpeace are spotlighting the destructive fishing practices in the Pacific tuna fishery. You can take action by adding your support here. Here is the video from that site.
Peter Bruce
Category Archives: Family and home
Steps: certified coffee
There is a major disconnect between those of us who enjoy $4.00 cups of coffee and the farmers, often living impoverished lives, who produce the beans. Thankfully, there are actions we can take to bridge the gap.
Coffee is grown in tropical climates often by subsistence farmers. Market systems, including endemic corruption, somehow conspire to ensure only minimal returns go to coffee growers. You can imagine that poorly resourced farms generate an unsafe working environment, including exposure to agrichemicals.
Certified coffee
Certification schemes for coffee production include Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, Organic certifications and Trade Aid Coffee. These improve the lot of growers, their families and communities by ensuring better prices for coffee beans, investment in local facilities and range of other benefits. Farmers participating in certification schemes experience benefits that can generate a virtuous spiral of improvements. For example, the provision of schools makes education available, possibly for the first time in some families. This video outlines some of the benefits.
Certified coffee has been with us for less than 2 decades. According to the Coffee and Conservation website, in 2010 it accounted for 8% of the global coffee market. When coffee is treated as a commodity, market forces will seek to reduce costs to maximise returns at the bottom end of the market, but cheap coffee typically translates to poor returns to growers. Coffee drinkers can make a difference by selecting a certified coffee. Sometimes certified coffee is more expensive, and it will get more expensive as demand increases. But that is good news as more and more producers will want to take advantage of the benefits of certification. For many tropical rural economies, certification of agricultural products, including coffee, could be the start of beneficial social transformations.
Environmental considerations
Certified organic coffee ensures coffee is grown more sustainably. Toxic agrichemicals are not used, and the trees are more likely to be grown in shade, in forest understory. Biodiversity is enhanced. This video contrasts shade and sun coffee.
Another small step is the packaging you choose. Aluminium foil packaging may be more likely to be recycled than aluminium plastic laminates.
If you can afford to buy a $3 or $4 cup of coffee, you can afford to help out growers by growing certified coffee. Where is good certified coffee sold and served in your community?
Steps – use soap in the shower
Not that long ago, we used to wash ourselves in the shower with soap. But now liquid body washes dominate the supermarket shelves. I use soap from Eco-store. The lemongrass bar smells great. Fortunately the ingredients in the body washes I checked out on the Skin Deep Cosmetics database commonly rated in the low risk range of 0 to 3 (on a 0 to 10 scale).
However the Ecostore package claims that the product has, among other things, no sodium lauryl sulphate. The natural health information website claims that sodium lauryl sulphate damages the skin and is a causal factor in health problems. As a comnsumer, it is hard to get to the truth about these products, but my instincts tell me to go with products are more natural – so its back to bars of soap,
Another major advantage of soap is that the packaging is cardboard, whereas the bodywashes come in solid plastic packaging.
Ecostore products are available in New Zealand, Australia, the USA and Hong Kong. Do you know of good alternatives for other countries?
Steps – use sunlight soap
This is the first of many posts about steps to sustainability that you can take. Remember small steps + unified action = big results.
Kitchen use
Sunlight soap has many uses, in the kitchen, laundry and for personal use. The major gains using this product are in the packaging and the ingredients. Sunlight soap is packaged in cardboard. If you use it for dishwashing, it will probably replace a liquid detergent in a plastic container. The Skin Deep cosmetic safety database ranks all but one of sunlight soap’s ingredients as 0 to 2 on their hazard score (the hazard score scale is from 0 – no hazard to 10 – high). The only ingredient to score 3 was the yellow colouring. By contrast some ingredients in liquid detergent will probably score 10.
I remember my mum using a soap cage to get sunlight soap to lather up. A soap cage has an advantage of using up small scraps of soap (why not use all of the product you buy). I can’t find a source of these soap cages anywhere – if you can help please let me know. Sunlight soap doesn’t lather up very well in hard water.
Laundry and personal use
I also recall my mum using sunlight soap to clean dirt on clothes. Sunlight soap can also be used to shampoo hair.
A product with a story
Sunlight soap is a sustainable product in another way – it has been around since 1884. William Lever produced the soap in cut bars, wrapped and branded it, and sold it in his dad’s grocery shop in Port Sunlight, England. By 1888 they were producing 450 tons a week, spawning the company Level Brothers (later Unilever). According to Wikipedia, Lever Brothers were socially responsible. “Lever Brothers was one of several British companies that took an interest in the welfare of its employees. The model village of Port Sunlight was developed between 1888 and 1914 adjoining the soap factory to accommodate the company’s staff in good quality housing, with high architectural standards and many community facilities”.
Steps to Sustainability 