I may preach a lot about sustainability, but I am no angel. I would count myself as someone who is quite sustainably conscious. I’m not particularly proud of this list, but it’s one that I thought I’d share regardless.

1. I fly on planes. For work, for vacation, etc. I feel so guilty whenever I step foot on one. I feel like I should be going on a plane to preach sustainability or to help plant trees or at least buy some carbon offsets. Do I still get on planes? Yep.
2. I am so lazy that I’d prefer a direct car ride over transit or riding a bicycle. I’m pretty sure my carbon foot print is huge.
3. I stay up really irregular hours and use up tons of electricity (case and point: look at the time that this blog was posted.)
4. I always forget my water bottle/thermos at home and end up buying some kind of drink with a disposable cup
5. I take the water we have here in Vancouver for granted.
6. Composting is a great idea, but sometimes a compost is too far away or I’m too lazy to wait to compost whatever I have that’s compostable
7. I am the worst person when it comes to buying cosmetics and never using them or only using parts of the product and then shove it in a drawer.
8. I don’t like wasting food, but I find I sometimes I am confronted with a lot of food. I think it’s super important to be aware of how much I can eat. However, I can’t control a lot of the portion sizes in restaurants.
9. I realize that red meat isn’t the greatest for the environment. This is especially true with how it’s produced and how much that production process goes into global warming, but it’s just so easy to prepare and is so much cheaper as well though! I consider going vegetarian all the time. I have been a vegetarian for about two days in a row before caving in to eating meat again though. It’s a love hate relationship.
10. I love the newer model of things I have. I will find an excuse to upgrade my laptop or to get a new jacket or anything that feeds into materialism.

I suppose that it’s all about finding the right balance between things I do, finding the passion to do these things properly and taking the time to educate myself. It took a lot to confess this, so please don’t rip me apart too much. I’m working on it though!

There’s a running joke reference in class after I made a reference to a shampoo bar from Lush that I’m the “Lush” girl in class. Yes. I love Lush. I think they’re an amazing example of a sustainable company that walks and talks it in their values.

I had the opportunity to see Brandi Halls talk at the 2013 Chasing Sustainability Conference. She is the PR manager of Lush and also aired in an episode of undercover boss for Lush. This is when I first discovered them – I had always seen the stores around, but the smell was always so intense when passing by that I thought I would suffocate if I ever walked into the store. (It’s actually not that bad!)

I’m just going to do a quick review of some of their products with a sustainability lens:

1.      Shampoo Bars

a.      Pro: It’s really easy to use and it works. You just have to lather it up and grab the bubbles as your shampoo.

b.      Pro: It’s one bar that’s worth 3 bottles of shampoo = cost savings + saving bottles from going to landfills

c.      Pro: Smells really good (and a lot of variety of smells you can pick from)

d.      Con: Might take more water than usual to lather up the shampoo bar

2.      Toothy Tabs

a.      Pro: Packaging is recycled paper mini boxes with little toothpaste tabs inside. Saves the toothpaste container from being a plastic tube or container that could result in difficulty of getting toothpaste when there’s only a little bit left. More efficient usage of product and less waste going to the landfills

b.      Con: some of the flavors still need a bit of work

c.      Con: behaviour change on using a tablet instead of toothpaste

3.     Face Scrubs

a. Pro: If you bring in 5 of the scrub bottles you can get one free

b. Con: Encourages more consumption with the pro mentioned above

c. Pro: Made with super fresh ingredients and works really well

d. Con: Since the ingredients are so fresh, the scrub has to be refrigerated an only lasts for about two weeks

It’s just interesting to see the kind of company that talks about sustainability that sells products en mass. More of a good thing can’t be bad, right?