My beginning with Sustainable Living

I recently got invited by a friend of mine's room mate to attend an Origami Workshop at Studio Pepperfry at Hyderabad (June 02nd 2018) and I was pumped. On arriving I realized that it was not just going to leave me trained on a few neat tricks on paper folding  but a lot more.

We had conversations with Roopika, the artist of the gorgeous pieces in the below images  :

- about how small choices we make everyday impact the earth and could be perhaps replace use-and-throw articles (like straws, plastic PET bottles etc.) with more sustainable alternatives (bamboo straws, glass straws, no straws, metal water bottles, glass water bottles etc.) . This was of course in honor of World Environment which was right around the corner at the time (June 05th 2018).

We discussed about the negative impact our small disposables can have to environment - especially since plastic takes hundreds of years to degrade, but are used sometimes for minutes to a few hours/days at maximum potential.

She asked us to check out a ted talk by Lauren Singer - some one who had adopted a 'Zero Waste Lifestyle' and I did check it out. Now I know that sounds impossible (and it kind of is in our current world any way). It is kind of a misnomer - but how cool is it that there are people around the world committed to producing as little waste as they possibly can?

I was shook.

Here's the Ted Talk I watched that night:

Here are some of the stuff I learnt to make there :

Lauren Singer, in the video, spoke about living a Zero Waste Lifestyle and my friend, her room mate and I were drawn into conversations that night about: wait, how does she wash her hair with zero waste? Have a zero waste period cycle? Shop? Eat?

I found all that information and more in her blog.

Apparently there were sustainable alternatives to nearly everything I use and throw. I was double shook.

However, I had to quickly understand as I started taking tiny (minuscule, microscopic ) steps towards a more sustainable life style - that living 'zero waste' doesn't have to scare me off because it sounds like an impossible standard.

As I took my own containers to shops and received the product in plastic covers inside of my own container I realized that I need to take a deep breath and try again tomorrow to ask the shopkeeper to not use plastic at all and show myself grace. When they do put the the product directly into the container I give them I rejoice.

I wince as I collect my tender coconut with a straw in it and start drinking because I forgot to ask not to give me one. I rejoice when I find sustainable alternatives to products I commonly use and throw heavily.

I've realized that I am slowly transitioning into this phase, of living a more sustainable lifestyle and I want to share any insights I gain about how I am substituting daily use-and-throw products with more sustainable products. So this will be extended into a series of experiments and my verdict on products (for me), maybe even some D.I.Y. that are sustainable alternatives that I try out & resources that I've stumbled upon on the topic (E.g. Bea Johnson's Ted talks)

I invite you to join me in on this journey.

Thanks for reading!

-Jeffy