Becoming More Eco-Friendly

Becoming More Eco-Friendly: Your Time to Shine

Sustainability, what is it?

Sustainability. This word has been thrown around a lot in the last two years, and we are globally trying to be more sustainable whether that be eating less meat and dairy or lowering CO2 emissions by walking to work instead of taking the car. Sustainability is the act of doing eco-friendly activities and many things are turning more eco-friendly; we are leaning towards reusable shopping bags, biodegradable bin bags and reusable straws for instance.

In India they've taken it a few steps further than reusable bags, as a small group have put together edible cutlery to cut down the amounts of plastic waste. They've done this by making the cutlery out of Wheat, Rice and Jowar to allow people to eat it after dining. According to The Guardian even if the cutlery is disposed of it decomposes within a few days, this is a huge difference when comparing it to how long it takes for plastic to decompose which is normally up to 450 years for full biodegrade. They've taken sustainability and really ran with it!

How do I become more eco-friendly?

There are so many things you can do as an individual to reduce the carbon footprint and become more eco-friendly, you don't even have to do anything major as every little change helps such as:

• Cutting down on the amount of food waste.
• Reducing your meat and dairy consumption.
• Parting ways with plastic.
• Buy produce locally instead of a supermarket, otherwise known as the food mile cut.
• Use eco-friendly cleaning products.

All the above are only a small part of what we can all do to become more eco-friendly, there are many more changes that can be made...

How is the reduction of meat and dairy consumption Eco-friendly?

The food production of livestock such as pigs, cows and chickens has been shown to cause as much greenhouse emissions as cars, planes and trains put together. By reducing the demand for meat and dairy products, we will endeavour to reduce our contribution towards the greenhouse gases that are harming the environment. In the same way, more consumers than ever are becoming vegan. In Britain, there are around 600,000 people who lead a vegan lifestyle according to research from 2018. This has already made a difference and even if people don't give up meat and dairy completely, by reducing intake it can be healthier for the environment and for an individuals health.

Turning your recycling into UPCYCLING.

Being Eco-friendly doesn't always have to mean buying things that are biodegradable. Plastic, for example, can be upcycled into almost anything & reused; let your creative side come out and try to upcycle your plastic bottles / bags when you've finished with them. An extreme example of this comes from one of our exclusive suppliers Chaud Devant. They partnered up with a company called Waste2Work and created a Chef wear collection made out of melted down plastic bottles. Find the article here to find out the process they went through.

Our sister company 'Bunzl Lockhart' wrote a blog regarding a similar issue and also made consumers aware of our Eco-friendly rice husk reusable cups, you can click the link and read this here.

What is your next step to become more eco-friendly?

We'd love to hear your thoughts via our social media channels @chefsdotnet on Twitter and Instagram and on Facebook.