Use 10 Percent Less

All things must change when the consumer changes

Archives for July 2018

Canvas Bags

by Leave a Comment

‘Canvas Bags’ – a fun song and video from Tim Minchin. This was posted back in 2011 but it’s still just as relevant today.

This song reminds us that we, the consumers, have the ability to change everything. All we have to do is refuse to use conventional plastics and the world will change. It will have to. One way for us to do this is to simply stop using plastic for carry bags, and refusing it when anyone in a shop offers us a plastic shopping bag.

I love the theatre and irreverence that Tim Minchin brings to this topic through this song. It simultaneously bears an important message and is a lot of fun.

Canvas Bags – Full Transcript

Take your canvas bags
When you go
To the supermarket
Why use plastic ones when you know
You know the world can’t take it

Take your canvas bags
When you go
To the supermarket market market yeah yeah
Don’t you use those plastic ones
No, no, no
Don’t you know that you’ll feel better for it

Take your canvas bags
Take your canvas bags
Take your canvas bags
To the supermarket

[Read more…] about Canvas Bags

The Natural World is Disappearing

by 1 Comment

I saw this article in the news recently and it caused me to pause and take stock. The article was in The Guardian and it was called “Our natural world is disappearing before our eyes. We have to save it.” by George Monbiot. Some of the comments in the article that had the most impact on me were;

  • natural world is disappearingThe swift decline of the swift (down 25% in five years)
  • I have lived long enough to witness the vanishing of wild mammals, butterflies, mayflies, songbirds and fish that I once feared my grandchildren would not experience: it has all happened faster than even the pessimists predicted.
  • The cause of this acceleration is no mystery. The United Nations reports that our use of natural resources has tripled in 40 years.
  • The great expansion of mining, logging, meat production and industrial fishing is cleansing the planet of its wild places and natural wonders.
  • What economists proclaim as progress, ecologists recognise as ruin.
  • the rush to carve up the last intact forests; the vanishing of coral reefs, glaciers and sea ice; the shrinkage of lakes, the drainage of wetlands. The living world is dying of consumption.
  • We have a fatal weakness: a failure to perceive incremental change.
  • Watching the cutters being driven at great speed across the field, he realised that any remaining wildlife would be shredded… he went to investigate, he found her fawn, its legs amputated.
  • The merger between Bayer and Monsanto brings together the manufacturer of the world’s most lethal pesticides with the manufacturer of the world’s most lethal herbicides.
  • We forget even our own histories.

[Read more…] about The Natural World is Disappearing