Use 10 Percent Less

All things must change when the consumer changes

Archives for September 2019

Do less to save the planet

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This title might sound like it’s contradictory to the theme of this blog, but it’s actually a fun play on words. I have to thank Tom Hodgkinson for the title. It’s all about the fact that just “doing less” will help save the planet. We do so many things that require more and more energy, so indeed there is considerable merit in the concept of aiming to do less to save the planet.

I first cam in contact with Tom Hodgkinson several years ago when I read his book “How to be idle” (see www.lifeintherightdirection.com/how-to-be-idle). It’s a good book and really opened my mind to the consideration that we don’t have to be doing things all the time and that there can be merit in simple idleness. That idea goes against everything we’re taught since we were about 6 or 7 years old and everything we see in the media, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It just might be that many things we’ve been taught and see in the media are wrong.

Idler Magazine

For the past few months I’ve been a subscriber to Idler Magazine (part of Idler Ltd that Tom Hodgkinson has setup). This is a fun publication that I enjoy reading. It’s published every two months and reminds me to keep thinking about the value of idleness and to stop glorifying being busy and doing things non-stop.

Along with the magazine, I get regular emails from Tom Hodgkinson and a few weeks ago I received one called “Do less to save the planet”. I read this email and I thought it was great. I would have loved to reproduce his whole email here are it fits so well with the theme of “Use 10 Percent Less”, however Tom will only allow me to reproduce 100 words maximum, so I’ll work with that. [Read more…] about Do less to save the planet

Cashew Nuts – signs we need to change

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This short news video from France 24 shows us what’s behind the cashew nuts we casually munch on in our comfortable homes. It immediately made me think that we need to reduce our overall consumption and use less. We consume things that appear cheap, and hence not so important, even though they can have severe effects on people we don’t normally see.

Unfortunately, I can only find this video on a Facebook site, so I can’t link it properly into this page. To watch the video, follow this link (or look at the static screenshots below);

While I was watching it, I saved a number of screen shots which I’ve posted below in the order of the video, so you can get the gist of the video from these. India is the largest source of cashew nuts in the world, mainly supplying European and US demand. Removing the shells from cashew nuts is very difficult and there are acids inside the shell that badly affect the hands of the people doing it. They can’t use gloves because that slows them down. It’s very sad to see people having to work like this.

The video really emphasises to me how we can simply buy a bag of cashew nuts, take them home and enjoy them, without thinking for a moment what had to happen for us to enjoy this luxury. At the exact other end of the chain there are women essentially forced into intolerable conditions to remove the cashew nuts from the shells. They get paid very little per day (equivalent of 2-5 euros) but they say they have no choice as there’s no other work.

All this reminds me that having something cheap in our supermarkets is rarely, actually a good thing. Somewhere along the line, someone is being abused to make it cheap. See these other related articles;

What should we do now?

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