Sustainability Spotlight: Starting at home
Sweet Farm is the first non-profit sanctuary in the world to address the global climate impacts of factory farming across animals, the plants, and the planet. Our food web is incredibly complicated and it’s impossible to move forward without first understanding how these pieces are connected. By linking climate education, regenerative agriculture, farm-animal rescue, and the technology that is sustainably disrupting food and agriculture production — Sweet Farm is the world's first Climate Sanctuary. Our monthly sustainability newsletter will share easy ways that you can contribute to our mission to create a compassionate and sustainable world.
Sustainability Starts At Home
Grocery bags, storage containers, food packaging, toothbrushes, shampoo bottles … the list of things in our homes made with plastic is endless. Every year, 400 million tons of plastic are produced, creating more than 200 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions and filling our landfills and oceans with waste. Worse still, most plastics are not recycled and can take 20 to 500 years to decompose.
At Sweet Farm we're kicking off January with a look at our kitchens and ways we can reduce waste. With a goal of making change at a large scale, we want to make sustainable change easy, affordable and within reach. Small changes in routine can have major impacts!
Here's a fact: in the U.S. we currently use more than 13 billion pounds of paper towels each year and that number is growing steadily. This means that every day more than 3,000 tons of paper towels are wasted in the U.S. alone. Globally, discarded paper towels result in 254 million tons of trash every year. Recently, we've fallen in love with Swedish Dish Cloths as a replacement for papertowels. A Swedish Dish Cloth can replace both papertowels and sponges and it absorbs up to 20x it's weight! They last 6 - 9 months and be composted when you're done with them. Did we mention they come in cute colors and patterns?
Another area where it’s easy to reduce your impact is at the kitchen sink. Washing dishes not only creates plastic trash from all the soap bottles you use, but things like water usage, microplastics in your sponge and even the ingredients in your dish soap can affect the environment. An easy swap is to a plastic-free Vegan Dish Block paired with a sustainable Bamboo Brush.
We completely understand it will take to transition toward a zero waste lifestyle, but did you know that by some estimates, the average American household uses 100 trash bags a year. That's upward of 12 billion trash bags used annually across the country. Luckily compostable, plant based trash bags are available and make for a simple switch that can greatly reduce your impact.
Highlighting Marilla’s: Fill Jars, Not Landfills
Whether you're local to the Finger Lakes and Rochester, New York regions or are one of our supporters located around the world we encourage you to check out Marilla's Mindful Supplies. We love her climate friendly, easy to access home staples that make our planet a better place. And don't forget to make a donation to Sweet Farm to support our climate positive nonprofit work.