Recycling: The Great Green Illusion?

Right off the bat, let’s get one thing straight. Recycling is not the sustainability saviour we were promised. For decades, we have been told a lovely narrative: that recycling is the key to sustainability. We’ve been encouraged to sort our waste, rinse out our plastics, and drop our empty cartons into the right bin, believing that we’re playing our part in saving the planet. Hate to be the one to break it to you, but this whole system is flawed. “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” was always meant to be a hierarchy, yet somehow, we’ve been conditioned to skip the first two and jump straight to “Recycle” like it’s a get-out-of-guilt-free card. Who’s to blame? Let’s take a quick history lesson….

 What if we told you that this narrative was designed to shift responsibility away from the real culprits—corporations and manufacturers—and onto us, the consumers? What if, instead of being the solution, recycling is actually a very cleverly marketed disguise for the...

How many plastic bottles of water or soft drinks do you purchase every month? Or every week or every year?

There is a lot of talk about reducing plastic as it continues to end up in our oceans and rivers, but there isn’t too much talk about the possible harmful effects that plastic might have on our own health! 

We are not here to scare anyone or tread the fine line of coming across as a “conspiracy theorist". However many scientists have investigated plastic and the harmful chemicals it can release in liquids and food, so we want to take a look at the facts available to us.

A report from https://www.consumerreports.org/  states that researchers analysed 34 everyday plastic products made out of eight different types of plastic to see how common toxicity might be. 74% of the products they tested were toxic in some way or another.

Is it fair to presume that the average consumer such as ourselves presumes that if plastic is being used to package our food and drink, that it must be s...

It is a place many of us love to be on a sunny day, or on our holidays – by the sea.  Looking out on that beautiful, vast horizon I normally find my problems become minute, but how often does it enter our minds that it is being overwhelmed with plastic pollution?  I fear this problem is very much “out of sight, out of mind”. 

It is estimated that 10 million tonnes of litter enter the world’s oceans each year.  Plastic makes up 80% of this “marine litter” (IUCN, 2018). Think about that figure for a moment, 10 million tonnes of waste equates to more than 1 garbage truck load of rubbish, entering the ocean every minute. That is staggering.

Beach clean ups are great initiatives, bringing communities together, creating awareness and keeping local coastal areas clean. But it is not enough. they are not a solution to this problem, it is like putting a band aid on to a broken leg.

“It is estimated that 70% of marine litter is on the seabed, 15% is floating in the water column and 15% is wha...

At the end of May, our team organised an online event called ‘Generation Tomorrow’ for students in Co. Wicklow and in Nigeria.

The students presented their research and findings on two topics - food waste and water.

Of course we expected differences and this is what made it such a valuable and insightful project. Students in Ireland highlighted the growing concern of water scarcity as well as fantastic tips to help you conserve it. When water is mentioned in environmental terms, conservation springs to mind immediately. 

Some students from Nigeria however took a different angle that we hadn’t thought of before, but that is simple and true - that water is an absolute necessity to the human body.

Hydration is vital to our survival. Our brain alone comprises 60% of water and when we are without it, our concentration and mood levels plummet. Our stress and anxiety levels increase and it can contribute to debilitating “brain fog”.

According to the Journal, every minute there are 1 mill...

Recently, I spent some time in my beloved Spain, in the city of Bilbao in particular. During my stay I was delighted to see the hotel I had booked did not offer single use toiletries, Yipee! I was thrilled.

I know for most people this might be a silly thing to get excited about, but when you work in the world of Environmentalism, and you see the figures I see in a weekly basis, regarding discarded mini toiletries, this is a big thing.

Single use plastics in hotels are a much bigger issue than most people think. To a customer, opening a mini bottle of shampoo, or an individually wrapped ketchup sachet, or a mini jam at their breakfast seems like a very small thing. It is just one item, isn’t it? What harm can it do?

An issue much bigger than we think

According to STR Global (American based company that tracks global data), there are nearly 200,000 hotels in the world. This number does not include guest houses, B&B’s or hostels so the real number is much larger. Let’s say every hot...

Last week I had a radio interview with NearFM about the #SaucyChallenge, and one of the questions Sabrina asked me was "When did all these single packaging starter?" and that got me thinking...

Shopping Frustrations

I don’t know about you but I am quite often absolutely shocked about the way shops, supermarkets, etc package the stuff I buy. Here is what happens, I bring my own reusable bag to put my shopping into, when I buy some fresh fish, they place it in a plastic bag and give it to me, I go to the check out till and the attendant puts the fish (already inside a bag), into a brown paper bag, for me to place the fish that is inside a bag, now wrapped in a second bag into my shopping bag. What the hell? When did I start accepting plastic as the new normal?

And it is not only fish, the same happens when I buy firelighters, which come in a box, which also has a second plastic bag inside the box already. The level of separation from my firelighters to my skin is plastic wrapping arou...