Episode 40 - Halloween

The average American spent $86 on Halloween in 2019, amounting to a total of $8.8 billion. And Canadians spend more (per capita) on Halloween than Americans. Spending on Halloween is comprised of three major components: costumes ($3.2 billion), candy ($2.6 billion), and decorations ($2.7 billion).

One of the big concerns with Halloween is waste, especially plastic waste. In the UK, for example, an estimated 2,000 tonnes of plastic waste (the equivalent of 83 million bottles) are be generated from Halloween costumes each year.

Costumes

This year Halloween parties are not allowed in most places due to COVID-19, so we decided not to focus too much on costumes. Next year we’ll cover them more comprehensively.

Costumes and Cultural Appropriation

You shouldn’t dress up as a marginalized culture that isn’t your own. Doing so presents other cultures as exotic or as a costume. And it can also further harmful stereotypes. Need examples? Here is a list of ten Halloween costumes you shouldn’t wear.

When you’re looking for an inclusive Halloween costume, York University’s Centre for Human Rights, Equity and Inclusion suggests asking five questions:

1. Is my costume depicting and perpetuating a stereotype or stigma associated with a particular race, culture or religion? 

2. Does my costume include a replication of a garment that is a significant component of a particular religion or culture of which I do not identify? 

3. Is my costume depicting an historical time-period where that look/costume is now considered offensive or discriminatory?

4. Does my costume represent elements of a culture or cultural practice that is being commoditized for consumption?

5. Can I look in the mirror and confidently say that my costume choice would not be considered offensive to a particular race, ethnic origin, gender, or religion?

Ethical Costumes

Try to avoid buying a fast fashion costume, especially if you only plan to wear it once or twice. As we discussed in our clothing series, there are huge human rights and environmental problems with fast fashion.

Costume rentals can be a good option if you need a look for a one-off event. Renting a costume is a good way to get affordable short-term access to a show-stopping costume. There are costume rental services in most cities. But here are a few options for Canadians: Torontonians can try costumerentals.ca or Theatrix Costume House. Calgarians can try the rentals at Costume Shoppe or the Tickle Trunk. Vancouverites, check out the Costume Bank or WATTS Costumes. People in Ottawa can try Malabar. And for Edmontonians there is the Theatre Garage.

You can always try thrifting a costume! Most thrift shops bring in costumes around the Halloween season, so there are lots of options. Some thrift shops will also sell new costumes and props, so just be sure that you are buying used.

Borrowing can also be a good approach. If one of your friends is Halloween obsessed, they probably have costumes and props from previous years that they would be happy to lend.

In normal years costume swaps are another option, so check your local community organizations for these kinds of events.

Another option is to build a costume around items that you already own. I have a lot of grey in my wardrobe, so last year I went as a rhinoceros. I made rhino ears using felt and a headband I had, but if you are looking for something cooler you can also buy printable origami mask templates (see here). This year I’m going as Velma from Scooby Doo, mostly because I had all of the core components in my closet (more or less). 

If nothing in your closet speaks to you, another option is building a costume with new items that you will use in your daily life. For example, a friend needed a peacock costume for an event; she used the occasion to buy outrageous peacock print leggings that she still uses.

If you are making a costume, try to upcycle using items you already have. If you do need new materials, think about recyclability and try to avoid plastic where you can. Here’s an article with some good ideas for creating costumes through upcycling. Going as a bag of groceries is a particularly inspired idea, I think.

Why not go as the Mike Pence fly? All you need to do is wear black and don a pair of wings. This how-to article on making fairy wings offers some good strategies that you could easily adapt for fly wings. 

When thinking about costumes and sustainability, remember to think about makeup too! (For example, go for biodegradable glitter.)

Candy

If you took all the candy that’s sold during Halloween week and turned it into a giant ball, it’d be as large as six Titanics and weigh 300,000 tonnes.

There’s a long list of problems with Halloween candy:

Transportation costs to have ingredients and finished products shipped all over the world

Litter from non-recyclable and non-compostable plastic packaging. You could give out baked goods or homemade treats to your friends and family, but trick-or-treaters will usually throw those away, especially during COVID I imagine. So trying to go zero waste would likely result in food waste.
Another option is to use TerraCycle, you can order a snack wrappers zero waste box, fill it with candy wrappers, and send it back for recycling. Yes, they start at $86, but as Kristen suggested in our episode, you can go in as a community or school, if the price is out of reach!
Ultimately, if you’re looking for plastic free packaging, there are options that come in cardboard containers. Some municipalities won’t recycle these because they’re too small, but they can always be composted. Junior Mints, Mike and Ikes (which are vegan, if you don’t mind eating a resin scraped off a tree that’s the product of beetles, who aren’t necessarily harmed in the process. The dye has likely been tested on animals though), Nerds (vegan except for colours being tested on animals, a colour made from the scales of insects, and refined sugar is often filtered using bone char from the meat industry holy shit I had no idea?), Dots (vegan), Milk Duds, Smarties, and Raisins (Kristen’s least favourite).
Side note: aluminium foil is recyclable and I’m the worst for not knowing that. The bigger the aluminium ball, the more likely to be recycled.

Food Waste. Left with too much candy for one kid (or adult) to possibly eat? Treats for Troops might be an option in your area. Candy is given to soldiers and veterans.

Carbon footprint of milk production. We’ve discussed this before!

Deforestation tied to cocoa.

Deforestation tied to palm oil.

Forced labour. Most Halloween candy sales are for chocolate, and most chocolate sales in a year happen at Halloween. We’re probably going to do a whole episode on chocolate, so I won’t get into it too much here, but the gist is the cocoa industry is real bad for forced labour. As is the sugar industry (we did an episode on that). This is especially prevalent in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, where the majority of cocoa farms are now located. During the 2013-14 growing season, an estimated 2 million children were used for hazardous labour throughout Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire.

“In June of 2001 the US House of Representatives voted to consider a labeling system to assure consumers that slave labor was not used in the production of their chocolate. The US chocolate industry responded with an intense lobbying effort to ward off legislation that would require “slave free” labels on their products.” - Slave Free Chocolate

A lot of companies, including Nestle and Mondelez (Sour Patch Kids, Oreo, Ritz, Toblerone, Wheat Thins, Maynards, Cadbury, Chips Ahoy) have promised to become more sustainable or fully sustainable in relation to their cocoa, but so far no one actually has from what I found.

Unreal sells vegan and fair trade chocolate. Here’s a list of a few more options!

Want to opt out of candy altogether this year?

Trick or Treat for UNICEF!
Give out packages of seeds instead of candy. This could be fun for kids, that’s a craft with payoff.
Give out a can of sugary fair-trade drink.
Lots of blogs recommending pencils/erasers, but who wants to be that guy? (Kristen apparently loves this).

Final note: Kristen mentioned the red dye scandal Starbucks dealt with a few years ago, here’s more information for the curious.

Decorations

Halloween is the second biggest decorating holiday (after Christmas).

Decorations and Human Rights

There isn’t a lot out there on the labour conditions of Halloween decorations producers, but it seems likely that conditions aren’t very good.

In 2018, a woman in the US found an SOS message in a polystyrene graveyard kit that had been made in a Chinese labour camp for dissidents. It said: “If you occasionally buy this product, please kindly send this letter to the World Human Right Organization. Thousands people here who are under the persecution of the Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever.”

Tips for Ethical Halloween Decorations

In general, try to avoid single-use decorations. If you must, go for recyclable paper decorations. There are lots of good DIY paper decoration ideas out there. Check out these links for paper skeletons, cardboard tombstones, ghost garland made from shredded paper, and paper spiderweb garland. Not every option in this Country Living decoration guide is sustainable, but I really like the horror novel door idea!

You can also upcycle materials for decorations. Try this tutorial for turning tin cans into jack-o-lantern decorations. Or use empty jars to make this spooky apothecary décor. You can also repurpose egg cartons as bats. 

If you are able to store decorations for multi-year use, that is a great option! As with costumes, start with upcycling and second-hand. If you are buying new, try to find fair trade if you can. And look for items that are durable and can be reused for years.

If you have kids, reusing trick or treat baskets is a good way to reduce your environmental footprint. Or you can just do what my parents did and give your kid an old pillowcase.

Not everyone has the space to store decorations. If you are space-constrained but still want to decorate, you can do that sustainably by using natural objects like gourds, corn husks. Then simply eat or compost them at the end of the season.

Pumpkins

We need to talk specifically about pumpkins, because they are a huge component of Halloween decorations. 99% of pumpkins sold in the UK are used for making jack-o-lanterns.

Try to go for local pumpkins if you can.

Food waste is a huge contributor to climate change, so don’t just trash the pumpkin. At a minimum, remember to compost your pumpkin. You can also make the most of your pumpkin by using all parts of it.

Toast the seeds and use the innards to make pumpkin purée. Here is a guide on how to toast pumpkin seeds.

You can also make pumpkin purée from the flesh of the pumpkin. Here is a guide on how to make pumpkin purée. Once you have pumpkin purée you can use it in pumpkin pie, pumpkin spice lattés, pumpkin soup, pumpkin pizza, pumpkin pasta, and much more. I’m going to use my pumpkin purée to make this pumpkin black bean soup from Minimalist Baker.

Episode 35 - Eating Insects

Kristen is on vacation, so Kyla took the reigns on this look into the future of eating insects. This was a topic we had discussed when originally brainstorming for the show, and we’re excited to finally eat our cricket powder.

A lot of the information for this episode was taken from a 2013 paper by the FAO, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. It’s called Edible Insects: Future Prospects for Food and Feed Security. Before this report came out, there was very little conversation happening on the subject, so this kick-started the discussion.

History of Eating Insects

The practice of eating insects is called entomophagy, and we’ve been doing it since prehistoric times. Shoutout to the wiki article on entomophagy which is extremely well written. I recommend checking it out as a starting point for those who want to learn more after the episode.

Around 2 billion people eat insects around the world, mostly in Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and even a bit in Australia and New Zealand, although it’s less common from my experience. It’s more taboo in western culture, but it shouldn’t be! It’s slowly becoming more acceptable in western cultures to eat insects, and in Seattle toasted grasshoppers are a big hit at Mariners baseball games.

There are about 2000 arthropods globally that are known to be safe for human consumption. Arthropods are invertebrate animals with an exoskeleton, segmented body, and paired jointed appendages. The category includes insects, arachnids, myriapods (centipedes, millipedes etc), and crustaceans. So if you’re eating crab and lobster, you’re already partway there. Crickets are so similar to shellfish they put allergy warnings on cricket powder saying people with shellfish allergies may react to cricket as well.

It’s kind of funny that we eat lobster, which used to be fed to servants and prison inmates until rules were passed to prevent something considered so cruel. Perhaps we’ll soon be there with bugs!

So why don’t we eat them in the west? A New York Times article suggests that because Europe spent so much of it’s history covered in ice, it only has about 2% of the world’s edible insects and they don’t get nearly as big as they do in warmer climates, so they were never worth hunting. We associate them with things that are dirty or decaying or carrying disease. Also the bible says not to do it (Leviticus 11:41 ‘And every creeping thing that creeps on the earth shall be an abomination. It shall not be eaten.’) so that’s that. Early explorers saw people eating insects in different countries and viewed it as animal-like. As Europeans took over large parts of the world, they took the idea of not eating insects with them, so we can thank colonialism for setting us way back on this one. Missionaries were especially influential in Africa and changed the way people viewed eating insects.

To be fair, it’s not like we’re super weird for not eating insects. Out of 800,000 arthropods, only 2000 are edible. But that same article says we can expect rapid growth in demand in the west for insects in the next few years, which is promising because there’s lots of great reasons to eat bugs!

Surprise, we already eat bugs!

Each year we eat 2lbs of insects! What?? They wind up in food like peanut butter, spices, or canned fruit and veg. The US FDA allows certain quantities to pass into the food Americans buy. “For every ¼ cup of cornmeal, the FDA allows an average of one or more whole insects, two or more rodent hairs and 50 or more insect fragments, or one or more fragments of rodent dung.” - CNN

Not to mention honey. A teaspoon of honey represents the lifetime regurgitation of 50 bees. So we’re already consuming hidden insects and the byproducts of insects. Pass the cricket powder! 

What insects do people eat?

The most popular are beetles, caterpillars, bees, wasps, ants, grasshoppers, locusts, and crickets.

I saw scorpions on sticks in Beijing, and bought mealworm and cricket powder here in Canada. In Australia, on a tour I did in Darwin, ants are picked right off of trees and eaten by brave tourists. They taste citrusy and are high in vitamin C.

In Kushihara Japan there’s an annual wasp festival where wasp-hunters sell snacks like wasp mochi, chocolate wasps, and full wasp nests. It’s all considered a delicacy.

There are loads of insects to eat! Dragonflies, grubs, termites, the list goes on.

Why Eat Bugs?

Everyone who eats insects say they’re tasty. 2 billion people aren’t eating bugs because they DON’T taste good. Apparently stinkbugs taste like apples. But just as important, they’re sustainable alternatives to the meat industry.

From an article by Samuel Imathiu from the University of Agriculture and Technology, Nairobi, Kenya

“The current research evidence shows that edible insects can play a significant role in addressing food and nutrition insecurities and this should be encouraged. Scientific evidence shows that edible insects’ nutritional quality is equivalent and sometimes exceeds that of animal-based foods. This and the fact that edible insects have a faster growth rate, high food conversion efficiency and requires less resources to rear compared to livestock should make them a more attractive quality food source especially to the rural poor in the developing countries.”

Environmental Benefits

We’ve talked a lot already in previous episodes about how animal agriculture is a big culprit in climate change, but as a refresher, livestock account for 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and use about 70% of the world’s agricultural land. And production is expected to ramp up as global demand continues to increase. As countries become wealthier, and more urbanized, they’re meat consumption grows. So, fighting climate change means overhauling our current food system. Eating insects can help in a few ways.

1) Insects can be fed on food industry by-products, which helps reduce waste and environmental contamination. This would be more for the insects being raised as feed for other animals. For people, we want to feed bugs food grade food. Or if the waste they’re eating is food waste like apple cores and melon rinds, stuff like that, then it would probably be alright for us. But this needs more study, and most of the farms I looked into feed them a grain meal. Here is a little more information than we went into on the episode.

2) Less food waste, since the whole cricket is being used. In addition, Entomo Farms (where I got my cricket powder) says their crickets’ manure and sheddings, called frass, are sold to farmers and gardeners as high quality fertilizer.

3) Insects emit fewer greenhouse gases and less ammonia than cattle or pigs. Methane, one of the worst greenhouse gases, is produced by only a few insect groups, such as termites and cockroaches. Overall, bugs produce one tenth as much methane as conventional livestock. When compared to chickens, which are greener than bigger livestock, crickets emit half as much C02 and use 25 percent less water. From the FAO paper:

4) They need less land, water, and food, and you don’t have to clear cut spaces to raise them. “Because they are cold-blooded, insects are very efficient at converting feed into protein (crickets, for example, need 12 times less feed than cattle, four times less feed than sheep, and half as much feed as pigs and broiler chickens to produce the same amount of protein)”.

As an email from Entomo Farms put it “less feed means less land, water, fertilizers, and transportation”. However, this is a little contested. When fed certain organic waste diets they’ve been found to have the same feed conversion as chickens. The feed the big farms use do make them more efficient, but everyone is still trying to figure out the best stuff to feed them.

By 2025, nearly 2 billion people are expected to be living with water scarcity, and more than half of our freshwater is being used in agriculture. 1kg of animal protein requires 5-20 times more water than 1kg of grain protein, or 100 times if you include the water required for forage and grain production to feed the animals. 1kg of beef requires 22000-43000 litres of fresh water. Cricket needs less, although the numbers are all over the place when I look it up. The highest estimates were 100-250l, but one source said 10l and another said 1l. Regardless, at the highest estimate it’s still a huge drop from the water requirements of cows.

For land, you need about 200 square metres to grow 1lb of beef, but you only need 15 square metres to grow 1lb of cricket. They could be good for vertical farming if they’re being kept in crates. One farm said 10’x3’ crates are used, but they can be kept in smaller boxes for small scale operations.

5) Insects are ready to eat way faster than other animals. They transform from larva to adults within weeks. There are loads of species of crickets, but most of them die of old age after 10 weeks, and none live more than a year.

As a bonus, all of the ways bugs are more environmentally friendly than livestock also makes them cheaper. While it’s still a little pricey to get insects here in Canada, it will become more cost effective for the consumer when everyone is eating them.

Eating insects isn’t just for people. They can be used to feed pets and livestock! We’ll probably have to start using them as our food’s food. The FAO figures worldwide production of animal feed will have to increase by as much as 70 percent to be able to feed the world by 2050, when we’ll have around 9 billion people on the planet. Switching from meat meal, fish meal, and soybean meal would help mitigate the production problems that come with those industries. We’ve talked about these problems in our milk, vegetarian, and seafood episodes in a bit more detail.

Health Benefits

Insects contain loads of protein, vitamins, minerals, and amino acids. They’re loaded with omega 3 fats, iron, magnesium, calcium, zinc, and fibre. The exoskeleton of insects actually makes their fibre content pretty high. This obviously varies widely based on the insects being eaten. There are nearly 2000 remember! But for the most part they’re hella good for you.

Entomo Farms talk about the nutrients in cricket powder on their site and use what I think is a misleading metric, which is comparing the nutrients to beef, pound for pound. My cricket powder was really expensive, and I won’t be able to eat a whole pound of cricket the same way I could eat a cheese burger. Or at least I can’t yet, I demand a cricket cheeseburger!
Although, 2tbsp have 400% of my B12 intake. So maybe I don’t need a cricket burger. But if I do want one, I just have to wait; as production ramps up, price will go down.

“Compared with mammals and birds, insects may also pose less risk of transmitting zoonotic infections to humans, livestock and wildlife, although this topic requires further research.” So mad cow and H1N1 and salmonella for example appear to be less likely to be transmitted. But because we’re not farming insects on large scale right now, more research should be done.

Pest Harvesting and Lifting People out of Poverty

From the wiki article on Entomophagy: Some researchers have proposed entomophagy as a solution to policy incoherence created by traditional agriculture, by which conditions are created which favor a few insect species, which then multiply and are termed "pests". In parts of Mexico, the grasshopper Sphenarium purpurascens is controlled by its capture and use as food. Such strategies allow decreased use of pesticide and create a source of income for farmers totaling nearly US$3000 per family. Environmental impact aside, some argue that pesticide use is inefficient economically due to its destruction of insects which may contain up to 75 percent animal protein in order to save crops containing no more than 14 percent protein.

“In the past two decades, villagers in impoverished north-eastern Thailand have started housing crickets in concrete pens in their backyards. As demand for the insects has risen, so have profits: One farmer reportedly went from selling 10 kilograms to more than two tons a day. Now around 20,000 such farms have been established, collectively earning more than $3 million a year.” - New York Times

Is It Cruel?

As Kristen has said before on the show, it’s a little tricky when you look at how one cow can feed a number of people, while a number of crickets are needed to feed one person. So is it ethical to do that?

There hasn’t been much research done on insect welfare and laws are suuuuper loose about how to raise and protect insects. The farm I bought my powder from puts the cricket welfare in their advertising, but I don’t think we should rely on the kindness of cricket farmers entirely.

It’s most likely that insects do not feel pain, but we’re not sure. So, the safest thing to do is to regulate the treatment of insects in farming. Kristen was a little skeptical of the “they probably don’t feel pain?” argument I offered, so here’s all the reading I did on it to land on that unhelpful statement.

It’s pretty easy to kill insects humanely and unlike mammals, they like living in high density situations. It’s important to regulate the slaughter methods, because there are humane ways to do it, such as lowering the temperature until they go into hibernation and then eventually die (24hrs to be safe), and inhumane, like boiling, frying, steaming, roasting, etc. There are some that are served and eaten still alive, which ranks pretty low on my humane scale.

Entomo says they treat the crickets ethically. They live at least 80% of their natural life cycle in large open rooms instead of crates. They roam freely and have constant access to food and water. I guess that’s better?

For farms that do use crates, they’re reasoning is that crates can be stacked to use space more efficiently and they’re usually given nooks and crannies and objects to climb on and hide in, for they’re comfort.

Brian Tomasik, who writes about reducing animal suffering, argues that eating insects isn’t ethical, and one of his best points was: is it ethical to bring more insects into existence in farming operations, if their lives are worse off than in their natural habitat? Even if large farms do a good job, amateur farms are likely to cause harm by neglect or making mistakes, like forgetting to feed and water them.

What do you think?

Downsides of Eating Insects

We have to be careful of over-doing it. Most insects are still harvested from the wild rather than farmed, so it’s possible to accidentally destroy the local insect population. From what I could find this is pretty rare, but still something to consider.

Wild caught insects are also more likely to have pesticides if they’ve been hanging around crops, which is a bad thing for us to be eating.

Because production isn’t mainstream, there needs to be more studies done on concentrations of heavy metals, pesticides, and allergens. Also, infrastructure and machinery for mainstream harvesting is still new and it’s loosely regulated or not regulated at all in most countries. It’s hard to know how safe the production process is for turning out food. If insects are being raised on farms with poor quality or straight up rotten feed, then humans are getting that nasty bacteria.

We have to be careful about introducing insects into environments where they might cause harm. It’s difficult to bring live insects into Australia, for example, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. While farms might remain mostly closed, it’s gotta be pretty hard to contain them fully.

Because farming insects is not a well understood industry, scaling it up to meet the demands of a population pushing 8 billion people will probably bring surprise issues that are difficult to see now but obvious in hindsight.

They look nasty as fuck. I read an article by Angela Skujins who tried to eat insects in every meal for a week, and it was a huge failure, she lost 4 pounds and thought she’d die of starvation.

Crickets still need to eat food. So they’ll still require crops and energy from heating their facilities (although because they like darkness, a bit of energy is saved by keeping the lights out).

Overall, if you’re looking for the most ethical diet, it’s still vegan.

So Are We All Going To Be Eating Insects?

The industry is slowly growing. In 2018 Sainsbury’s in the UK started carrying Crunchy Roasted Crickets. Whole Foods and Loblaw here in Canada also apparently stock it, although I’ve never noticed and I’ll have to watch out for it now. More than 100 companies currently exist that produce their own branded foods made from insects.

The industry was worth less than a billion dollars in 2019, but is projected to be worth as much as 8 billion dollars by 2030.

Aspire Food Group, a farm in Texas, is ramping up the size of it’s operation because demand for cricket powder is so high.

So will people eat bugs? Yeah probably someday. Sushi was very stigmatized when it was first introduced in the west but grew popular because restaurants put it on their menus and patrons trusted the chefs to present something edible. We might just be one popular restaurant chain and an influencer munching on a cricket burger away from cricket chips in every cupboard.

Further Info

Fun Fact of the episode: when crickets are ready to mate, they make their chirping noise. If a whole bunch of them are ready to go at once, it gets hella loud in the big farms and farmers have to wear headphones.

Here is a great short video on eating insects!

And another!

And a podcast episode from Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything

Episode 33 - Carbon Offsets

What Are Carbon Offsets?

Carbon offsets compensate for emissions by financing emissions-reducing projects somewhere else in the world. So, to take an example from Umair Irfan’s Vox article: let’s say a steel mill wants to reduce its emissions. Rather than waiting years to install new zero-emissions technology, the steel mill could start mitigating its emissions immediately by buying carbon offsets.

Types of projects

• Deforestation prevention

• Renewable energy projects, biogas projects

• Methane capture

• Energy demand projects: energy efficiency, like distributing efficient cookstoves

The cost of carbon offsets varies, but typically the price is around $12 USD/tonne of CO2 offset.

For context, a flight from Toronto to Vancouver generates about 0.6 tonnes of carbon. I used the Less Emissions calculator for my upcoming Ottawa – Edmonton roundtrip flight, and it came out to 1.1 tonnes of carbon, which cost $27 CAD to offset through a Gold Standard-certified international offset project (there was a cheaper option available but it was CSA-Standard Certified). The Carbonzero calculator estimated 1.45 tonnes for the same flight path, so I’m not sure what accounts for the difference there.

The average Ontarian uses about 11 tonnes of carbon annually. Half of that total comes from driving a car (2.2 tonnes), home heating (1.7 tonnes), air travel (1.4 tonnes), and eating beef (0.5 tonnes).

As a consumer, you can also buy some goods and services that include carbon neutrality as part of the price.

Who Does Carbon Offset Projects?

It’s a combination of businesses and NGOs.[1]

Who Is Using Carbon Offsets?

Globally, there is about $300 million per year in sales of voluntary carbon credits, trading almost 100 million metric tons of carbon.

The compliance offsets market (the market for carbon credits used to meet legally binding caps on carbon in schemes like the EU’s Emissions Trading System) is much larger, at somewhere between $40 billion and $120 billion.

Heavy emitters lean on carbon offsets more than other industries, because it is more difficult for them to decarbonize without a fundamental change in their business models – so, sectors like agriculture, aviation, and oil and gas.[2] Airlines are among the most vocal sectors on using emissions offsets.[3]

There is over 100 markets for carbon offsets already.[4] A lot of carbon offsets are built for compliance markets – so that companies can meet emissions targets when there is something like a cap and trade system in place.[5] For example, California’s cap-and-trade program allows companies to offset a small percentage of their carbon output with forest preservation projects in North America. The three biggest markets for carbon offsets are China, India, and the US.[6]

Consumers buy offsets, often by clicking the option when buying an air ticket. But others will purchase offsets as part of a commitment to carbon neutrality or to offset big carbon expenses like air fare. Governments also buy carbon offsets. For instance, Norway is the world’s largest supporter of the REDD scheme.

Major Carbon Offset/Credit Schemes

There are at least three United Nations schemes. The largest carbon offset scheme is the Clean Development Mechanism, a program that came out of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The Clean Development Mechanism has a poor track record of meaningful reductions in emissions.

Joint Implementation is the other offsetting mechanism under the Kyoto Protocol. It enables countries with emissions reductions commitments to generate Emission Reduction Units (ERUs) and to transfer them to other countries. Joint Implementation is responsible for issuing one-third of all Kyoto offset credits. There are serious weaknesses with JI.

Then there is also the UN Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD). And a UN Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) will start in 2021.

There are other government-run schemes, such as the California Air Resources Board forest standard and new tropical standard. Canada is planning to establish an offsets market in the future. And there are a bunch of private carbon offset companies, such as Less and Carbonzero.

Principles of Good Carbon Offset Programs

From a positive point of view, carbon offsets put a price on pollution. Which can be a good thing and is the justification behind carbon taxes and other market-based climate policies.

For carbon offsetting to address climate change, there are several things that offsetting schemes must accomplish: additionality; third-party verification; permanence; avoiding leakage; social and environmental safeguards; and offset limits.

Additionality

It is important that carbon offset projects are effective, but that is not enough. That’s why carbon offsets experts talk about something called additionality. Additionality means asking: would this have happened anyway? Is the revenue from carbon offsetting actually supporting brand new decarbonization efforts? You have to be able to count reductions that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

Additionality is the biggest measure of quality in a carbon offsetting project.[7] Clean energy projects have low additionality. Renewable energy projects already generate renewable energy certificates and they already have subsidy support. Although clean energy projects are the lowest quality type of carbon offset project, they are the biggest category of carbon offsets.[8]

You can much more directly claim additionality for reforestation projects (tree-planting).[9] Energy demand projects also have high additionality – that is things like clean cookstove distribution and energy efficiency projects.[10]

Some offset providers guarantee emissions savings, which essentially means that if the emissions savings don’t occur or if they turn out not to be additional the provider would make up the loss with another project.

In 2015 a French study found that 37% of REDD projects overlapped with existing protected lands like national parks.

Measurement and Third-Party Verification

Like with any social or environmental standard, you want to ensure that the standards are being verified by third-party auditors. Measuring emissions savings can be tricky. Some projects are much more difficult to measure than others. A methane capture project simply involves installing a sensor at, say, a coal mining operation. For forestry projects, you have to use satellite imagery to make sure that tree is still standing year after year. That’s difficult and expensive to do.[11]

Permanence

Permanence means: if you reduce the carbon with this project, is it going to stay sequestered? This is one of the main critiques of reforestation offsetting projects. Forests could be cut down or destroyed before emissions reductions have been generated. If you cut down a tree before 100 years, all of that carbon gets released into the atmosphere.[12]

Avoiding Leakage

Leakage refers to a situation where emissions reductions in one area result in greater emissions somewhere else. For example, forest protection somewhere could lead to logging somewhere else.

Social and Environmental Safeguards

Carbon offsetting should have safeguards to ensure that the project isn’t harming communities or undermining other environmental objectives. Without these safeguards, carbon offset projects can have negative impacts on local populations. For instance, a windfarm project displaced local farmers and didn’t generate the expected amount of power. And a 2015 green dam project in Guatemala was linked to the killing of six Indigenous protesters, two of which were children. That project is funded by the World Bank and will produce tradeable carbon credits.

Problems with Carbon Offsetting

The biggest problem with carbon offsetting is that a lot of projects fail to meet the principles described above. In particular, most carbon offset projects fail to meet the standard of additionality. But here are a few other common critiques.

Measurability and Pricing

Measurability issues can drive up the price of a carbon offsets project. As a result of measurability issues, reforestation projects – which are some of the potentially most effective projects from a sequestration perspective – are largely left out of carbon offset schemes.

Is this a Racket? A Scam?

Opaqueness of pricing of carbon offset projects undermines the legitimacy of the whole market. Companies have an incentive to choose a baseline scenario with inflated emissions, and that has occurred.

There is also evidence of fraud, exaggeration, and double-counting. In some cases, projects never get carried out – such as the example of a tree planting project in Panama. The carbon offsetting market continues to improve. While a decade ago, carbon offsets were a “wild west”, today there is a bit more structure.

Still, though, emissions reductions are overestimated in about 85% of offsets projects. Only 2% of projects have a high likelihood that emissions reductions are additional and are not over-estimated.

Moral Hazard

The climate advocate George Monbiot famously compared carbon offsets to indulgences in a 2006 Guardian column. His point was basically that carbon offsets make consumers and businesses complacent about the need to reduce our consumption. From that article:

“Any scheme that persuades us we can carry on polluting delays the point at which we grasp the nettle of climate change and accept that our lives have to change. But we cannot afford to delay. The big cuts have to be made now, and the longer we leave it, the harder it will be to prevent runaway climate change from taking place. By selling us a clean conscience, the offset companies are undermining the necessary political battle to tackle climate change at home. They are telling us we don't need to be citizens; we need only to be better consumers.”

 One thing that I think is pretty funny about this comparison is the fact that the Vatican used carbon offsets to declare itself the “first carbon-neutral sovereign state” in 2007. (Of course, the project they paid for never actually got done, so…)

There is also a cheeky site called CheatNeutral that pokes fun at carbon offsets by allowing you to be infidelity neutral by funding someone else to be faithful.

Some people have taken aim at these analogies. David Roberts at Grist has said the following about the indulgences comparison:

“If there really were such a thing as sin, and there was a finite amount of it in the world, and it was the aggregate amount of sin that mattered rather than any individual's contribution, and indulgences really did reduce aggregate sin, then indulgences would have been a perfectly sensible idea.”

But there is still the question of whether people (and businesses) use offsetting as a way to avoid changing other behaviours.

Reliance on Capitalism/Market Solutions

This argument is basically:

“Look, I think that we should save forests. Totally agree that we should save forests. I just don’t think that we should use capitalism to save forests. I don’t understand why everyone wants to use capitalism for everything.”[13]

Incrementalism

Carbon offsets can’t actually reduce emissions. At best, all they do is cancel out emissions that have already been produced. That can be a good thing, but when you take into account time horizons it is actually a big problem. Some offset projects – tree planting, for instance – can take decades to have emissions saving effects, if they ever do. And given the lock-in effects of climate change, not to mention the risk of run-away climate change, it might all be too little, too late. Carbon offsets have been around for decades, yet emissions are still increasing.

Low-Hanging Fruit

Offsets are cheap in part because there are lots of ways to reduce emissions very inexpensively. We could refer to these as quick wins. But what happens when the low-hanging fruit of emissions savings are used up?

Carbon Offset Certification Schemes

One way to ensure that you are buying carbon offsets that adhere to the principles set out above is to get offsets that adhere to a respected certification standard.

Voluntary Gold Standard

Voluntary Gold Standard (VGS) -certified offsets are audited according to the rules set out in the Kyoto Protocol. The Gold Standard is the highest global standard for carbon offsets. It’s the standard that the David Suzuki Foundation recommends using if you are going to buy carbon offsets.

Voluntary Carbon Standard

Voluntary Carbon Standard is the world’s most widely-used voluntary emissions certification program.

Other Third-Party Verification

Here are a few other third-party offset verification standards:

• CSA Standard-Certified Canadian Offsets

• Green-e

• American Carbon Registry

• Climate Action Reserve

• Climate, Community, and Biodiversity Standard

• Verra

• Rainforest Alliance

Should I Use Carbon Offsets?

For people and businesses, carbon offsetting should be a final lifeline: it should be something you do after you have done everything reasonable to reduce your emissions. 

For example, the sustainable shoe brand Allbirds has a three-step approach to carbon neutrality.

1. Measure emissions across the supply chain, including product end of life. They include a carbon score with all of their shoes. For instance, the runners that I bought this year from them have a footprint of 9.0 kilograms of carbon (which is below the average of 13.6 kilograms for running shoes generally). 

2. Reduce the carbon impact.

3. Offset anything that’s left.

That is generally the way companies should approach offsets. (As a quick note: while Allbirds is well-rated for environmental sustainability and animal welfare, Good On You has pointed out serious weaknesses in its labour practices.)

You should be extremely skeptical of any company that is using offsets as the main approach to sustainability. For example, a BBC investigation calculated that in order to offset the annual emissions of Ryan Air (which is positioning itself as the greenest airline), you would need to plant enough trees to cover 12% of the UK.[14]

As an individual, I would liken carbon offsets to donating to charity. It doesn’t get you out of your core ethical responsibilities, but you can use it to improve your overall moral contribution. Buy carbon offsets only where there are no feasible green alternatives (e.g., important long-distance air travel).

You can justifiably use carbon offsetting as a way to cut your overall footprint or as an incentive to be greener – like a self-applied carbon tax. But you may as well just donate to your favourite environmental group. In the episode, Robert makes the good point that our society’s obsession with measurement can get in the way of impact.

The real criticisms with carbon offsets come from businesses that use flawed offsets programs to meet government emissions standards.

Which Carbon Offsets Should I Buy?

Buy certified offsets, preferably from a standard with a registry of projects. Less.ca has several options for certified offsets and you can see the projects associated with them. This was also the top-rated offset program in a David Suzuki report (though it’s over a decade old now). Make sure the project is registered – that ensures that offsets are only sold once. Another suggestion is to choose projects that specifically help the world transition away from fossil fuels.

Endnotes

[1] Switched On Podcast. 19 May 2020. When Enough’s Not Enough, Try Carbon Offsets. Switched On Podcast.

[2] Switched On Podcast, “When Enough’s Not Enough.”

[3] Switched On Podcast, “When Enough’s Not Enough.”

[4] Switched On Podcast, “When Enough’s Not Enough.”

[5] Switched On Podcast, “When Enough’s Not Enough.”

[6] Switched On Podcast, “When Enough’s Not Enough.”

[7] Switched On Podcast, “When Enough’s Not Enough.”

[8] Switched On Podcast, “When Enough’s Not Enough.”

[9] Switched On Podcast, “When Enough’s Not Enough.”

[10] Switched On Podcast, “When Enough’s Not Enough.”

[11] Switched On Podcast, “When Enough’s Not Enough.”

[12] The Energy Gang Podcast. 2019. The Problem with Carbon Offsets. The Energy Gang Podcast.

[13] The Energy Gang Podcast, “The Problem with Carbon Offsets.”

[14] BBC Panorama. 11 November 2019. Can Flying Go Green? BBC, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPhOS4uXkmM&feature=youtu.be.

Episodes 22 and 23 - Seafood

The seafood industry is large, and growing, as humans are eating more fish each year. You might be surprised to learn that, per capita, annual fish consumption has increased from 9.9kg in the 1960s to 19.2kg in 2012. And the average Canadian eats slightly more than this, at 23.1kg. Americans eat an estimated 17 billion marine creatures annually.[1] 

Fishing is a Global Industry

In addition to capturing spectacular worldwide demand, fish is a global industry because it is a highly traded commodity: approximately 200 countries export fish and fishery products. Canadian fish and seafood imports generally match the global trend. The top five countries of origin for our fish and seafood imports are: the U.S. (36.7%), Thailand (14.9%), China (14.6%), Chile (5.1%) and Vietnam (4.6%).

The Fishing Supply Chain

1. Fish and shellfish (A) living in open waters or (B) raised via aquaculture in ponds, tanks or bounded coastal waters are harvested.  

2. They are packed and transported to processing facilities.

3. Processors convert the fish to consumer products (i.e. canned, frozen, filets, smoked). In some cases, processing takes multiple steps while in others fish are transported live.

4. Wholesalers receive the processed or unprocessed fish and distribute the product to retailers and restaurants.

5. You buy/eat it.

This episode focuses on just step one of the fish supply chain. Maybe we’ll cover the others in future episodes.

Overfishing

The State of Overfishing

85% of global fish stocks overfished. “Overfishing” refers to a situation when more fish are caught than can be replaced through natural reproduction. It has several causes, including rising demand, new technology, and governance gaps.

A study of catch data published in the journal Science in 2006 predicted that if fishing rates continue at the same rate, all the world's fisheries will have collapsed by 2048. The problem of overfishing is so bad that some have argued for giving the oceans their own seat at the United Nations.  The global ocean plays a central role in supporting life on Earth. Oceans cover 3/4 of the planet and contain 80% of all life.

Overfishing affects the entire ocean ecosystem. But especially the top of the food chain: the population of large predatory fish has dropped by an estimated 90% since the industrialization of fisheries in the 1950s.

Overfishing is bad for workers as well as the environment: because fish stocks have been declining, vessels must take longer and longer voyages to find fish, meaning that workers are stuck aboard for long periods of time; declining stocks also make fish processing an increasingly precarious job.

You might recall the collapse of the Newfoundland Grand Banks cod fishery in the 1990s: this put between 50 000 and 40 000 people out of work. Fishing is central to the livelihood and food security of an estimated 200 million people. Sustainable fishing matters for the environment, for animals, and for people.

Illegal, Unregulated, and Unreported Fishing

The problem of forced labour on fishing vessels is extremely difficult to tackle, as it is linked to illegal, unregulated, and unreported (IUU) fishing (IUU fishing also goes hand in hand with overfishing).  

Because international waters are a global commons, regulating fishing has proven extremely difficult. For this reason, people often refer to overfishing as a tragedy of the commons (each individual has an incentive to overfish, even if collectively everyone would benefit from responsible stewardship).

IUU fishing is a huge problem: it is estimated that IUU fishing accounts for 30% of all fishing activity worldwide.  Structural loopholes in international maritime law, specifically on the high seas, allow for IUU fishing to proliferate.

Outside of a country’s exclusive economic zone (on the “high seas”, which cover 64% of the surface area of the ocean) ships are governed by the laws of the country in which that vessel is registered (the “flag country”).

Often, fishing vessels are registered in countries with no meaningful link to their operations. IUU fishing occurs in primarily on the high seas and poorly regulated national waters. For example, along the coastline of sub-Saharan Africa forced labour is a problem on European and Asian fishing vessels in poorly regulated waters.

Seafood Fraud

A recent investigation of seafood bought in Montreal found that more than half of samples were mislabelled. 61% were mislabelled in some way, while 34% were an entirely different species than advertised.

Unfortunately, this is not an outlier. It merely highlights the endemic challenge of falsely and mislabeled seafood. Between 25 and 70 percent of seafood products in Canada are “mislabeled due to counterfeiting somewhere along the supply chain”. Globally, on average 30 percent of seafood products are mislabeled.

Why so high? As fish markets have globalized so too have the supply chains for fish products, resulting in a “notoriously opaque” system in which weak governance provides a hospitable environment for seafood fraud. Also, consumers don’t really know much about seafood – which is a very wide category. Approximately 350 species of seafood can be found in American markets.[2] So, seafood fraud is very easy.

Common frauds:

·      In Canada, cod is often actually haddock[3]

·      One investigation found that three quarters of red snapper was actually another species – most commonly red sea bream or tilapia.[4]

·      Grouper is another seafood that will be mislabelled. It’s often actually catfish[5]

·      And fish labelled as wild caught is often actually farmed[6]

Beyond being a consumer rights issue – if you buy salmon you probably want to know that you are receiving salmon – seafood mislabeling poses challenges for sustainability.

Eco-labels with traceability standards offer a partial solution to this problem, although seafood mislabeling still happens under such schemes (but it happens a lot less). Of course, private regulation has its limits – accordingly, government-mandated traceability requirements will play an important role as well. (For a good summary of traceability standards in the seafood industry, see this report.)

Finally, better tools are needed. DNA testing has generated research attention since it poses a potential solution to the deficiencies of current traceability best practices. For instance, the MSC published a report on the subject in March. 

The Ecological Effects of Fishing

In addition to overfishing, sustainability also concerns the broader environmental impact of fishing processes. For example, if gear is lost during the fishing process or if fishing entails destructive processes, such as the use of dynamite and poisons, this can cause more widespread ecosystem damage.

Commercial fishing gear is becoming more efficient and less efficient, depending on how you look at it. Modern fishing devices are great at finding and catching fish. But they damage the seabed and catch a lot of unwanted species in the process. “Bycatch” refers to marine species captured in a fishing operation that aren’t the target species. Bycatch is usually thrown overboard, dead or dying.

The bycatch ratio varies dramatically from method to method, but in general about a quarter of all fish taken worldwide is bycatch.[7] Sometimes, as is the case for shrimp trawling, there is much more bycatch collected than the actual intended catch.[8] In Thailand’s shrimp industry, the bycatch ratio is 14:1.[9] Dredges, bottom trawls, and drift nets are the worst for bycatch and habitat destruction – well, also dynamite.

Bottom Trawling

Bottom trawling basically turns the bottom of the sea into something resembling a paved surface or plowed field.[10] This causes extensive and irreparable damage to coral reefs and seabed ecosystems.[11] It also stirs up sediment that makes the area unlivable for some species.[12] Bottom trawling is the “marine equivalent of clear-cutting a rain forest.”[13] The average trawling operation throws 80-90 percent of the sea animals that it captures as bycatch overboard.[14] “Imagine using a bulldozer to catch songbirds for food – that’s what it’s like.” (biologist Sylvia Earle)[15]

Dolphin-Safe

Dolphin safe: in 1987 a biologist filmed dolphins being drowned in purse seine nets for tuna fishing. The footage of dolphins shrieking as the nylon nets tore away their fins really affected people, and tuna consumption dropped almost overnight. “Dolphin-safe” tuna was maybe the first ethical seafood consumer movement

Aquaculture

As overfishing impacts more and more species, fish farming is on the rise. For instance, if you are eating Atlantic salmon it is almost certainly from a fish farm: 300 farmed salmon are sold for every wild caught salmon.[16] Fish farming is the fastest growing form of food production in the world. In 1970 it contributed 3% of the world’s seafood, compared to more than 50% today.[17] And the weight of farmed fish exceeds the weight of beef produced globally.[18]

Here’s a description of aquaculture that I found helpful: “In the fjords and coastal inlets along the coast of Norway, Britain, Iceland, Chile, China, Japan, Canada, the United States, and many other countries, cages or nets that may be more than 200 feet long and 40 feet deep have been lowered into the sea and secured to platforms from which workers feed the fish. With salmon, 50,000 fish may be confined to each sea cage, at a stocking density that is equivalent to putting each 30-inch salmon in a bathtub of water.”[19]

 Fish farming is problematic for a bunch of reasons. First, because of the intensity of farming it is not great from an animal welfare perspective. More on this in a bit.

The second problem with farmed fish is that fish farms require lots of fish feed: “Fish farming sounds like a good way of meeting the growing demand for seafood while taking pressure off wild fisheries. But that can be like thinking that if we ate more beef, we wouldn’t need to grow so much corn.”[20] What often happens is that carnivorous fish are farmed and fed high volumes of fish meal. So, in essence, these operations actually use up a lot more fish flesh than they produce – and that means putting more pressure on wild fish populations.[21] And if you’re thinking, hey, at least fish meal is from relatively abundant fish, remember that this is taking away the food supply from vulnerable apex predator populations.

Fish farming also isn’t very carbon efficient for that reason. Whereas a wild salmon will go and catch its own food, fish farmers need to get fish meal from fossil-fuel powered boats.[22]

Fish farming can also cause harm to the wider environment through the spread of farm waste, chemicals, disease and parasites.  

Basically, high concentrations of fish feces and food waste are discharged, untreated, into the water around sea cages. According to WWF calculations, Scottish salmon farms discharge the same amount of waste as 9 million people (double the human population of Scotland).[23] 

The pollution from fish farming can also affect the people that inhabit coastal areas. For instance, in 1996 activists in India won a class action lawsuit against shrimp farms, on the basis that these farms had cost local communities their livelihoods.[24] In Bangladesh, illegal shrimp farms have displaced thousands of local villagers.[25]

And as with factory farming on land, the intensity of fish feedlots means that fish need to be given antibiotics and pesticides. Those leach into the water and cause environmental problems like ocean dead zones.

Lastly, farmed fish sometimes escape when predators or storms cause holes in the enclosure nets. As many as half a million farmed salmon escape every year, for example.[26] These escapees can infect wild fish with diseases and parasites. For example, young wild salmon now have levels of sea lice infestation 73% times higher than previously.[27]

Some kinds of aquaculture operations are better than others. Oyster and mussel farming seems to be relatively benign.

On the other hand, shrimp farming is a major contributor to the destruction of mangrove forests, in addition to all the regular harms.

Animal Welfare

As was the case for the vegetarianism episode, there are sort of two issues here. The first is whether it is ever okay to eat a living being that feels pain. The second is whether the manner of catching or farming fish is justified on welfare grounds.

Because we’ve covered the first bit before, we’ll skip over it here. Check out part one of vegetarianism for this. I will just quickly say that seafood encapsulates a wide variety of animals, with different capacities and levels of intelligence. Some fish – like octopus – are incredibly intelligent. Most are social creatures that have demonstrated pain responses in scientific studies.

The one exception to this may be bivalves. Bivalves are a class of marine and freshwater molluscs that have laterally compressed bodies enclosed by a shell consisting of two hinged parts. They include species like oysters, clams, mussels, and scallops. The evidence for consciousness in bivalves is “barely stronger than it is for plants, which is to say it is vanishingly slight.”[28]

A Good Death? Not So Much

Wild caught fish is somewhat proximate to hunted meat. The fish live normal lives for their species, so the only question is whether the slaughter is unjustifiably cruel. There is no such thing as humane slaughter for wild-caught fish. Take longline fishing, for example. When fish are hooked, they struggle for hours trying to escape. Then they are either clubbed to death or have their gills cut and bleed to death.

In trawlers, hundreds of different species are crushed together, gashed on corals, bashed on rocks – for hours – and then hauled from the water, causing painful decompression (the decompression sometimes causes the animals’ eyes to pop out or their internal organs to come out their mouths). On longlines, too, the deaths animals face are generally slow. Some are simply held there and die only when removed from the lines. Some die from the injury caused by the hook in their mouths or by trying to get away. Some are unable to escape attack by predators […] no fish gets a good death. Not a single one. You never have to wonder if the fish on your plate had to suffer. It did.[29]

Also, your wild caught fish probably came with bycatch.

Fish Farming

Farmed fish are similar to factory farmed cows, chickens, and pigs. They are in very crowded environments. Farmed fish exhibit stress behaviours just like factory farmed mammals and birds.[30]

Eating Animals identifies six sources of suffering on salmon farms: “(1) water so fouled that it makes it hard to breathe; (2) crowding so intense that animals begin to cannibalize one another; (3) handling so invasive that physiological measures of stress are evident a day later; (4) disturbance by farmworkers and wild animals; (5) nutritional deficiencies that weaken the immune system; and (6) the inability to form a stable social hierarchy, resulting in more cannibalization.”[31]

Also like factory farming on land, farmed fish have a high death rate due to illness, abrasions, and sea lice infestations – which Lex so helpfully told us about in the food episode. A recent study found that salmon bred and raised at fish factory farms are forced to grow at such an accelerated rate that over 50% of them are going deaf. Cool. “Another study by Royal Society Open Science found that a significant proportion of farmed salmon suffer from severe depression. The fish are referred to as ‘drop outs’ because they float lifelessly in the dirty tanks they reside in.” (source: Live Kindly)

Farmed fish are typically starved for 7-10 days before slaughter.[32] Because there generally aren’t rules for the humane slaughter of fish, farmed fish are killed in brutal ways that would be illegal in land operations.[33] Sometimes they are simply allowed to suffocate on land, which can take 15 minutes.[34] They are sometimes bashed in the head with a wooden bat, which sometimes doesn’t kill them – meaning that they can be cut open while fully conscious.[35] Sometimes they have their gills cut and bleed to death.[36]

Bivalve Farming

The one type of fish farming that may be ethically justifiable is the farming of bivalves like mussels and oysters. Because these creatures likely don’t feel pain and aren’t conscious, the same cruelty concerns don’t apply. Also, bivalves feed themselves and actually clean up the water around them – theoretically getting around some of the environmental issues.

Generally speaking, “mom and pop” mussel and oyster farms seem to be fine – good, even – for the environment. However, there are some arguments that mussel and oyster farms at a large scale can have negative environmental effects. So, it’s still unclear whether they’re a good idea at an industrial scale.

Human Rights

Thailand is the third largest exporter of seafood in the world (the country’s seafood industry is worth $7.3 billion USD annually); it is also notorious for crewing fishing boats with slaves trafficked from Burma and Cambodia. A form of bonded labour is typical: in this scenario, trafficked fishermen are sold to fishing boat owners and then must work to pay off a given price (the ka hua). In addition to being enslaved, workers on such ships are exposed to overwork, violence, torture, and even executions at sea.

Each year the U.S. State Department produces its Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report. In 2014, that report downgraded Thailand to a Tier 3 ranking due to a lack of improvements. The report revealed that the Thai government ignored instances of human trafficking and even sought to punish those attempting to bring these abuses to light.

Thailand is often used as an example of human trafficking in the fishing industry because of the size of its fishing industry and inaction on the part of its government (regulation of the Thai fishing industry is woefully inadequate). Nonetheless, this is a problem that exists worldwide. While Southeast Asia is the biggest problem region for slavery on fishing vessels, this is a global phenomenon. Human trafficking is endemic in the fishing industry. Some fishing operations in at least 51 countries crew their ships with slave labour. 

Sustainability Labels

Marine Stewardship Council

When purchasing sustainable seafood there may be several different eco-labels available to you, but the one that is largest and most well-known is the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). MSC was founded in 1996 by WWF and Unilever.

The MSC’s standards are based on three principles:

1. The condition of the fish populations: are there enough fish to ensure that the fishery is sustainable?

2. The impact of the fishery on the marine environment: what effect is the fishery having on the immediate marine environment, including non-target fish, marine mammals, and seabirds?

3. The fishery management systems: the rules and procedures that are necessary to meet principles one and two.[37]

The MSC now accounts for about 10% of global wild caught seafood (as compared to aquaculture/farmed fish) but this proportion is often much higher in developed countries, where the demand for certified fish is higher. In Canada, for example, 67% of domestic wild catch seafood is MSC certified.

In addition to being the most widely used eco-label, MSC is also well-known for its rigorous standards. However, it has been criticized for focusing too narrowly on the sustainability of fish stocks instead of the overall environmental impact of fisheries and the fish supply chain, as well as for having a process that is too burdensome for small fisheries and fisheries in developing countries.

If you are looking for sustainably caught seafood, the MSC is probably your best bet: it is the most likely to actually be available in stores near you and has standards that are reasonably stringent and evaluated impartially, based on evidence.

Aquaculture Stewardship Council

The Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) was founded in 2010, also with the involvement of WWF. ASC standards focus primarily on environmental issues, like pollution reduction and protections for biodiversity. There are also a few social standards – no child or forced labour, safe working environments, consulting Indigenous communities, and regulated working hours – in ASC. There are no animal welfare standards as far as I was able to tell.

SeaChoice reviewed ASC and MSC certifications in Canada. They found some weaknesses with MSC, but bigger ones with ASC – lots of evidence of non-compliance with the standards.

What to Think About When Choosing Ethical Seafood

For my own part, I believe that seafood is largely not an ethically justified dietary choice. I would only consider eating bivalves, and in that case only if the method of farming/fishing is sustainable and environmentally responsible.

However, for those that want to cast a wider ethical net, here is what you should think about:

Species

Is it overfished or not? There’s a fairly long list of seafood species you should never eat because they are overfished. But some of the more well-known ones include: bluefin tuna, Atlantic cod, Chilean sea bass, shark, Atlantic halibut, and monkfish.[38]  You can usually feel comfortable that a few seafood species aren’t overfished. Those include: oysters, mussels, sardines, Pacific halibut, herring, jellyfish, mullet, and pickerel.[39]

What is its trophic level? Is it an apex predator? Bottomfeeder recommends eating only bottom-of-the-foodchain species, because the big fish are so overfished.[40]

Does it feel pain/how intelligent is it?

Fishing or farming method

Things you might want to ask yourself about the fishing or farming method include:

• How much bycatch is produced?

• Does it kill coral or otherwise destroy ecosystems? How polluting is it?

• How cruel is this method?

The best catch methods from a sustainability perspective are hook and line fishing, harpoons and scuba, pots and traps, and purse seines.[41] Always avoid seafood caught with drift nets (“walls of death”), dynamite and cyanide, and bottom trawls.[42]

Location

Location matters too. Try asking:

• How far does the seafood have to travel to get to me?

• How did it travel? (e.g. really pricey fish by air freight have a large carbon footprint)

Brands/Certifications

To try to push the market you can ask: is the company that sold it a seafood leader or laggard? You can also look for seafood with MSC or ASC certification. And if there isn’t a certification, ask yourself: do you really know anything about where the seafood came from?

How to Choose Ethical Seafood

If you are going to be a selective omnivore, Taras Grescoe’s Bottomfeeder offers a generally good rule of thumb for seafood: eat as close to the bottom of the food chain as possible.[43]

Bottomfeeder also recommends:[44]

• Avoiding cheap seafood, since it was probably farmed

• Avoiding fish that has travelled far

• Avoiding long-lived predator fish (e.g. Chilean sea bass, sharks, tuna, swordfish)

• Avoiding farmed shrimp, tuna, salmon, and any other carnivorous fish

• If buying farmed salmon, cod, or trout, opt for organically farmed ones (the book was written before ASC was created)

• Opt for seafood at the lower end of the food chain as much as possible

In addition, there are a few useful tools that can help you pick ethical seafood:

• SeaChoice is a good place to go to get informed about sustainable seafood.

• Oceanwise classified seafood as recommended or not recommended. The full list is a bit overwhelming, but you can also search the website pretty easily. SeaChoice ranked this as the best resource for choosing ethical seafood.

• Seafood Watch has a useful website that you can use to search species that are “best choice”, “good alternatives”, or “avoid”.

Endnotes

[1] Singer, Peter and Mason, Jim. (2006). The Ethics of What We Eat. Rodale Publishers.

[2] Grescoe, Taras. (2008). Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood. Toronto, ON: HarperCollins.

[3] Grescoe, Bottomfeeder.

[4] Grescoe, Bottomfeeder.

[5] Grescoe, Bottomfeeder.

[6] Grescoe, Bottomfeeder.

[7] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[8] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[9] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[10] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[11] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[12] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[13] Safran Foer, Jonathan. (2009). Eating Animals. New York: Back Bay Books at p.191.

[14] Safran Foer, Eating Animals.

[15] Grescoe, Bottomfeeder at p.27.

[16] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[17] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[18] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[19] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat page 122.

[20] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat page 123.

[21] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[22] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[23] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[24] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[25] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[26] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat page 122.

[27] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[28] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat at page 133.

[29] Safran Foer, Eating Animals at p. 192-3.

[30] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[31] Safran Foer, Eating Animals at p.190

[32] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[33] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[34] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[35] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[36] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[37] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[38] Grescoe, Bottomfeeder.

[39] Grescoe, Bottomfeeder.

[40] Grescoe, Bottomfeeder.

[41] Grescoe, Bottomfeeder.

[42] Grescoe, Bottomfeeder.

[43] Grescoe, Bottomfeeder.

[44] Grescoe, Bottomfeeder.

Episode 21 - Cannabis

How Does Cannabis Work?

The Endocannabinoid System

Humans and plants share similar chemical compounds called cannabinoids (in people we call them endocannabinoids). We make our own endocannabinoids through our endocannabinoid system is thought to control how we feel, move, and react. The endocannabinoid system may play a role in regulating stress recovery, nervous system protection, immune system response, and homeostatic behaviour. We have two kinds of cannabinoid receptors, which endocannabinoids bind to:

• The first type, CB1 receptors, are primarily located in the central nervous system (including the brain)

• The second type, CB2 receptors, are found primarily in the immune system.

Plant cannabinoids also interact with these receptors and inhibit the way they function.  

Plant Cannabinoids

The cannabis plant contains hundreds of cannabinoids, but the two most well-known are tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD). Because the number and location of endocannabinoid receptors differ, reactions to THC and CBD won’t be the same, even if people are consuming the exact same strain. The effects of cannabis also depend on things like consumption method, frequency of use, genetics, age, sex, personality, current mood, and mental health conditions. Most people will know that THC is what produces the “high” associated with cannabis. CBD doesn’t generally produce a high. It’s associated with pain-relief and reducing anxiety, as well as a few other health effects. Because everyone is different, health experts recommend starting with cannabis that has low THC and CBD levels to gauge how your body will react.

Effects of Cannabis

Generally, the desired effects of cannabis are temporary and include stress relief, anxiety reduction, increased creativity, and increased appetite. Unpleasant effects are also generally temporary and result from consuming too much. These include: an inability to concentrate; memory problems; anxiety, panic, or paranoia; disorganized thoughts; dizziness or hallucinations; reduced reaction time; and sleepiness. To avoid unpleasant effects from cannabis, try to choose cannabis with low THC content and consume small amounts slowly. Check out other tips for responsible use here.

There are a few long-term effects that can develop from frequent (daily or near-daily), long-term cannabis use. Most of these are effects on the brain, including harms to memory, concentration, and ability to think and make decisions. The only known long-term effect on the body is from smoke inhalation. Similar to smoking tobacco, this can increase risks to lung health including bronchitis, lung infections chronic cough, and increased mucus build-up in the throat.

Cannabis Production

Cannabis production has five stages:

1. Cultivation

2. Extraction

3. Testing

4. Distribution

5. Retail

Cannabis Legalization/Decriminalization

There are a few countries around the world that have either legalized, partially legalized, or decriminalized marijuana. Legalization for medical use is the most common, while Canada is fairly rare in legalizing recreational use. Uruguay legalized cannabis in 2013.

Legalization in Canada 

Recreational marijuana became legal in Canada in October 2018. A CBC News article from December ran with a headline that I thought was funny: “Canada’s cannabis policy makes it an international rebel on drug treaties”. More than 130 licensed producers in Canada’s cannabis landscape when PwC wrote this article in late 2018. Federal government (Health Canada) oversees commercial production and processing, while the provinces and territories oversee distribution, wholesaling, and retailing. 

Canada’s Cannabis Industry

Creating a Legal Industry for Cannabis 

As of February 2020, the Canadian cannabis industry (legal and illegal) is about $8 billion annually. A lot of that still comes from the black market: close to 40% of adult cannabis users reported obtaining cannabis from the black market in the last year (friends, dealers, private dispensaries, online, and family as the largest sources). As for legal cannabis, the main sources are retailers (55%), online (46%), medical providers (17%), and homegrown cannabis (6%).

Legal cannabis tends to be about 60% more expensive than illegal cannabis. There have also been supply issues, especially in Ontario during the initial rollout of legal weed. In Ontario, just 24 stores opened in 2019, compared with more than 300 in Alberta. Cannabis retail shops are fancy AF, as you can see from these photos of some of the best cannabis store brands.

Depending on the province, the retail model differs. It can include government-operated stores, private licensed stores, and online retailers.

• Public-only (physical and online): PEI, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, Northwest Territories

• Public and private (physical), public (online): British Columbia, Yukon

• Private (physical) and public (online): Newfoundland and Labrador, Ontario, Alberta

• Private-only (physical and online): Manitoba, Saskatchewan

• None of it: Nunavut

Big Weed

The top five companies control a combined 73% of the Canadian cannabis market (as of April 2019). The four largest cannabis companies are Canopy Growth Corp (Ontario-based), Cronos Group (CRON), Aurora Cannabis (Edmonton-based), and Aphria (APHA).

A bit more on the big dudes. Aurora Cannabis is one of the largest cannabis companies in the world. It recently bought Choom, which is a consumer cannabis company with a large retail network in Canada. They also bought Clarity Cannabis Retail Stores.

Cronos is a globally diversified and vertically integrated cannabis company with a presence on five continents. In Canada it is planning to launch the Medmen Canada retail brand, a joint venture with Medmen.

Canopy Growth operates two retail brands in Canada: Tokyo Smoke and Tweed. Canopy Growth has also partnered with Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s cannabis brand, Houseplant.

And Westleaf Inc. is a vertically-integrated Canadian cannabis company. Westleaf plans to launch 50 premium retail stores across Western Canada by the end of 2020.

There are a ton of cannabis brands, and it’s a bit overwhelming to try to differentiate them. My cannabis oil was made by Solei (based in Leamington, Ontario) and purchased at Tokyo Smoke (owned by Canopy Growth). Solei seems to have pretty strong commitments to environmental sustainability, but it’s difficult to know.

Ethics and Legal v. Illegal Weed

There isn’t a lot written about this, which maybe isn’t surprising. Putting aside whether there is any moral harm to breaking the law in itself, buying illegal weed supports organized crime. Even if your weed guy is nice, you may be in some way supporting other more harmful forms of trafficking. That is, of course, unless you can verify that you are buying from, say, a neighbour who grows his own marijuana and sells a bit of it on the side. That’s a murkier ethical question. With legal weed, you can also be reasonably sure that the workers who cultivated, processed, and sold your cannabis had some measure of legal labour protections.

Environment (the other “Green Revolution”)

Water Use

In general, hemp plants require quite a lot of water to grow: a single marijuana plant can consume up to six gallons of water per day. If you are growing cannabis at home, there are some ways that you can do this more efficiently. One suggestion is using water from dehumidifiers to water the plant.

Energy Use

Growing weed can take a lot of energy: in Denver, for example, cannabis accounted for nearly four percent of the entire city’s energy usage in 2013-2016. Most of that was from growing cannabis. Get weed that was grown in a greenhouse, instead of a dark warehouse, because that uses less energy.

One example of an eco-friendly grower is L’Eagle (Denver-based). L’Eagle uses the entire plant for concentrates and flower and doesn’t use pesticides. It also promotes reusable products in-store.

Packaging

Because cannabis is a regulated product, it often has to be sold in small quantities in child-proof packaging that is often made from non-recyclable, single-use plastics. An estimated 10,000 tons of packaging was generated in the first year of weed legalization in Canada.

The federal Cannabis Act in Canada requires that cannabis be packaged in containers that are: opaque or semi-transparent; tamper-evident and child-resistant; and designed to prevent contamination and keep cannabis dry. It has been difficult to find biodegradable materials that meet these criteria. Unfortunately, regulations also prohibit the reuse and refill of cannabis packaging (because it has to be sealed with an excise stamp before going to the retailer).

Recycling these containers is a bit hit-and-miss. My cannabis oil container can apparently be recycled, but I doubt the dropper can be. One brand, Tweed, has launched a recycling program through TerraCycle.

There is some attention to this issue – for instance, entire companies have been created around sustainable cannabis packaging. Lots of cannabis-inesses are trying. For example, Sana Packaging produces biodegradable hemp-based packaging. The push is coming from consumers: consumers want eco-friendly cannabis and are willing to pay more for them.

Which Consumption Method is Most Eco-friendly?

Well, it’s definitely not disposable vapes (the “K-Cups of cannabis”). Don’t use those. And if you live in a place where you can easily grow your own using sunlight, putting some of that in a reusable pipe is probably the most environmentally friendly way to go. But beyond that, every method has its benefits and drawbacks. And in each category, there are better and worse options.  

Which Consumption Method is Best?

Flower

It is possible to buy flower in bulk – the largest quantity I saw on the Ontario Cannabis Store website was 28g.  The website also lets you pick flower from Ontario-based growers, which would reduce the transport emissions.

Oils (Tinctures), Sprays, and Capsules

Oils, sprays, and capsules are a popular way to use cannabis. They all use oil-based marijuana concentrates that you ingest. When you are getting pot in single-use plastic packages, look for plastic with the classification 1 (PET), which is most likely to be recyclable in your municipality. And remember good recycling etiquette.  You can also go with a brand that has a recycling program. And tell your Member of Parliament that you want to get high without wreaking the oceans.

You could also buy cannabis flower in bulk and make oil from it at home. You basically grind the flower, then sauté it in oil (very gently) for an hour or more. Then you just strain out the plant solids. You should make sure that the space is well ventilated if you are going to make your own oil. Here is a cannabis oil recipe that we found. And here’s another. The downside of homemade oil is that you can’t be as precise with the concentration, which is what I really like about buying oils.  

Other Extracts

Hash is a pressed concentration of the marijuana plant’s sticky glands. It can be vaporised or smoked. Kief is another option – it refers to the bulbous, crystal formation on the top of the marijuana plant’s resin glands. It’s powdery. Apparently it’s easier to make cannabis oils from kief. 

Joints

Don’t just flick your roach onto the ground. Littering is bad. Beyond that, you can think a bit about your filters and rolling papers.  

Not all joints are vegan. For instance, some use animal-based glues, though many brands now use plant-based glues. Animal products can also be present in the dyes. Not all rolling papers are cruelty-free, either.

You can get eco-friendly rolling papers made of hemp or rice. Check out some options here.

Vaporizers

If you vape, make sure you are recycling your batteries appropriately. Don’t buy a disposable vaporizer.

Edibles

To meet government safety regulations, edibles have to be packaged in child-proof packaging. And in Canada, no more than 10mg of THC can be in a package of edibles. The general packaging advice goes for edibles, or make your own!

Topicals

Topicals are products like lotions, creams, and oils that are meant to be applied to hair, skin, and nails and have been infused with cannabis extracts. Because topicals bind to a different kind of cannabinoid receptors (the CB2 receptors in the immune system), they impact us differently than smoking or ingesting cannabis. The general packaging advice goes for topicals.

Episode 19 - Personal Behaviour Changes and the Climate Crisis

This episode we were joined by Robert Miller, a progressive activist and organizer based out of Edmonton, Alberta. One of the groups he works with is Extinction Rebellion. Since this was an interview episode, a research note is a bit tricky to do. So, what I’ve done here is just include the prep notes that I did, to give a sense of themes.

Belief and the Climate Crisis 

Johnathan Safran Foer in We Are the Weather writes about the psychological difficulty that humans experience in truly believing climate science. What he means by that is that many of us know the climate science, but we don’t really believe it – not enough to really change the way that we live in the ways that the climate crisis demands.

One of the threads throughout the book is this question that he raises around his grandmother’s decision to leave her village when the Holocaust was beginning. And the decision of family members who stayed. All of them had access to the same knowledge, but there is something different going on when it comes to really believing it and acting on that belief.

And we see this a lot with the climate crisis, I think: this idea that we are in the middle of the greatest crisis that humankind has ever faced, that we know we have a decade to take radical leaps to prevent runaway climate change.

And yet my life goes on more or less as normal. And I think that’s the way it is for a lot of people. So, I guess my question is: how can we get people to really believe in climate change, in the deep-seated way that we needed to?

Climate Anxiety and Climate Grief

One idea is that we can’t really conceptualize the climate crisis until we acknowledge its ability to kill us. That’s a pretty heavy thing to accept.

Do you experience climate anxiety? How do you deal with it?

Of course, the other side of climate anxiety is climate grief – coping with what we’ve already lost and what we cannot save. I think for me at least, climate grief is harder to cope with than climate anxiety.

What would you say to people that are just starting to confront climate grief, or to even realize that climate grief is a thing?

Which Personal Behaviour Changes Are Best?

Nearly two-thirds of global emissions are linked to direct and indirect forms of human consumption. So, in theory at least, there’s a lot that we can personally do to address the climate crisis.

What, in your view, is the single most important personal behaviour change people can make to address the climate crisis?

Eating a plant-based diet

We’ve talked on the podcast before about the environmental benefits of eating a plant-based diet – whether that means going fully vegan or becoming a ‘flexitarian’ or ‘reducetarian’. By one suggestion, a climate-sensitive flexitarian diet would mean eating about 1.5oz of meat daily (or, about three hamburgers worth per week). And just a reminder from our previous episodes that the world is an animal farm – about 30% of the earth’s land mass is used for animal agriculture or animal feed. Emissions from food production could surge by 87% by 2050.

Robert, you’ve been vegan for a while. Was it the climate crisis that motivated you to become vegan, or something else? What advice would you give to someone who cares about the climate, but who is intimidated about the prospect of going vegetarian or vegan?

I just want to quickly highlight some of the other personal behaviour changes that are often recommended:

Reducing your food waste

GHG emissions associated with food loss and waste is as much as 8-10% of all global emissions.

Composting

By the time this episode comes out, we’ll have already released the zero-waste episode. In that episode we talked about how organic waste is the majority of garbage people throw away. Composting can help us fight climate change because landfilled organic materials produce methane, a super potent GHG.

In an episode on biogas, we talk about the potential for turning food waste into energy!

Driving less, cycling, walking, and taking public transit more

In 2010, the transport sector was responsible for over 25% of global energy demand.

Having kids?

There is one last lifestyle change that I want us to reflect on a bit, and that is having children. A lot of people worry about bringing children into a world that is quite likely going to look a lot worse in a generation than it does today. Others have concerns that producing more humans contributes to the increases in consumption that are causing the climate crisis. What are your thoughts on becoming a parent in the climate change era?

What’s wrong with fighting the climate crisis with personal behaviour changes?

Some articles say that lifestyle changes are the only answer to the climate crisis, while others say that we can’t address climate change through personal behaviour. So, who’s right?

Themes within this: inefficiency (there’s so much we cannot personally control); personal behaviour changes are way easier for some than others; and climate justice, environmental racism.

Do We Need Mandatory Rationing?

A lot of people have used wartime rationing as an example for how personal behaviour can address the climate crisis. For instance, Bill McKibben has said, “it’s not that global warming is like a world war. It is a world war. And we are losing.” The suggestions along this line usually include stuff like marshaling extraordinary public investment to build solar panels, wind farms, electrified public transit, tree-planting et cetera. It could also include meat rations and, more controversially, retreat and re-wilding.

What are some of the benefits and drawbacks of taking a wartime approach to the climate?

As we get closer to 2030, are we running out of other options?

The Green New Deal

One thing that I’ve started to hear a lot in climate discussions is how we need to focus on the opportunities of decarbonization as well as the costs. We often hear this in the context of the Green New Deal.

What is the Green New Deal, in a nutshell? What are some of the benefits that we could achieve from acting collectively on the climate crisis, aside from averting catastrophe?

Learn more about the Green New Deal for Canada.

How to Promote Collective Action Changes

Political scientists love to talk about climate change as a collective action problem. Basically what that means is that the benefits of addressing climate change are diffuse (and mostly in the future), while the costs are specific (and mostly in the present). So, there are huge incentives to free ride, which makes collective action difficult. Or, to put it in the slightly flashier language of journalist Oliver Burkeman: “If a cabal of evil psychologists had gathered in a secret undersea base to concoct a crisis humanity would be hopelessly ill-equipped to address, they couldn’t have done better than climate change”.

We hear this narrative a lot in Canada from climate delayers: that Canada is a small part of the world’s global emissions and we can’t take on climate change, so why bother. What would you say to that?And what about the idea that the world still needs oil, so someone has to supply it? What does collective action on climate look like, from your perspective?

How Can You Support Collective Action?

Vote!

Vote for the candidate that has the best climate stance. If you live in America, the Sunrise Movement identifies Green New Deal champions. What should someone do if they don’t see sufficient climate policies reflected in any of their major parties or candidates?

Sign petitions, write your MP, your MPP, your councillor

Petitions are helpful for advocacy groups, because it helps them talk to politicians. When an advocacy group meets with an MP, it’s a lot easier to get his attention when you can show that people in the constituency care about that issue. The Citizens’ Climate Lobby has good tools for talking about the climate crisis.

Go to climate rallies

Protests make issues visible, and crowd-size matters. Activists often talk about the idea that non-violent revolutions have, historically, usually been successful when they mobilize 3.5% of the population. (From Erica Chenoweth’s research). In September 2019, roughly that percentage of Canadians participated in the climate strike. Do you think anything has changed as a result of recent climate strikes? And if not, why not?

Donate to or volunteer with a climate group of a climate champion candidate

There is a lot you can do with your time as a climate action volunteer: door-knocking, calling, pamphleting, flyering, postering, et cetera. Let’s say a listener is interested in helping out, but showing up at protests isn’t something they’re comfortable with. What would you say to them? What are some helpful ways they could get involved?

Become a citizen climate scientist

If science is your jam, there are ways to get involved as a citizen scientist.

Bring up climate change in your social circles, even if it’s awkward

This is where I think personal behaviour can spur social change, too. Any tips on how to raise the climate crisis with climate agnostics in a way that won’t alienate them.

Personal Behaviour Changes ARE Collective Action Changes

That is why acting matters, even if it is small. Because “the most contagious standards are the ones that we model” (JSF). So be the person at the protest, even if there are only a few hundred people there – even if there are only a dozen people there. Try to reduce your carbon footprint. Go flexitarian, or reducetarian, or vegetarian, or vegan. The people who love you will notice. And when they change, even just a little, it matters.

Also mentioned in the episode:

Wet’suwet’en Solidarity
350.org
Fridays For Future Climate Strikes

Episode 17 - Zero Waste

The Disposable Society

Zero waste, or waste-free, is a reaction to the throwaway society and all of the problems that it has caused. The disposable society, throwaway society or throwaway culture are terms used to describe the overconsumption of short-lived or disposable items over durable goods that can be repaired.

Short-lived or low-quality items include things like fast fashion, as well as planned obsolescence and e-waste. Making things that don’t last very long is a viable business strategy because consumers then need to buy replacements. It is profitable because businesses aren’t held responsible for their product’s end of life. Next, there are also single-use items like plates, cutlery, straws, and bags. And of course there is also the packaging for all of these goods.

Disposable, or single-use, items are actually a pretty new invention. When disposables were introduced in the 1950s, they were touted as a timesaver for housewives.  Around that same time, plastic was introduced into the mainstream market.

A few plastic facts:

●      It has only been 113 years since plastic was first introduced.[1]

●      It has only been 55 years since the first plastic bag was created.[2]

●      We have produced over 320 million metric tonnes of plastic, which is heavier than every human alive combined.[3] And that figure is set to double by 2040.[4]

●      Only 14% of plastic has ever been collected for recycling, and only 5% has actually been recycled (rather than downcycled).[5]

Today, plastic has become so essential to how we live our lives that it has really gotten out of control. Globally, we generate 3.5 million tons of solid waste every day – approximately 10x the amount we produced a century ago. The average American produces 1,500 pounds of trash annually, sending 4.4 pounds of trash to the landfill every day.[6] And that is a problem for climate change because landfills are responsible for 16% of methane emissions in the US.[7]

Single-use plastics are a particular problem because they are so common and used for such a small amount of time. For instance, Coca-Cola produces 120 billion plastic bottles every year.[8] And plastic bags are used for an average of just 15 minutes.[9]

As William McCallum of Greenpeace UK has described it:

…we managed to create a material and use it at unbelievable scale with no plan for how to deal with it afterwards. Single-use plastic cutlery, plastic bags, and plastic-lined coffee cups have become central to our lives – used once for a matter of minutes, they will not break down for hundreds of years. It is untenable to carry on like this: we are consigning future generations to a world in which plastic might outweigh fish in the ocean in 2050.[10]

Most plastic ends up in landfill, but a lot of it also leaks into our water systems, ending up in the oceans. 12.7 million tons of plastic enter the oceans every year,[11] which works out to one garbage truck of plastic entering the ocean every minute.[12] There are an estimated 150 million tons of plastic in the oceans right now, equivalent to 300 of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest tower in the world.[13]

When plastic gets into the oceans, it really messes with ecosystems. Approximately 90% of seabirds have plastic in their stomachs.[14] And plastic ingestion and entanglement are really bad for seabirds and other wildlife. And because plastic is being eaten by everything and everyone, bioaccumulation is a risk for animals at the top of the food chain[15]

The Zero Waste Movement

The Zero Waste, No Waste, or Waste-free movement is essentially 25 years old. Most of the top advocates for zero-waste are (white) millennial women. Some examples include: Kathryn Kellogg (Going Zero Waste), Lauren Singer (Trash is for Tossers and Package Free Shop), Anne-Marie Bonneau (Zero-Waste Chef), and Bea Johnson (Zero Waste Home).

Principles of Zero Waste

In its simplest expression, the zero-waste movement aims to produce zero trash. But even the most ardent waste-free advocate will acknowledge that this is not possible in today’s society. We will always produce some trash, and we will always be complicit in the production of trash we can’t see.

This is why any zero-waste advocate will tell you that part of being zero-waste is making your voice heard – whether that’s political actions like voting, protesting, and talking to your Member of Parliament or smaller actions like writing a makeup company to say that you’ve stopped buying their product because there aren’t refillable options. 

Although recycling is a part of the waste-free movement, going zero-waste actually means recycling less. So, zero waste means reduce, reuse, recycle, and compost, in order of preference.[16]

Reduce

You can reduce by refusing to buy things with lots of packaging and by not buying things unless you really need them. This doesn’t necessarily mean being super austere: it means finding a balance of what you need. A 2015 survey found that more than half of Americans (54%) are overwhelmed with the amount of clutter that they have. Three-quarters (78%) said they did not know what to do with it or found it too complicated to deal with.

Reuse

Go for reusable items instead of single-use items, and durable instead of short-term. Then keep using stuff as long as you can. That means repairing stuff – and when you’re buying, look for things that can be repaired. Also, shop used when you can. And when something can no longer be used for its original purpose, repurpose it. Waste-free advocates often talk about “demoting” items. For example, the last plastic toothbrush I owned I demoted as a cleaning brush. It’s great for cleaning tiles. Basically, be like your grandparents.

Recycle

Recycle, where you can, but do it well: if more than 1% of a batch of recycling is contaminated, the entire thing may end up in landfill.[17] Zero-waste asks you to really look into what you’re recycling.

Compost

About 75-80% of all household trash is organic matter that can be composted, but we mostly aren’t composting it. If your city or town does composting, it can be really easy to do this. I keep a compost bin in my kitchen (food waste) and in my bathroom (for things like tissue, hair, and compostable floss). In a later episode on biogas, we talk about how food waste could be converted into energy, if you want to learn more!

Generally speaking, compostable plastics are not a solution to plastic waste. Very little of it actually gets composted. And in a lot of cases you cannot compost these items in home composting. There are also “biodegradable” plastics that can’t be composted. And nothing biodegrades in a landfill!

How to Become Zero Waste (ish)

Ultimately, going zero-waste will mean replacing some of the tools that you use to meet your daily needs. But it’s counterproductive to trash stuff that you’re currently using in favour of eco-friendly products, so waste-free advocates suggest a slow approach with small improvements.

Start with a waste audit

Go through your trash to see what some of the most impactful swaps could be for you. For me it is definitely snack foods – chips, granola bars – and receipts (which cannot be recycled or composted). 

Say no to stuff you don’t want

As Sarah Lewis of the Zero Waster puts it: “Just Say No to Crap”. This can include things like straws and paper cups. Being clear about your requests in advance is a good way to avoid problems. One easy solution is to put a “no junk mail” sign on your mailbox. When you are at a restaurant or café, be clear and polite but firm about your requests. Usually people are happy to accommodate, but if they aren’t you can choose not to return there in the future.

Gifts are difficult, because there are social customs and emotions involved. Zero-waste advocates generally recommend: (1) talking to your family and friends about why waste-free is important to you and (2) giving them tools to make it easy for them to give gifts that won’t cause problems for you.  Kathryn Kellogg recommends giving friends and family a list of consumables, experiences, and items you’d really value. It is key to do it well in advance. She even recommends adding notes about why you want something, which can help if people want to go off-list.[18] But ultimately, this is a thing you’re doing: if someone gives you a gift, accept it and thank them. The time to raise the issue is much, much later.

Buy things more intentionally

This means buying things only when you really need them. When you do buy something, try to find ways to buy it used or buy it new but built to last (repairable). Try waiting 30 days before purchasing something you want.

Start with some easy waste-free moves

Some of the easiest ways to reduce your waste include:

·      Saying no to straws (unless you need single-use straws for accessibility reasons);

·      Getting (and actually using) reusable bags. Set up a system so that they are with you when you need them; and

·      Getting (and actually using) a reusable water bottle and coffee mug.

When you’re ready, slowly start replacing disposables and short-term items with stuff that is refillable and/or built to last. Start with the problem areas you identified in your waste audit. For consumables, buy in bulk and avoid plastic packaging as much as possible. Glass and metal containers tend to be easier to recycle.

Think about end of life for your goods

Most people already recycle, but they key is to recycle well. Usually, your municipal government will have online tools to help you recycle properly. But it’s important to know that you can recycle things that your city or town will not accept. Increasingly, you can bring short-term items back to the companies that made them for recycling.

Check out Terracycle to see if any of their recycling programs meet your needs. Terracycle is an organization that collects difficult to recycle items in 21 countries. You have to join and look at their specific programs though – they work in partnership with companies. E.g. You can recycle Boom Chicka Pop popcorn bags through Terracycle. Other programs include: Tweed cannabis, several Burt’s Bees products, Europe’s Best frozen fruit and veg packages, e-waste, Nespresso capsules, and much more. Terracycle has public drop-off locations, or you can mail items to them. In the future we’ll do an episode on recycling so we can give it more attention.

Another great way to think about the end life of your consumables is to try composting! If you’re not composting your food, it goes into landfill where it produces methane. That’s because landfills are tightly packed so there isn’t enough oxygen for it to decompose properly. When food waste breaks down in landfill, it releases methane, which is a super potent GHG. Project Drawdown estimates that composting can reduce emissions by 2.3 billion tons over the next 30 years. About 40% of landfill material is organics – so if we all composted we could make a big difference.

And of course, if you are donating a good, be smart about it. Try starting with friends and family. Then, use the tips we suggested in our clothing series!

Try out a waste-free shop

Waste-free stores are shops where all of the products come with either no packaging or recyclable/compostable packaging. They usually have a system where you weigh your container, then you fill it and are charged by weight. Zero-waste stores have opened up in trendy neighbourhoods in the last five years. An article in the Guardian estimated that 100-200 zero-waste stores had opened in the last two years in the UK.

If you are in a medium-large city, there is probably a waste-free shop somewhere. Toronto has a handful of them, for example. There are some online as well: Package Free Shop is great, and I go to it for anything I can’t find in a local waste-free shop.

If there isn’t a waste-free shop in your area, you still have options. Check out Bulk Barn and other bulk stores for food items: it’s cheaper and there is more selection. If you aren’t sure where to find waste-free or bulk stores in your neighbourhood, this tool from Zero Waste Home is helpful. For produce, choose no/low packaging items at a grocery store or farmer’s market. For personal care products, Lush has an array of low/no-waste products.

You can also try “do it yourself” solutions using bulk ingredients. There are lots of recipes out there from all of the zero waste advocates mentioned above. Try one out! Things like cleaning supplies tend to be very easy and accessible to make. Lotions, lip balms, etc. can be super easy too.

Endnotes

[1] McCallum, Will. (2018). How to Give Up Plastic. London, UK: Penguin Life.

[2] McCallum, How to Give Up Plastic.

[3] McCallum, How to Give Up Plastic.

[4] McCallum, How to Give Up Plastic.

[5] McCallum, How to Give Up Plastic.

[6] Kellogg, Kathryn. (2019). 101 Ways to Go Zero Waste. New York: the Countryman Press.

[7] Kellogg, Kathryn. (2019). 101 Ways to Go Zero Waste.

[8] McCallum, How to Give Up Plastic.

[9] Kellogg, 101 Ways to Go Zero Waste.

[10] McCallum, How to Give Up Plastic at p.3-4.

[11] McCallum, How to Give Up Plastic.

[12] McCallum, How to Give Up Plastic.

[13] McCallum, How to Give Up Plastic.

[14] McCallum, How to Give Up Plastic.

[15] McCallum, How to Give Up Plastic.

[16] Kellogg, Kathryn. (2019). 101 Ways to Go Zero Waste.

[17] Kellogg, Kathryn. (2019). 101 Ways to Go Zero Waste.

[18] Kellogg, Kathryn. (2019). 101 Ways to Go Zero Waste.

Episodes 12, 13, and 14 - Clothing

People

Fast Fashion

Fast Fashion has gotten a lot of buzz recently. Hasan Minhaj devoted an entire episode of The Patriot Act to it. CBC did a documentary on fast fashion, called Fashion’s Dirty Secrets. There have also been books published on fast fashion, like Fashionopolis by Dana Thomas or Over-Dressed by Elizabeth Cline.

Zara is often the brand people think about when they think of fast fashion. It is the world’s largest fashion brand, producing more than 450 million items in 2018.[1] Zara was a pioneer in fast fashion, and it has changed the apparel business paradigm. Other retailers have since gotten on board.

Essentially, under the model of fast fashion, brands take designs from top-tier fashion designers. Then they produce a cheaper version with worse fabric and sell it at low prices to middle-market consumers.[2] It’s called fast fashion because production and sales have been sped up.[3] Between 2000 and 2014, the number of garments doubled: 100 billion garments are now produced annually.[4] That amounts to fourteen new garments annually for everyone on the planet.[5]

In a way, fast fashion has democratized or massified fashion – bringing high design to regular consumers. But fast fashion has also caused a lot of problems

As a result of fast fashion, we have lots of poor-quality clothes and we don’t wear them for very long. On average clothing is worn seven times before being disposed of,[6] mostly to landfill. Shoppers buy five times more clothing now than they did in 1980.[7] In 2018, the average consumer bought 68 garments.[8] 

French designer Jean Paul Gaultier has said: “The system doesn’t work… There aren’t enough people to buy them. We’re making clothes that aren’t designed to be worn. Too many clothes kills clothes.”[9]

Offshoring and the Fractured Supply Chain

Another important change, to set the context, has been the globalization of clothing supply chains. This change is often called “offshoring”, which basically means relocating factories in countries with low labour costs. Offshoring has changed the industry dramatically over the last thirty years. In 1991, 56.2% of all clothes purchased in the United States were American-made. By 2012, it was 2.5%.[10]

And today that supply chain is not only offshore, it’s also fractured. Fabric is woven and dyed in one place, cut in another, sewn somewhere else, and then zippers and buttons are attached in another location.[11] Brands rarely own the factories that make their clothes. They contract to suppliers, who often subcontract to other suppliers.

Together, this creates challenges for ensuring workers’ safety and rights. And that matters: “fashion employs one out of six people on the globe, making it the most labor-intensive industry out there – more than agriculture, more than defense. Fewer than 2 percent of them [garment workers] earn a living wage.”[12]

The fashion industry’s supply chain has roughly six stages:

1.     Planting and harvesting the raw materials (e.g., cotton)

2.     Weaving the fibre into cloth

3.     Finishing and shipping the cloth to distributors

4.     Producing the garments

5.     Shipping finished products to the warehouse

6.     Distribution from the warehouse to the storefront

Within each of these stages, there can be different steps. For instance, dyeing isn’t included in here, but it will occur in most cases. For blue jeans the supply chain will also typically include distressing at a washhouse. These steps may occur in different locations.

Sweatshops

The garment industry has had sweatshops since the Industrial Revolution. In the 1830s, the invention of the lockstitch sewing machine made possible mechanization of clothes-making.[13]

Cotton mills in particular were horrorscapes. Both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote about the conditions they observed in cotton mills, where death, mutilation, rape, and illness were common. Engels was so horrified by what he saw that he called mill work a new form of enslavement.[14]

One of the most famous incidents in historical sweatshops was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which took place in 1911. 146 employees died in that fire (123 women and 23 men). The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was NYC’s worst workplace disaster until 9/11.[15]

After a lot of activism, workers’ protections were introduced. In America, Frances Perkins, Labour Secretary under FDR, introduced a number of legislative protections for workers, which cleaned up the manufacturing industry.[16]

Unfortunately, when production moved offshore in the 1990s, “the old-style sweatshop system came roaring back to life.”[17] The EU is still a major apparel exporter, but most garments are exported from Asia. China is the top apparel supplier, followed by the EU, Bangladesh, Vietnam, India, Hong Kong, and Turkey.

Offshore sweatshops today look a lot like the sweatshops of the 1800s and early 1900s. They are hot, unsanitary, dusty, and unsafe. There is often no food or clean drinking water. Workers work long hours for low wages. They often don’t get breaks and are forced to work overtime for no pay. Buildings are often locked. Workers sometimes can’t talk to each other. And as most workers are women while most supervisors are men, sexual assault and rape is endemic.

In wealthy countries like the US and Canada, there are domestic sweatshops, too. When the FDR-era reforms got rid of legal sweatshops, sweatshops became less common – but they didn’t disappear entirely. There are still sweatshops in wealthy countries, but they exist illegally and are run by organized crime. Because of their illicit nature, these sweatshops are also hubs for human trafficking and money laundering. [18] Domestic sweatshops are a particular problem in the US, and especially LA, because of the large undocumented immigrant population. About half of the apparel manufacturing workers in LA are estimated to be undocumented workers who make as little as $4 per day.[19]

Rana Plaza

Beyond the generally shitty working conditions, there are still frequent sweatshop disasters on the same scale or larger than the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

One of the most famous ones took place in Bangladesh in 2013. On 13 April 2013 there was an explosion at the Rana Plaza garment factory. It ripped a hole in the wall. Engineers wanted to condemn the building immediately, but the owner refused.[20] The next day, workers returned. The power went out and, as backup generators went on, the building began to quake. Then, “It went down.”[21] Rana Plaza was the deadliest garment factory accident in modern history. 1,134 people died and another 2,500 were injured.

The infuriating thing, though, is that it was the third high-profile sweatshop disaster in Bangladesh within three years. A December 2010 fire at the That’s It Sportswear garment factory killed 29 and injured more than 100. Gap had just finished inspecting the factory.[22] In November 2012, a fire at the Tazreen Fashion factory killed at least 117 and left 200 injured.[23] Sears, Walmart, and Disney products were produced there. Overall, between 2006 and 2012, more than five hundred Bangladeshi garment workers died in factory fires.[24]

After a 2010 fire, NGOs created the Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Agreement. It went unsigned until winter 2012.[25] Then, a handful of companies signed on when ABC News ran a story on the 2010 fire. Most other brands did not act until after the Rana Plaza explosion. And even then, a number of brands went with a watered-down voluntary agreement called the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, which was not legally binding.

There have been some changes since Rana Plaza, but unsafe sweatshops still exist there.[26] And as of 2017, 95% of buildings in Dhaka still do not have a fire exit. A recent study found that firms support factory safety but aren’t willing to increase prices, so factories have to absorb these costs themselves. And although the incidence of sweatshops went down after Rana Plaza, there are still problems of low wages, long working hours, overtime, abusive supervision, and union busting. The optimistic way of framing this is that activism and public pressure can work, but it needs to be sustained in order to really generate progress.

A garment factory fire in New Delhi killed 43 people in December 2019.

Child Labour

The garment industry is also a hotbed for child labour. Child labour has been an unfortunately common practice in the apparel industry going back to the advent of mechanized clothing production. Lots of sweatshops have children working in them.

For example, in 2016 “H&M, Next, and Esprit were found to have Syrian refugee children sewing and hauling bundles of clothes in subcontracted workshops in Turkey.”[27]

Sometimes children are lured from their homes to work in sweatshops. For instance, a report by the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) and the India Committee of the Netherlands (ICN) found that: “recruiters in southern India convince parents in impoverished rural areas to send their daughters to spinning mills with promises of a well-paid job, comfortable accommodation, three nutritious meals a day and opportunities for training and schooling, as well as a lump sum payment at the end of three years.” (from the Guardian) But in reality, “Girls and young women are being lured from their home villages by false promises and are working under appalling conditions amounting to forced labour” (SOMO and ICN).

Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Pakistan, Thailand, and Uzbekistan are particularly notorious for child labour in the textile and garment industry.

Child labour occurs at different phases of the supply chain, from the production of cotton seeds (Benin), cotton harvesting (Uzbekistan), yarn spinning (India), and “cut-make-trim” garment production in factories (Bangladesh). An investigation by SOMO found that 60% of the workers at spinning mills in India were under 18 when they started working there (the youngest workers were 15).

Forced and child labour in Uzbekistan’s cotton industry is particularly egregious. “Every year […] approximately 1m people – including teachers, doctors and students – are dumped in Uzbekistan’s cotton fields to pick “white gold”. They are taken from their jobs and their schools, sometimes threatened with expulsion or dismissal or physical violence, and compelled to meet quotas to help the government earn some hard cash.” (From the Economist) This is a unique case of state-sanctioned mass mobilization of child and forced labour.

The Uzbekistani government sets cotton quotas. If famers don’t fulfil their quotas they can be kicked off of their land. But farmers can’t afford extra farm hands for harvest, so state officials order state employees (e.g. doctors and nurses) and students into the fields. A study by the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London found that between 86 and 100 percent of schools in the districts that they studied were subject to compulsory recruitment of children in grades 5-9 (ages 11-14). Students were employed in the cotton harvest for between 51 and 63 days without breaks and under unsanitary, unhealthy, and nutritional conditions.

The Responsible Sourcing Network has convinced 314 companies to pledge to eliminate Uzbek cotton from their supply chains. You can check out the list of brands here. As a result of advocacy efforts, the export of Uzbek cotton has been reduced from 2.5 million bales to 0.7 million bales in the last decade. The pledge was launched in 2011. American Apparel, as of December 2019, still has not signed the pledge. It is one of the last remaining American brands to do so. Polo Ralph Lauren is another non-signatory. I also did not see Roots Canada on the list.

Outside of Uzbekistan, child labour in the garment industry may not be state-sanctioned, but this does not make it any less harmful.

Forced Labour

The fashion industry is also one of the biggest sources of modern slavery. The Walk Free Foundation estimates that $127.7 billion USD worth of garments imported annually by G20 countries are at-risk of modern slavery.

Last year it was revealed that China is operating forced labour camps in Xinjiang province. Uighurs detained in “re-education camps” are reportedly working in factories producing cars, cotton, and clothing. Brands so far have said that they haven’t found evidence that the labour in these factories is forced, but investigative journalism has come to a different conclusion.

Women’s Rights and Sexual Assault

Fast fashion is fundamentally a gender inequality issue. Approximately 80% of workers in the garment industry are women between the ages of 18 and 35.

Rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment are big problems in sweatshops. For instance, a study by the Fair Wear Foundation and Care International found that 43% of women interviewed in Vietnamese factories said they had suffered at least one form of violence and/or harassment in the last year. Research by ActionAid found that 80% of garment workers in Bangladesh have either seen or directly experienced sexual violence or harassment in the workplace.

So Why Is Everything So Shitty? 

Here is where the fractured supply chain comes in: when disasters and abuses like these happen, brands often claim that they are not responsible, that the sweatshops in questions were not authorized suppliers. Basically, big brands have approved suppliers, and those approved suppliers subcontract to sweatshops. When a scandal happens, brands that claim to be sweatshop-free will “often claim they had no idea their “approved” contractors were subcontracting to sweatshops.”[28]

Are Things Getting Better?

Not really, no. These problems are fundamental to how fast fashion works: there is a need to get clothes made really quickly and really cheaply. People and the environment inevitably suffer.

There have been some changes, though. The first industry shift was a move toward supplier codes of conduct. In the mid-1990s, American apparel brands faced criticism over offshore sweatshops. “In response, some started drafting “codes of conduct”: a list of standards that a company expects its suppliers to respect.”[29] Levi Strauss approved fashion’s first code of conduct in 1992.[30]

The independent audits that are used to enforce the codes aren’t great. Visits are often announced in advance. And the monitors themselves have no oversight, so things like bribery can happen.[31] Still, this IS progress. In 1998 about 15% of company codes of conduct included freedom of association and collective bargaining, and now nearly all do. [32]

Another big move is transparency: it is becoming more common for brands to publish supplier lists.[33] Fashion Revolution and other NGOs have been instrumental in pushing fashion brands to be more transparent.

How You Can Act to Promote Human Rights in the Clothing Industry

Fashion Revolution

Fashion Revolution promotes a more ethical and sustainable fashion industry. Their manifesto is pretty holistic (it covers dignified work, fair and equal pay, labour rights, cultural appropriation, solidarity, environmental impact, the throwaway culture, transparency and accountability).

Fashion Revolution was founded in reaction to the Rana Plaza disaster. It is most well-known for publishing an annual Transparency Index. But Fashion Revolution also organizes Fashion Revolution Week and runs the #whomademyclothes and #imadeyourclothes campaigns.

Fair Wear

Fair Wear is an organization that is working to promote worker and human rights in garment production. They focus on the sewing, cutting, and trimming processes because those are the most labour-intensive parts of the supply chain. 133 brands have signed onto the Fair Wear Foundation’s Code of Labour Practices. You can check them out here.

Environment

The environmental impact of clothing comes from three different stages of production: the impact of producing the fabrics from which clothing is made; the impact of moving those fabrics around, turning them into garments, and selling them; and the impact of clothing disposal.

Fabrics

Fashion’s environmental footprint is mostly from manufacturing textiles – so, growing or making, then spinning, dyeing, and finishing the fabrics.[34] Examining the environmental impact of clothing means looking at the different fabrics that make up our clothing. The most commonly used fabrics in clothing today are cotton and polyester. They make up 75% of the global fibre market.[35]

Polyester

Polyester is everywhere. It is present in 60% of clothing.[36] There has been a 157% increase in the use of polyester between 2000 and 2016.[37] That is because polyester is the backbone of fast fashion: “it is the cheap, easy-to-produce material that an industry built on low price and speed depends on.”[38]

Polyester is plastic. It is made from fossil fuels, which are non-renewable and contribute to climate change. The demand for polyester and other plastics drives investment in petrochemical refining.[39]

Polyester has a huge waste problem. Because it is plastic, polyester does not readily biodegrade. And we really have no plan for what to do with the massive volumes of polyester we are producing. Right now, only a very small amount of polyester clothing uses recycled plastic, and typically this is from plastic bottles rather than plastic clothing.[40] And of course, go back to our laundry episode to hear more about how it sheds plastic microfibres.

Given that polyester is everywhere, if you want to buy the best version of the stuff, try to seek out recycled polyester or polyester that is certified hazardous substances free.[41]

Other synthetics – Spandex, Nylon, Acrylic, Polyurethane, PVC

There is a variety of synthetic fibres in clothing, and they are all slightly different. Nylon is present in 5% of clothing, making it the second most common synthetic fabric, next to polyester. Acrylic is the third most common synthetic material. It is present in 2% of clothing. It is a cheap alternative to wool. Spandex makes stuff stretchy. Polyurethane is used in things like coatings and faux leather

Most synthetics seem to have problems with carcinogens, and they all take a lot of energy to make.[42] As with polyester, Elizabeth Cline recommends looking for synthetics with safe-chemistry labels, as well as recycled synthetics.[43] She also recommends avoiding all polyvinyl chloride (PVC), which is used for vinyl and some faux leather, since it often includes a chemical that is linked to endocrine disruption.[44]

Cotton

Cotton makes up about a quarter of global fibre production.[45] The majority of cotton is grown in China, India, and the United States.[46]

Cotton can be tricky to grow, so usually it is farmed with a lot of pesticides and fertilized. As a result, cotton uses about 6% of all pesticides, which is more than any other major crop.[47] Twenty percent of insecticides are devoted to producing conventional cotton, even though it is grown only 2.5 percent of the world’s arable land.[48] The WHO has classified 8 out of 10 of America’s most popular cotton pesticides as hazardous.[49] These pesticides can poison workers, as well as the people and environment around cotton farms (when it gets into the air, water, and soil).[50]

Cotton is also super thirsty. Growing one kilo of conventional cotton requires 10,000 litres of water (2,600 gallons). And processing cotton requires even more: about 5,000 gallons for a t-shirt and a pair of jeans.[51] The good news is that organic cotton can be grown with up to 91% less irrigated water than conventional cotton.[52]

And almost 60% of all cotton is grown in water-scarce regions.[53] That means stuff like this happens…

The Aral Sea in Central Asia was once the world’s fourth largest lake, but today it has almost completely dried up. That is because in the 1950s the Soviets began using the rivers that feed the Aral Sea to irrigate surrounding agricultural area. It is a practice that has continued into today. As the Aral Sea has dried, it is releasing salts and carcinogens into the air, which has caused throat cancer and respiratory diseases for people in surrounding villages. How is this relevant to the fashion industry? Well, because the river is being used to irrigate 1.47 million hectares of cotton.

Where you can, try to find organic and/or fairtrade certified cotton, as well as recycled cotton.[54]

Viscose Rayon (Cellulosic Fabric)

This fabric type will show up on labels in a variety of ways, including viscose, rayon bamboo, modal, lyocell, eucalyptus, and Tencel. Some of these are identical and others are slightly different. But basically, all of these fabrics are made by chemically dissolving food from eucalyptus, beech, or bamboo trees; the chemical pulp is then reformed into a fibre.[55]Viscose or rayon (which are the same thing) makes up about 70% of this category of fibres.[56]

Cellulosic fabric and its compatriots are essentially a cheaper cousin to silk or cotton. Cellulosic fabric is also often marketed as ecologically conscious or sustainable, even though it may not be. So, you really have to be careful about greenwash with these fibres. There are some forms of viscose rayon that can be more sustainable (like lyocell).

Cellulosic fibres take a lot of energy to produce and the materials have a higher greenhouse gas impact than the manufacture of polyester or cotton.[57] They also produce a lot of waste: 70% of the tree becomes waste in the manufacturing process.[58]

And cellulosic fabric is driving deforestation. Ancient and endangered forests are being used in the manufacture of these fabrics. This includes the Amazon and Indonesia’s rainforests. But Canada’s boreal forests and Great Bear Rainforest are also being threatened by these practices. The NGO Canopy is working with clothing companies like Levi Strauss & Co., Marks & Spencer, and H & M to protect forests.

If you are going with a cellulosic fibre, try to look for lyocell (also called Lenzig Tencel), since it is the most sustainable cellulosic fabric. Look also for safe-chemicals certifications, and buy from brands that are working with Canopy.[59]

Wool and Leather

Although we did not focus on animal welfare in this episode, it is worth noting the environmental impact of animal-based fibres.

Leather has a big carbon, water, and land use footprint – we’ll do a full episode on leather, but let’s just mention that here.

Wool can be sustainable, or it can be bad for the environment – a lot depends on where it is produced and how the animals are raised.[60] Although there are different wools out there, sheep’s wool is 95% of the market.[61] Cashmere comes from goats.[62] Wool production can cause erosion when animals overgraze.[63] Cleaning raw wool creates high quantities of wastewater.[64] Also, it produces a lot of methane.[65] On the other hand, wool lasts longer than most other fabrics, so Elizabeth Cline recommends buying timeless wool products and mending them to make them last.[66] She also suggests buying organic and safe-chemicals-certified wool.[67]

Check out our Winter Gear episode to learn more about choosing between animal and synthetic materials.

Bast Fibres (Linen, Hemp, Jute, Ramie, Flax): Best Fibres

Linen is the oldest known fabric. It is a natural fibre, cultivated from the flax (linseed) plant. Together, bast fibres are about 5.5% of the global fibre market.[68] Bast fibres use less energy and fewer chemical inputs, so these fibres can be cultivated sustainably.[69] There are few environmental issues with purchasing these fabrics, but why not also look for recycled or organic bast fibres?[70]

Buying Conscious Fabrics

Whichever fibre you choose, there are a few certifications that you can look for to signal effort on one aspect of environmental stewardship.

The first set of certifications are safe-chemicals certifications, which guard against the use of hazardous materials. Some common safe-chemicals certifications include: Cradle to Cradle (C2C) Oeko-Tex, and Bluesign-approved.

Next, organics standards prohibit the use of pesticides. Some organics labels to look for in clothing include: Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS), Organic Content Standard (OCS), and Cradle to Cradle (C2C) certified.

You can also look for fairtrade member and certified products. Fairtrade essentially means that the workers producing a product have been paid fairly and experience some level of safety in the workplace. See our sugar episode for more on fairtrade certification, but one label we will mention here is Fair Trade USA.

Garment Production and Distribution

Water Use

The fashion industry uses a lot of water. “If fashion production maintains its current pace, the demand for water will surpass the world’s supply by 40 percent by 2030.”[71]

Emissions

Fashion also has a big emissions footprint. Apparel and footwear production accounts for 8.1% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. And clothing production is growing at a swift pace, meaning that emissions from textile manufacturing are projected to grow by 60% by 2030.

Some companies try to use carbon offsets to improve their image, check our episode on this subject to see where we land on that.

Pollution and Hazardous Chemicals

We talked about plastic microfibres in our laundry episode. But it is worth remembering that synthetic fabrics pollute waterways when they break down in the washing machine.

In addition to plastic microfibres, toxic chemicals are a big problem in the clothing industry. 46 million tons of chemicals are used to process textiles annually, and ten percent pose a potential risk to human health.[72] Some are even linked to cancer.[73]That is a problem for worker health and the environment, as well as for us because chemicals can remain on the clothing that we buy.

In 2011 Greenpeace released a report revealing that suppliers of major clothing brands are polluting the Yangtze and Pearl River deltas with toxic, hormone-disrupting chemicals. The report focuses on pollution from two facilities in China (the Youngor Textile Complex and the Well Dyeing Factory Limited). Greenpeace took samples of wastewater discharges from the two facilities and found that alkylphenols and perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs) were present in the wastewater. These two facilities were linked to major brands including Abercrombie and Fitch; Adidas; Bauer Hockey; Calvin Klein; Converse; H&M; Lacoste; Nike; and Puma.

Greenpeace followed up this report with another one on the presence of nonylphenol ethoxylates (NPEs) in clothing. Their analysis of clothing bought from 15 leading clothing brands, and found that two-thirds tested positive for the presence of NPEs above the limit of detection.

Why are NPEs bad? NPEs wash off of the clothing and break down into nonylphenols, which then accumulate in the food chain. Nonylphenols are hella toxic. So even though NPEs are banned in some places… they can still end up in the water supply when people wash clothing produced with NPEs elsewhere.

Tools for Seeking Out Conscious Brands

If you are interested in finding conscious brands, there are some tools out there to help!

The Good on You App and website rates the ethics and sustainability of fashion brands. Done Good is a web directory of conscious fashion brands. You can buy directly from the website. Rank A Brand assesses and ranks consumer brands on sustainability and social responsibility. There is, of course, also Fashion Revolution’s Fashion Transparency Index, which focuses on supply chain transparency. (For more on this, see our very first episode!) And you can also consult the Ethical Fashion Report. 

End-of Life

We, as a society, are throwing out so many clothes. Every second, the equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles enters landfill or is burned, which amounts to a $500 billion USD loss in value due to clothing waste. In the United States, 23.8 billion pounds of clothes are thrown in the garbage annually, which is about 73 pounds per person![74] Clothing is the fastest-growing category of waste in US landfills.[75]

In addition to the problem of waste from landfilling clothes, this can be an environmental problem. Natural fibres slowly decompose. When they are trapped in the landfill, they release methane, which is super bad for climate change.[76] Synthetic clothing can take hundreds of years to biodegrade, but the hazardous chemicals they are made out of can be released into the air or ground as they slowly break down.[77] For every 2 million tons of textiles we keep out landfills, we can reduce carbon emissions equivalent to taking 1 million cars off the road.[78]

Escaping Fast Fashion

Trying to incorporate ethics in clothing can be overwhelming. But the overall message to take is that we do need to reject the mentality of fast fashion, since the business model itself is causing a lot of problems.

More than 70% of the average wardrobe is going unworn.[79] Being more intentional about your wardrobe is an important first step. And, of course, just wearing what you have for longer is the biggest way to have an impact. But if you’ve got a fast fashion wardrobe full of shitty materials that wear out quickly, that can be tricky. So, what do you do?

You can work towards building a conscious closet.

The Conscious Closet

What is a conscious closet? According to Elizabeth Cline, author of The Conscious Closet: “A conscious closet is a wardrobe built with greater intention and awareness of our clothes, where they come from, what they’re made out of, and why they matter.”[80]

There are lots of different tools and strategies to build a conscious closet, and the mix that works best for you will be different than for everyone else. But Cline identifies three Fashion Personality Types that can help to guide you. Minimalists buy for keeps, have a more timeless look, and want to cut clutter from their lives. Style Seekers are maximalists; they want statement pieces and lots of change. Traditionalists are somewhere in the middle.

There are six components of a conscious closet:

1.     For-keeps: clothes you already own, love, and want to keep wearing;

2.     New-to-you: swapped, borrowed, handmade, hand-me-downs, resale, secondhand, thrifted, vintage;

3.     Rentals;

4.     Quality: timeless pieces that are built to last;

5.     Better Big Brands: clothes by the big brands that are on the right path, compared to their peers; and

6.     Conscious Superstars: the most pioneering, ethical, and sustainable brands.

Conscious Closet Inventory and Cleanout

Cline suggests starting with a Conscious Closet Cleanout, which is a good way to really examine what you own, how often you wear it (if at all), what it’s made of, et cetera. But this isn’t like Marie Kondo-ing your wardrobe. Cline wants to emphasize that you should not throw anything away.

We reproduced this impact inventory card from Elizabeth Cline’s book, The Conscious Closet.

Here are some quick tips for doing a conscious closet cleanout. First, purge by season. Focus on in-season clothes only. So, look at sweaters in winter and sundresses in summer. Your decision-making will be better this way. Also, it will be easier to responsibly deal with end-of-life (donation etc.) if the clothing is in-season. Next, if you love it, keep it. Don’t shame yourself for things you’ve already bought. Building a conscious closet takes time. Third, pay attention to what you wear most, and why they make you happy.

Eventually you will want to find your magic wardrobe number – how many clothes you need, which will be different for everyone. Cline suggests that minimalists can be happy with 50 pieces or fewer, but style seekers might want 250+ items and that’s okay. You can use a fashion fast or a capsule wardrobe to get a better sense of what your number is. De-cluttering your wardrobe is an important element of building a conscious closet, but you don’t want to go too far.

When deciding what to get rid of, here are a few tips. Aim for balance and look for things that go together. Look for pieces that don’t go with anything else. Then, either find a way to make them work or prune them. Cut back on trendy pieces. Learn from items you’ve never worn. When you are eliminating bad fabrics, focus on which fabrics wore out more quickly and what brands produced them. If you are even a little unsure, keep the item for a while and give it another go. And repair items if you can!

Reuse Plan

When you are getting rid of clothes, how do you deal with it responsibly? Cline calls this a “Reuse Plan”.

There are four different ways that you can consciously get rid of clothes, but you need to really think about the item, and which is the best fit.

1.     Donate or give away: do that when clothes are in a clean and wearable condition.

2.     Sell or swap: do this for your highest-value, on-trend, and in-season pieces when they are in pristine condition.

3.     Repair: do it where you can and either keep it for yourself or put it in one of the first two categories.

4.     Recycle: when items are worn-out beyond repair, do this.

Donations

Charities only sell about 20-25% of what we donate. The rest gets exported overseas or downcycled (turned into mattress stuffing, insulation, or rags). [81]

Exporting clothes sounds nice, but it is actually a big problem. Used clothes exports have tripled in fifteen years – the US exports 1.7 billion pounds of clothes annually.[82] Most exported clothes go to sub-Saharan Africa, where second-hand dealers distribute and sell it.[83]Although this sounds nice, the volume and low quality of the apparel that is donated means that those second-hand dealers aren’t able to make a living anymore; many are living in extreme poverty.[84] And ultimately a lot of this stuff ends up as garbage. One NGO found that 40% of all used clothing imported to Ghana is immediately landfilled rather than worn or resold.[85]

So, how can you donate effectively? Investigate first: make sure that you are giving to a reputable charity. Vet clothing donations bins. You can do this by looking for bins that are clearly marked with the organization’s name and going to their website. Find out what their acceptance policies are and where they send the clothes that they collect. Depending on what you are donating, you can often donate directly to those in need: homeless shelters, crisis centres, and churches. If you can meet a direct clothing need, this can help assure that your donation won’t end up in a landfill.

For example, Kristen’s building has a Diabetes Canada bin. The website says that their clothes are collected by the linked social enterprise National Diabetes Trust. It delivers clothing to Value Village, though, and they are not transparent about where unsold clothing goes. Kristen didn’t love this option.

Dress for Success Toronto is a charity that provides support, professional attire, and tools to help women achieve economic independence. Dress for Success international has a high (91.4%) charity rating. Kristen ultimately decided that this was the best option for the item she wanted to donate (a pair of dress pants).

It is also crucial that you follow basic used clothing etiquette. First and foremost: always, always, always clean your clothes first. It’s the best way to keep them from ending up as trash. Remove personal belongings from pockets. And tie your shoelaces together! That way the shoes don’t lose each other when they go through re-sorting. You should also mend and repair donated clothing whenever possible. Tears and stains often result in immediate landfilling: usually clothes aren’t getting repaired by the second-hand market. And never leave your donations outside unattended, because they can get rained on and then they will be landfilled.

Recycling

Most clothes are recycled through downcycling: the clothes you recycle are turned into lower-quality products like rags or insulation. That doesn’t solve the waste problem because these still eventually end up in a landfill. But it does increase the length of their lifespan, and that is good.

There are companies working on recapturing cotton that can be used again in exactly the same way as virgin fabrics, which is neat. Hopefully in the future that will be possible and affordable!

For now, though, how do you recycle clothes responsibly? If you are donating your clothes to major charities or thrift shops, a lot of it is likely already being recycled.[86] But ask to make sure! Kristen asked her local Value Village and found out that they do not do this: unsold items get shipped to Africa, where they are most likely landfilled.

There are also in-store garment recycling options. Brands (like Patagonia) sometimes will recycle or repair their own clothing, taking responsibility for end-of-life. A few other brands offer to take and recycle clothing of all brands. Depending on where you live, you may also be able have municipal clothes recycling, so look into this.

In Toronto, where Kristen lives, there is not a municipal clothes recycling program. But H&M, American Eagle, Puma, and North Face all have recycling programs that will accept any brand of clothing. All four brands use the same company (I:CO) to sort and reprocess the clothes, so is very likely that it makes no difference which of these programs you use. Clothes donated through this program are most likely to be downcycled, assuming they are in good enough condition.

Selling and Swapping

If you want to resell your clothes, you have a few options. You can use an online service that takes on the process of selling clothes for you, like thredUP and the RealReal. You can try to sell clothes yourself online through websites like Poshmark. Or you can sell in person through consignment stores.

The types of clothing that do well in the resale market include: on-trend and recent purchases; luxury and designer brands; and in-season items. If you bought something but never wore it and the tags are still on, resale might be a good option – especially if it is from a high-end brand.

Bypass resale if your clothes are damaged; if they are basics; or if they are kids’ clothes, menswear, or workwear. These do not sell well.

You can also organize a clothing swap with friends or a community group. Cline has some suggestions in her book for setting up a clothing swap. But here is another article with quick tips.

Clothes Rentals

Clothing rentals can be a great option if you are the kind of person that needs a lot of trendy pieces in your wardrobe. There are lots of options for renting from clothes rental companies, as well as a few where you can rent items from your wardrobe.  

There are basically two different kinds of clothing rental options: onetime rentals and monthly subscription plans. Rental companies will clean and repair clothes, so no worries there. With rentals, there are shipping and packaging concerns to think about. But this is minimal in comparison to the environmental impact of making clothes.

Your location will determine what your clothes rental options are. In Toronto, there are a few companies.

Dresst is a Toronto-based clothing rental subscription company. When you purchase a membership, you can rent a set number of items for each month. At the end of the month you return the item(s) and they clean it and rent it to someone else. Dresst charges $49/month for one item or $99/month for three items.

Fitzroy is a dress rental company in Toronto. If you are in need of a luscious party gown, this is a great option. Most of the rentals were around $100.

Reheart is a rental website where you can lend or rent. As a lender you get a cut of the profits from renting your item (less than 50%, but Reheart deals with cleaning et cetera). It can be a good way to de-clutter.

Escaping fast fashion is about valuing your clothes more, from the time you are deciding whether to purchase (or rent) them until you have responsibly disposed of the item. Try to think about clothes as an investment, rather than something disposable. Ultimately, you’ll save money and love your wardrobe more!

Endnotes

[1] Thomas, Dana. (2019). Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes. New York: Penguin Press at p.1.

[2] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.31.

[3] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.31.

[4] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.34.

[5] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.35.

[6] Thomas, Fashionopolis.

[7] Thomas, Fashionopolis.

[8] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.3.

[9] Cited in Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.36.

[10] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.5.

[11] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.35.

[12] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.6.

[13] Thomas, Fashionopolis.

[14] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.45.

[15] Thomas, Fashionopolis.

[16] Thomas, Fashionopolis.

[17] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.47.

[18] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.41.

[19] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.40.

[20] Thomas, Fashionopolis.

[21] Shila Begum, worker at Rana Plaza, quoted in Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.57.

[22] Thomas, Fashionopolis.

[23] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.55.

[24] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.54.

[25] Thomas, Fashionopolis.

[26] Thomas, Fashionopolis.

[27] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.6.

[28] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.42.

[29] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.50.

[30] Thomas, Fashionopolis.

[31] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.51.

[32] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.65.

[33] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.65.

[34] Cline, Elizabeth. (2019). The Conscious Closet: The Revolutionary Guide to Looking Good While Doing Good. NY: Penguin Randomhouse.

[35] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[36] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.199.

[37] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.199.

[38] Cline, The Conscious Closet at p.162.

[39] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[40] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[41] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[42] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[43] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[44] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[45] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[46] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[47] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[48] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.70.

[49] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.70.

[50] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[51] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.71.

[52] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[53] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[54] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[55] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[56] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[57] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[58] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[59] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[60] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[61] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[62] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[63] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[64] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[65] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[66] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[67] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[68] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[69] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[70] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[71] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.71.

[72] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[73] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[74] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[75] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[76] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[77] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[78] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[79] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[80] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[81] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.194.

[82] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[83] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[84] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[85] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[86] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

Episode 10 - Sugar

This episode featured the inimitable Alexandra Sundarsingh, a PhD student in the History Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Lex is an historian of food, migration, and labour. She is also part of the Canadian debate illuminati, which is how she and Kristen became friends. Lex highly recommends that you check out the book Sweetness and Power by Sidney W. Mintz – which Lex drew on for some of the information in this episode. (Actually, Lex wants you to gift this book to pretty much everyone you know; we’d endorse that).

We were really excited to link Lex’s expertise on the history of sugar to some of the present-day practices of the sugar industry. So, the research note below focuses primarily on modern human rights abuses in the sugar industry. There is also some information about sugar and the environment, which Kristen collected but did not discuss – like, y’all, we had been recording for two hours and we thought, ‘Let’s maybe save this for a future episode.’ But we’ve put the notes here just in case you want to know what we found.

Background

What is sugar?

Sugar (sucrose) is produced from two major sources: sugarcane and sugar beets. We did not talk about corn syrup (fructose) in this episode, but it could have (probably will have) an entire episode to itself. We also didn’t talk about maple syrup.

Sugarcane is a grass that reaches 10-20 feet. It grows in warm, humid conditions, typically near the equator. It is a perennial. Sugar beet is a 3-5 pound off-white root crop. It can grow in temperate climates with warm days and cool nights. More than 145 million tonnes of sugar is produced annually in 120 countries.

Here are some different kinds of sugar:

·      Granulated sugar: pure sucrose, the most common form of sugar;

·      Icing sugar: powdered granulated sugar with cornstarch to prevent caking;

·      Brown sugar: produced by crystallizing the golden coloured syrup (before purification?) or mixing molasses syrups with white sugar

·      Liquid sugar

·      Other specialty sugars (e.g. plantation raw, organic)

How is sugar made?

Sugar-making is a multifaceted process. Briefly, here are the steps of the process:

·      Sugar plants are cultivated and harvested;

·      Then they are washed and sent to sugar refineries for processing;

·      Processing sugar starts by slicing sugar beets or crushing sugar cane;

·      Then the sugar is extracted by essentially stewing the sugar in hot water to make a juice;

·      Next, the pulp is removed;

·      Then the sugar is purified using a lime solution and concentrated by boiling it at a low temperature;

·      After a thick juice is produced, it is crystallized, spun in a centrifuge, and dried/cooled;

·      Finally, the sugar is packaged and distributed.

There’s a really good video on sugar beet production from How It’s Made. If you are interested in making your own, here is a link to a DIY process. To be honest, though, it seems a lot less efficient than the manufacturing process. But hey, if you’ve got sugar beets on-hand, you do you. The fibre that remains as a by-product of the sugar refining process is used to generate electricity, or it can be manufactured into paper goods or pelletized for animal feed.

Where does our sugar come from?

Most of the sugar that we consume (60-70%) worldwide comes from cane sugar, while the remainder is from sugar beet. Depending on where you live, that proportion can be very different. Fun fact: sugar beet rose in popularity as a result of a blockade of French trade lines during the Napoleonic wars.

The top five global sugar cane producers are Brazil, India, China, Thailand, and Pakistan. If we’re talking about both kinds of sugar, the only major change is that the EU takes third place. Brazil alone accounts for more than half (52%) of the world’s sugar market. 

Almost all Canadian sugar (90%) is from imported raw cane sugar. The remaining 10% is beet sugar, mostly from Alberta. When we import the raw cane sugar, it is processed by Canadian refineries in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver.

Albertan sugar beets are processed by a Canadian company called Rogers Lantic – the product of a recent merger of an east coast sugar company (Lantic) and a western Canadian company (Rogers). All Canadian sugar beets are processed by a refinery in Taber, Alberta. If you’re buying Rogers sugar with a black stamp on the bag that starts with the number 22, you’re buying Albertan beet sugar. There is also some sugar beet production in Ontario near a processing plant in Michigan.

Canada’s sugar industry is essentially dominated by Rogers-Lantic and Redpath Sugar. There are Canadian sugar refineries in Quebec, Ontario, Alberta, and BC. Aside from the Taber facility in Alberta, Canadian sugar refineries all process cane sugar.

Labour Abuses and the Sugar Industry

Human rights and cane sugar farming

Historically, sugar cane has well-documented links to slavery. But what are the practices today? Well, in short: it’s not great. Child labour, forced labour, and bonded labour are still prominent facets of sugarcane cultivation today.

Children between the ages of five and fifteen are engaged in child labour on sugar plantations. They may work as unpaid family helpers or migrate with their parents to find work on commercial plantations during harvest season. In El Salvador, for example, Human Rights Watch found that nearly all of the boys aged fourteen and older harvested sugarcane. And it’s important to remember that this is dangerous work.

Sugarcane may be produced using forced labour in Bolivia, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Myanmar, Pakistan, India, and Guatemala, according to Know the Chain. In Brazil, there are approximately 25,000 – 100,000 people in slavery, virtually all of whom are involved in agricultural work. Sugarcane production is one of the major sources of Brazilian slave labour. Most slaves work on estates in the extremely remove eastern Amazon region, occurring out of view of the population. As researcher Justin Campbell describes:

“Enslavement typically begins with a hired contractor, known as a gato, who recruits impoverished men from the slums of large cities or poor, rural villages. By offering cash up front and the promise of decent wages, he is able to entice these men to leave their homes for work on a distant estate. The men are then driven hundreds or thousands of miles to a remote ranch or plantation, where they are informed that they are in debt for the costs of transportation, food provided on the trip, and even tools. The debts are never erased; the illiterate workers have little recourse and are thus enslaved.”[1]

Research by the Conversation found that even among Bonsucro-certified sugar mills in Brazil (where workers are required to provide at least the legal minimum wage) workers’ earnings fall short of what is needed for a decent standard of living. Sugarcane is sometimes called the “hunger crop” for the poverty experienced by plantation workers.

And more generally, sugarcane workers experience negative health impacts. There was recently an epidemic of kidney disease across Central America, with rates rising by as much as 41% in some places (Nicaragua; 27% in Guatemala; 26% in El Salvador; 16% in Costa Rica). The suspected cause was heat stress from working in unsafe conditions on sugarcane plantations.

Canadian sugar beets and Japanese-Canadian internment

Canadian history: so fun! So many human rights abuses! Did you know that some of the Japanese-Canadians that were interned during WWII were forced to work on beet sugar farms? Well, they were. About 4,000 Japanese-Canadians were sent to work on sugar beet farms in Alberta and Manitoba to fill labour shortages (of about 12,000 total interned). Fuck you, William Lyon Mackenzie King.

Canadian sugar beets and the exploitation of Indigenous people

From the 1940s to the 1980s, thousands of Indigenous families were recruited to work on sugar beet farms across the prairies. Essentially, farmers would go into northern Métis reserved to offer families work harvesting sugar beets. Labour conditions were horrendous – 12-14 hour shifts with no food or water and very low pay. Living conditions were just as bad. In some cases, families received no accommodations and slept in their trucks. In other cases, they slept in tents. Indigenous workers were also subject to racism. Families continued to return because they had few other alternatives. The Department of Indian Affairs would cut off social assistance and apprehend children if they did not work on the sugar beet farms.

This practice only stopped when journalists with the Winnipeg Tribune exposed the labour conditions in Winnipeg in 1975. After that, Indigenous farm workers organized to demand better conditions. That struggle, in combination with the availability of farm machinery, ended the practice in the mid-1980s. (So yeah white Canadians did effectively nothing)

Labour practices on beet sugar farms today

What about human rights and sugar beets? We were not able to find a lot on this, but sugar beet farming today is mostly mechanized, so the labour practices are likely not so bad. However, this does prompt an ethical question of whether the guise of buying ethical – which if you’re buying beet sugar means buying from the global north – is perpetuating international income divides. That’s a tricky ethical question and at some point in the future we want to give it a full episode, because it’s a theme that we expect will recur.

For now, though, we’ll say this: we don’t think that buying beet sugar (or switching to substitutes like maple syrup) is really the right way to approach the problem. Definitely, switching to stevia is a bad way to go (see below). Instead, we think the best you can do is to: (1) support fair trade sugar and (2) support political change. More on fair trade later.

Labour practices in Canadian sugar refineries

It was tricky to find information about labour practices on sugar refineries. At least some sugar refinery workers are unionized, though. Lantic Roger’s Sugar workers in Taber, Alberta are unionized through UFCW (local 383); Lantic Suger workers in Montreal also unionized; and workers at Redpath sugar refinery in Belleville also unionized through UFCW. So even though labour issues might come up at sugar refineries, when we’re talking about labour abuses in sugar we are usually talking about sugar extraction – and mostly sugarcane extraction.

Environment and Sugar

The environmental impact of cultivating and processing sugar includes: loss of natural habitats; water use; agro-chemical use, discharge, and run-off; and air pollution (according to a study by WWF). Because sugarcane deteriorates as soon as it is harvested, it needs to be quickly transported to a refinery; in contrast, sugar beets can be stored for months.

Land use

We were unfortunately not able to find much on whether sugarcane or sugar beets are relatively more land intensive. Articles seemed to point to the fact that both divert land use. A European sugar lobby (le Comité Européen des Fabricants de Sucre) study found that sugar beets are 50% less land intensive, but this is a pretty biased source (Europeans grow sugar beet).

In 2019, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro lifted a ban on cultivating sugarcane in the Amazon rainforest and other areas of primary forest. This surprised even the sugarcane industry, which views the move as an unnecessary reputational risk. Sugarcane in Brazil is used for biofuel as well as sugar. Bolsonaro’s decision has been uniformly criticized by environmental groups. Sugarcane plantations threaten biodiversity and can cause deforestation.

Water use

Producing a 0.5 litre bottle of pop uses between 170 and 310 litres of water. Less than 1% of this is from the actual water in the final product. Most of the rest (95%) comes from the supply chain. A large portion of this comes from sourcing the sugar.

Sugarcane is a more water-intensive crop than sugar beet:

●      1 kg of sugar from sugarcane = 390 gallons of water

●      1 kg of sugar from sugar beets = 243 gallons of water

Oftentimes, to grow sugar producers will siphon water from local populations in water-stressed regions.

Air pollution

Harvesting process for sugarcane involves torching the fields to strip the crop of leaves. That causes air pollution.

Emissions

There is a lot more variability in how emissions-intensive sugar beets are, compared with sugar cane. At the high end, sugar beets and sugarcane are comparable. At the low end, sugar beets have a smaller carbon footprint. One of the big factors underlying this gap is transportation. Sugar beet is processed directly into white sugar (fewer steps than cane sugar) and generally at nearby factories.

Sustainability Labels for Sugar

Want to buy sustainable sugar? Here is some information about the ecolabels you might see.

Rainforest Alliance certification

Sustainable Agriculture Standard includes rules on biodiversity conservation; improved livelihoods and human wellbeing; natural resource conservation; and effective planning and farm management systems

Bonsucro certification

Bonsucro is a sustainability standard for sugar cultivation and processing. Producers must adhere to seven principles: obey the law; respect human rights and labour standards; manage efficiency to improve sustainability; manage biodiversity and ecosystem; continuously improve; adhere to EU directives; and organization of farmers (smallholder standard only).

Fairtrade

What is fair trade?

Fair trade is a set of movements, campaigns, and initiatives that have emerged in response to the negative effects of globalization, especially the often unjust and inequitable nature of international trade.[2] Fair trade began as a small church and Third World solidarity movement in the early postwar period.[3] Generally speaking, fair trade standards include values like decent and safe work, fair prices for producers, and sustainability

What fair trade labels are out there, and which is best?

There are five recognized fair trade labels: Fair Trade International (certified by FLOCERT); Fair Trade USA (certified by SCS Global Services); Fair for Life (certified by Institute for Marketecology (IMO)); the World Fair Trade Organization (a membership organization that recognizes its members by determining their adherence to 10 principles of fair trade); and the Fair Trade Federation (which is similar to WFTO).

Artificial Sweeteners

There are a bunch of artificial sweeteners out there, and we’ll do an episode on them sometime. But we do want to talk briefly about biopiracy and one artificial sweetener – Stevia – because it came up in the episode.

Stevia – Product of Biopiracy

Stevia is actually a product of biopiracy. Stevia rebaudiana is a plant native to eastern Paraguay and Brazil. Indigenous Guaraní peoples have traditionally used it to sweeten tea and medicine. In the late 1800s, stevia was identified in Western science as a sweetener.

Stevia is commercialized as steviol glycosides, which are ‘high-intensity’ sweeteners. Actually, it is not legal to sell Stevia leaves in EU, US, or Swiss markets. That is essentially because there has been little commercial interest in pursuing an approval process for Stevia leaves. Whereas steviol glycosides have been approved. “In practice this means that the products of large multinational corporations are able to access markets far more easily than products based on the traditional use of whole stevia leaves” (from the Bitter Taste of Stevia). Which is especially fucked because companies will play up the “natural” character of Stevia

The Guaraní have received negligible benefits from the global market for Stevia. This is in violation of their right to benefit from the use of stevia, as established under the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Nagoya Protocol. Today Stevia is grown in many countries outside of Paraguay. China is now the main producer and exporter of Stevia leaves. Stevia is primarily produced by smallholder farmers.

“In Paraguay, the average smallholder producer has only 5-10 ha of arable land available, and cultivates Stevia in crop rotation with other crops such as cotton, cassava, sesame or soy bean. Similarly, in China, Stevia is typically produced by contracted smallholders on plots of […] 667 square metres” (from the Bitter Taste of Stevia).

The largest Stevia (steviol glycosides) producers are the multinational corporations Cargill, Stevia First, and DSM. There is currently an effort to produce steviol glycosides through synthetic biology (SynBio) instead of producing them from leaves. Essentially, that would mean that you wouldn’t need to cultivate stevia farms to produce steviol glycosides. If that happens it could hurt smallholder farmers in Paraguay and elsewhere.

Sugary Drinks

Ethical Consumer recommends reducing packaging and food miles by making your own sugar at home, using Fairtrade and organic ingredients

But SodaStream has some of its own issues. It has been criticized for being complicit in Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights because of its operations in the West Bank. And it was recently bought by Pepsi, which has a number of ethically questionable practices.

Call to Action

Looking for something concrete that you can do? We’ve already recommended a few actions above. As a reminder, you can always seek out more ethical sugar by buying fair trade. It is also important to help keep human rights in the sugar industry on our political radar: tell your friends about what you’ve heard; stay informed; sign petitions and support organizations (like Know the Chain and Human Rights Watch) that work to uncover human rights abuses in sugar and elsewhere. But here’s one action we would recommend taking right now: contact your MP and ask them why Canada hasn’t ratified the Nagoya Protocol.

Endnotes

[1] Campbell, Justin. (2008). A Growing Concern: Modern Slavery and Agricultural Production in Brazil and South Asia. Human Rights and Human Welfare, https://www.du.edu/korbel/hrhw/researchdigest/slavery/agriculture.pdf, p.131-2.

[2] This is from an edited volume: Raynolds, Laura, Murray, Douglas, and Wilkinson, John. (eds.). (2007). Fair Trade: The Challenges of Transforming Globalization. NY: Routledge.

[3] Ibid.

Kyla’s Notes

An interesting and well-sourced article with more on how sugar affects the brain.

An idea of average sugar intake.

More on the Maple Syrup Heist.

More info on residential schools.

Even more info on residential schools, from Secret Life of Canada, a podcast we love.

Episode 09 - Veganuary

Veganism as a Set of Ideas and a Movement

History of veganism

The term veganism was coined in 1944 by a British guy named Donald Watson and a small group of non-dairy vegetarians. When they were creating the word vegan, they also suggested: dairyban, vitan, benevore, neo-vegetarian, sanivores, and beaumangeur.

And that is how the Vegan Society came to be founded. Veganism is, as self-described, “A philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans, animals, and the environment.” Veganism is still a bit more of a fringe lifestyle, which is why it is so much harder – whereas almost every restaurant today will have a vegetarian option that is not always true for vegans.

History of Veganuary

Veganuary is a campaign started by a British charity with the same name that was founded in 2014. In 2019, the nonprofit says that 250,000 people took the pledge to try a vegan diet. Veganuary also draws participation from 500 companies, and it has become a hub for launching plant-based products and menus. Veganuary is also supported by Joaquin Phoenix, who lobbied for the all-vegan menu at this year’s Golden Globes. The campaign also aims to raise awareness and to mobilize people into a mainstream vegan movement.

Why veganism?

Although there is a wide spectrum of vegans that have different justifications for their lifestyle choice, most vegans view animal welfare as one of the main reasons behind their choice. From an animal welfare perspective, vegans argue that vegetarianism just doesn’t cut it: dairy and egg family can be just as bad or worse for animal welfare.

The strongest version of the argument says that we shouldn’t use animals as an end at all – so some vegans view it as wrong to even, say, shear a very happy sheep for wool. But most vegans focus on the very real contemporary horrors of our modern food, clothing, and cosmetics industries. The famous historian Yuval Noah Harari (author of Sapiens and Homo Deus), called animal farming “the worst crime in history”.[1]

And many vegans explicitly take aim at the idea that humane meat is possible. Many of today’s “humane” standards, like cage-free eggs, still leave animals in cruel conditions.  

What about wild game? A lot of vegans have ethical issues with killing animals at all, but many will grant that this is a lesser harm than factory farming. However, from an environmental perspective, vegans will often point out that it would be impossible to feed the planet if everyone was consuming this kind of ‘humane’ meat (at least, in anywhere near the quantities that we do today). So, in some sense buying wild game or humane meat from local organic farms is a kind of modern indulgence for privileged aspects of society.

Veganism and whiteness

But the vegan movement has run into some issues of its own when it comes to race and inclusivity. 

For Indigenous people, hunting is a traditional way of life. Especially given the trauma that has been inflicted upon these populations continually since colonization, the ability to connect to traditions is an important part of cultural healing and resilience. Indigenous peoples will also point out that environmental stewardship and respect for the land and animals is embedded in their cultural traditions. So, from their perspective hunting is a morally justifiable part of their way of life. It’s also a crucial component of food sovereignty for Indigenous communities.

This is where vegan activists have sometimes come into conflict with Indigenous people. From an Indigenous perspective, some vegan activists have a White Animal Savior complex, which is inherently anti-indigenous. For example, in 2017 animal activists targeted a new Indigenous-owned and -operated restaurant in Toronto because it had seal on the menu. This was despite the fact that the restaurant (Kū-Kum Kitchen) made a point of vetting the hunters from whom they sourced their seal meat. For more on this issue, check out the documentary Angry Inuk.

More generally, vegan activism has also been criticized for racism against other communities. In 2003 PETA released an ad that related the poultry industry to the Holocaust. Animal activists have made similar associations between animal farming and slavery. 

We also need to talk about the connection between veganism and white nationalism, because Nazis ruin everything. Evidently, a sizable portion of white nationalists are vegan. This has something to do with the concept of “blood and soil” that is a bedrock of white nationalism. Apparently, Hitler was famously vegetarian, which I just learned. But if you recall the uncomfortable association between early vegetarianism and eugenics, it’s not all that surprising.

Finally, until recently been a lack of BIPOC representation in animal rights organizations. As this is starting to change, animal rights activists are becoming attuned to the need to become more intersectional. That means thinking seriously about oppression and developing strategies that are more inclusive.

If you want to be a woke vegan, Gloria Oladipo offers a few tips in an article she wrote for Afropunk. First, non’t culturally appropriate – vegan versions of cultural dishes should come from members of that culture. Next, support initiatives that make plants more accessible – food deserts are often in racialized communities, and solving that problem should be a first focus. Third, feature more BIPOC vegans. (Actually, polling has found that Black and Latinx Americans are vegetarian in roughly the same proportions as white Americans.[2] BIPOC individuals should be represented and should have leadership roles in the movement). And finally, show up for BIPOC causes – acknowledge that BIPOC go through a lot and be an ally.

A friendlier, more inclusive animal-free movement?

That new inclusivity focus has already benefited the movement immensely by underscoring the need to focus on institutional change, rather than individual lifestyle choices. This is one of the core points that Jacy Reese makes in his book, The End of Animal Farming. So, rather than shaming individuals for eating meat, the animal-free movement is now focusing on shaming factory farms and pushing for institutional change.[3] Reese argues that this is actually more efficient because it helps people to overcome status quo bias and mobilizes a wider base of support.  

This is helpful from a strategic perspective because most people already think factory farming is bad; they just feel overwhelmed by the problem and powerless to change things. 32% of Americans believe “animals deserve the same rights as people to be free from harm and exploitation” and another 62% believe they deserve “some rights”, according to a 2015 Gallup poll.[4] The increase in pro-animal rights attitudes over the 1990s and early 2000s is generally attributed to: urban pet ownership, cosmopolitanism, feminism, and religious trends (secularization and the increasing popularity of pro-vegetarian religions like Buddhism). In California, Proposition 2 (a ballot initiative to ban animal confinement in small spaces) drew the highest positive turnout for a citizen initiative in the state’s history.[5]

Tactics like animal farm investigations have also helped, by exposing the conditions in factory farms. The first modern animal farm investigation was carried out in 1992 on a foie gras farm, exposing force-feeding. In the late 1990s and early 2000s these investigations became increasingly popular. “A 1998 PETA investigation of a pig-breeding farm led to the first felony indictments ever for cruelty to farmed animals”.[6] The Humane Society of the US “released a ground-breaking undercover investigation of a California slaughterhouse” in 2008.[7] As these investigations gained prominence, the meat, dairy, and egg industries started to lobby for “ag-gag” laws to limit the ability of activists to document animal farm operations.[8]

Veganism as a Dietary Choice

Vegans don’t eat animals or animal-derived products. This obviously includes meat, fish, poultry, dairy, and eggs. But one of the most difficult things about going vegan is navigating all of the secret animal products in our food.

Animal-derived ingredients

PETA has a comprehensive list of animal-derived ingredients. Dummies.com also has a list. Theirs doesn’t include everything on the PETA list. But it has an easy-to-use layout.

Some of the most common animal-derived ingredients include:

o   Beeswax and honey;

o   Casein (a milk protein derived from animal’s milk), calcium caseinate, sodium caseinate;

o   Confectioner’s glaze, resinous glaze, shellac, natural glaze, pure food glaze (comes from a hardened resinous material secreted by the lac insect);

o   Gelatin (a gelling agent derived from animal collagen);

o   Isinglass (a clarifying agent used in making wine and brewing beer, derived from fish bladders);

o   L. cysteine (a dough conditioner in some pre-packaged breads and baked goods, often sourced from feathers or human hair);

o   Whey (the liquid that remains once milk has been curdled or churned and strained);

o   Carmine (used as a red dye, this is from ground cochineal scale insects);

o   Lactose, saccharum lactin, d-lactose (I found this in chips a lot; it’s essentially a milk sugar);

o   Vitamin D3 (not all, but most Vitamin D3 is derived from fish oil or the lanolin in sheep’s wool) and omega-3 fatty acids (similarly, mostly derived from fish but vegan alternatives are available); and

o   Additives beginning with E (e.g. E904) are often animal-derived.

Veganism tips and tricks

To find out if packaged food is vegan, first look for vegan labelling (“Suitable for Vegans”, “Certified Vegan”). Then you can look for allergen information (e.g.: “Contains milk, eggs, shellfish”). Allergen information won’t generally tell you about meat-containing ingredients, so you should also read the ingredients list. There are some items that can be vegan but typically won’t be (e.g. bread, candy, chips, and beer/wine).

Fruits and vegetables are weirdly not always vegan. That is because they are often coated with either beeswax or a resin called shellac. These make the fruit look prettier, and also can reduce moisture loss and delay rotting. Synthetic polyethylene wax (a petroleum by-product) and carnauba wax (a palm derivative) are common, though problematic vegan substitutes.

If you are looking for a book with practical advice on how to go vegan, check out How To Live Vegan by a pair Youtubers that call themselves Bosh!

Meat substitutes

The first reference to plant-based food that mimicked animal flesh was about tofu in 965 AD. The Magistrate of Qing Yang (China) “encouraged tofu consumption as a more frugal alternative to animal flesh, referring to it as “mock lamb chops” and “the vice mayor’s mutton.””[9]

The first reference to vegetarian meat in Western civilization wasn’t until 1852, referring to a sausage-like mixture made by squeezing chopped turnips and beets.[10] The first recorded veggie burger was created in 1939,[11] and Tofurky was introduced in 1995.[12]

Beyond Meat and the Impossible Burger are two plant-based burgers that are designed to mimic the culinary characteristics of beef burgers. They were both released around the same time. Impossible Burger released its burger in trendy restaurants, whereas Beyond Meat went straight to households by retailing at Whole Foods.[13] The plant-based food industry is now big enough to have an industry association (the Plant Based Foods Association).[14] Major food corporations are now investing in plant-based start-ups or creating their own plant-based food items: Unilever has released its own eggless mayonnaise;[15] General Mills invested in a nut based cheese and yogurt company called Kite Hill;[16] and Tyson Foods invested in a 5% share in Beyond Meat.[17]

Cultured meat

Cultured meat is also called cell-cultured meat, cell-based meat, in-vitro meat, lab-grown meat, and clean meat.[18] In 1998 NASA-funded engineers successfully grew goldfish meat in vitro, but the first cultured meat that people admit to eating was an art exhibition of cultured frog meat created by Australian artist Oron Catts in 2003.[19] There are now four main cultured meat companies racing to the market: MosaMeat, Memphis Meats, Hampton Creek, and SuperMeat.[20]

Endnotes

[1] Reese, Jacy. (2018). The End of Animal Farming. Boston, MA: Beacon Press Books at p.x.

[2] Reese, The End of Animal Farming.

[3] Reese, The End of Animal Farming.

[4] Reese, The End of Animal Farming at p.4.

[5] Reese, The End of Animal Farming.

[6] Reese, The End of Animal Farming at p.24.

[7] Reese, The End of Animal Farming at p.27.

[8] Reese, The End of Animal Farming.

[9] Reese, The End of Animal Farming at p.46.

[10] Reese, The End of Animal Farming.

[11] Reese, The End of Animal Farming.

[12] Reese, The End of Animal Farming.

[13] Reese, The End of Animal Farming.

[14] Reese, The End of Animal Farming.

[15] Reese, The End of Animal Farming.

[16] Reese, The End of Animal Farming.

[17] Reese, The End of Animal Farming.

[18] Reese, The End of Animal Farming.

[19] Reese, The End of Animal Farming.

[20] Reese, The End of Animal Farming.

Episode 05 - Kyla and Kristen Ruin Christmas

Holiday Waste

The holidays are generally a wasteful time of year. The amount of garbage that we produce increases by about 25% over the holidays.

Christmas Trees and Ethics

If you live in the US, it’s likely that your Christmas tree is coming from Oregon, North Carolina, Michigan, or Pennsylvania. Oregon is the country’s largest Christmas tree producer, and cuts more than 6 million Christmas trees annually.

Environment

Around 80% of Christmas trees, at least in the US, are artificial. Most artificial trees made out of PVC (plastic) and metal (steel). There is a lot of information out there on whether it is environmentally better to get an artificial or real Christmas tree. Three factors that guide how environmentally friendly a Christmas tree is: ‘tree miles’, length of ownership, and disposal methods.

Some argue that Christmas trees aren’t so bad for the environment. A five- or six-foot tree takes just under a decade to grow and usually a tree is planted in its place.

Most of the articles out there on the environmental impact of real versus artificial trees draws on a lifecycle analysis commissioned by the American Christmas Tree Association (which represents artificial tree retailers). However, I read the report and it seems like it’s largely reasonable. They compare the most common artificial and natural Christmas trees purchased in the US. According to the study, the most commonly purchased artificial tree is manufactured at a large facility in China. It is shipped to the US and distributed by a major big box retailer. It is 6.5 feet tall and weighs 11 pounds). The most common natural tree is a Fraser fir. They assume a 6.5 foot tree cultivated on wholesale natural tree farms and distributed through large retailers. They assume that an accompanying tree stand is 10% metal and 90% plastic. The study covers three time periods of use for the artificial tree – 1, 5, and 10 years. They assume that the tree stand is used for the same amount of time as the regular tree. The study finds that, by energy intensity, an artificial tree is more energy efficient on a 5-year scenario. By GHG emissions, the study finds that – unless a tree goes to landfill – the artificial tree is better than natural trees on a 5-year scenario.

 If you are going with a live tree, try to get one that is Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified.

You can actually rent Christmas trees in some places. Essentially, you’ll get a live tree delivered with a root ball. Then it gets returned and is either rented again next year or permanently replanted. This option for sure exists in Ontario and BC. Oh, and using LED Christmas lights will save electricity.

Labour

Because Christmas tree farms require so much more labour over the holiday season, they use temporary labour – which means often long hours for migrant workers.

Wage theft in the Christmas tree industry has come up a few times. In 2002, there was a major court case over labour violations in the American Christmas tree and garland industry. Most of the workers were migrants from Mexico. One of the workers, for instance, was making $3.31 per hour (below the $5.15 federal minimum wage at the time) and working 80h per week. A similar issue came up in 2017. There are also fair trade tree options.

Ethical Gift Wrap

Can’t I just recycle my wrapping paper?

Paper gift wrap and cards can sometimes be recycled, but usually anything glossy or sparkly is not recyclable. A good rule of thumb is this: try scrunching the paper into a ball. If it scrunches and stays scrunched, it can probably be recycled. You will have to remove any sticky tape and decorations like ribbons and bows, since these cannot be recycled.

Putting non-recyclable gift wrap in recycling can contaminate an entire load of recycling, so you really want to avoid doing that. And even if your wrapping paper is recyclable, not every municipality will take it. Toronto does, but you should check with your local municipality before you put wrapping paper in recycling. If you absolutely must use disposable gift wrap, make sure it’s recyclable – and even better if it’s made from recycled material! – and minimize the amount of tape that you use. Remember to remove bows, ribbons, and tape before recycling.

If you do receive presents in non-recyclable gift wrap, try reusing it! A few ideas:

o   Roll onto empty tin cans for storing scissors, pens, and pencils

o   Shred and use in packaging or shipping to prevent breakage

o   Use to cover standard white photo frame mats

o   Save and reuse for next year 

Is reusable better?

Instead of going for single-use gift wrap, another option is reusable gift bags or fabric wrap. You can buy reusable bags. But you can also create your own pretty easily, either with or without a sewing machine.

However, you have to actually reuse the reusable gift wrap to make it worthwhile. I wasn’t able to find information on paper/plastic gift wrap versus reusable fabric specifically, but we can use an assessment on plastic versus reusable bags as a general approximation. A study by the UK government found that you would need to reuse a cotton bag 131 times to match the emissions of a plastic bag, because of the emissions intensity of cotton. (As a note, though, two other types of reusable bag only needed to be reused 4 and 11 times, respectively, to offset the emissions difference.

Depending on whether you take a sustainability or climate approach, you might decide that reusables are worthwhile or not. By emissions, it can sometimes be better to recycle (or even toss) a single-use item rather than reuse. But if you think about it from the perspective of honouring the earth’s resources, using a resource once and then having it burnt or sitting in landfill is not great. Planet Money did a pretty good two-parter on this a few months ago (Episodes 925 and 926).

If you are looking to make your own reusable gift bags, try using more sustainable fabrics like recycled cotton or hemp or linen! Or, upcycle old clothing by turning it into a reusable gift bag. 

Online Shopping and the Environment

A study done by Dimitri Weideli at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics based on US figures found that in-store shopping has a larger carbon footprint than online shopping. However, rushed online shopping was worse than both in-store and regular online shopping. Most of an in-store shopper’s carbon footprint comes from the emissions used in transporting goods from the store. Having said that, the study assumes that consumers are driving to the store. Since I exclusively walk or use public transit, it is probably better for me to buy in-store. For online shopping, most of the carbon footprint comes from packaging. And for rushed online shopping, there is also a large footprint from air freight. (So, like, the fact that I had to express mail my gift to you probably makes the entire gift unethical)

Kyla’s Links

Kristen mentioned Planet Money episodes worth a listen, here they are!
The Wickaninnish Gallery where Kyla bought the paintings.
Vancouver’s waste free shop, Nada.
East York Meals on Wheels.
Metro Vancouver has some great tips on recycling and reducing waste.
Halloween Spending Reports.
6 million turkeys.
Thanksgiving weekend shopping figures.
Amazon pledges to be net carbon neutral by 2040.
Some clever tricks companies use to get you to spend more.
The Verge talks online shopping and package waste.
Amazon’s Profits.
CNN reports on the environmental impact of fast shipping.
Buzzfeed News looks at the environmental impact of Amazon and suggests ways we can be better.
Log Driver’s Waltz.