This Saturday, the toddlers and I hit our local, weekly Growers Market and I felt the familiar awe at the people shopping there. Everyone looks so, darn...healthy! They glow a healthy brown from working in their own gardens, their babies are gnawing on a raw carrot and they're smiling, at 6.30am on a Saturday...without coffee. With Christmas looming round the corner I began thinking, what could these happy healthy people possibly need?
We all have these beautiful healthy people in our lives. They have the environment foremost in their minds and have taken the time and energy to research sustainable living. Each year I try to inch closer to becoming one of these beautiful healthy people. I'm buying our fresh produce at the growers market, home composting (with varying degrees of success) striving for more sustainability in our wooden sunglasses business, wearing second hand/ gifted clothing, becoming a recycling fiend ripping off labels and washing bottles, and this year have even sown seedlings for our own garden. This did in fact turn into a nudey mud fight between our children (nudey children...not nudey parents).
Are you a beautiful healthy person? Or do you have that person to buy for this Christmas? A good person will ALWAYS say, "I don't need anything this year, no presents!" but when you want to ignore them and buy something the sustainable person would appreciate, have you considered sustainable sunglasses?
On my journey to make our business more sustainable and become a beautiful healthy person, I have discovered some harrowing facts. 12 million tonnes of plastic enter our oceans each year (or a rubbish truck full every minute!). Only 9% of plastic waste is recycled, the rest ending up in landfills where it takes upwards of 400 years to degrade.
The guilt factor (or conscientiousness) around single use plastics is becoming more widespread and mainstream. As it should be! Our wooden sunglasses as a product, are pretty darn sustainable; wood takes 3-14 years to decompose (although we're confident your Vilos won't end up in a landfill!), but whilst striving to become a healthy happy person, there are other areas of our business I have been able to improve. The courier satchels and adhesive address labels we send our sunnies in, are fully home compostable.
We pad out our sunnies in paper shredding from our local ambulance station and our bamboo sunglasses cases are made from Forest Stewardship Council wood.
So if you're looking to bless an awesome eco warrior in your life, to say a big fat "Thank you!" for caring about our planet as much as the rest of us should, they could appreciate a pair of sustainable wooden sunglasses this Christmas. Make them super unique and extra special with a personalised engraving on the bamboo lid.
So I'm not yet a healthy, happy sustainable fiend, but with improvements little and often...I'm well on the way to becoming one. Little changes to our home and business each day, make for an easier conscience and eventually healthier world for my nudey babies.
