Sustainable living: Be one of the millions making waves
by Kerrin Honey, Sustainability Director
“Save the ozone layer!”
This was one of the most significant environmental campaigns I remember from my childhood. Horrified by the prospect of a scorched Earth future, where plant, creature, and human life would cease to exist, global leaders were pushed to change.
In 1987, the Montreal Protocol was signed banning the use of chlorofluorocarbon (CFC). The former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called it "perhaps the single most successful international agreement".
With the help of computer modelling, scientists recently concluded the CFC ban has prevented the ozone layer from breaking down by the late 2040s, putting humans at greater risk of health problems, like skin cancer, and degrading the ability of plants and trees to absorb carbon from the atmosphere. Without the ban, the loss of the ozone layer would have alone contributed to a 2.5 degree increase in global temperatures.
Around this time there was another campaign called “Save the Trees” to end deforestation of the Amazon. El Nino entered our vocabulary, the severity of droughts in Africa increased, Al Gore became more than just a politician, and Greenpeace activists were seen as disruptors not influencers.
Although global warming was a term we had become familiar with, an understanding of climate change was largely limited to the scientific community. To those outside the scientific community, we hadn’t yet realised how significant and interconnected these issues were with climate change.
Fast forward a couple of decades, scientists largely agree that climate change is a direct result of human behaviour, and an environmental activist could be anyone of the neighbours who lives on your street. We recognise the worst is yet to come and there is an increasing ambition to limit climate change.
We now understand the consequences of burning fossil fuels, air travel, industrial scale livestock production, overfishing, deforestation, biodiversity loss, the harm of plastics and over consumption. Sustainability is becoming a way people choose to live in an effort to ensure we meet the needs of the present, without compromising the needs of future generations.
To paraphrase the words of Anne Marie Boneau; “We don’t need a handful of people doing sustainability perfectly, we need millions of people doing it imperfectly.” It can be overwhelming knowing where to start and I recommend making small changes that can be built on.
Some of the things Nteractive has done in our own operations include using renewable energy, eco-friendly cleaning products, purchasing office supplies from sustainable sources, having non-dairy milk alternatives available and continuing efforts to reduce our business waste in general.
Many of these are so easy to implement as individuals, alongside lifestyle changes such as eating less meat and more plant-based protein. You can read more about the operational steps we’re taking as a business to reduce our carbon footprint here.
The ripples we create as individuals will be the waves that drive change in business and government. Be one of the millions making waves!