We take a step closer to our everyday lives today with something we all need, every day (and several times, at that): food and water. We can’t make this more plain: what you choose to eat and drink every day makes a huge, huge difference, so making the sustainable [www.sundancechannel.com] choice has huge potential to make a greener [www.sundancechannel.com] future. Let’s take a closer look.

First of all, One Planet Living defines the difficulties of food production very succinctly, so we’ll just go with it, “Industrial agriculture produces food of uncertain quality and harms local ecosystems [www.sundancechannel.com], while consumption of non-local food [www.sundancechannel.com]
imposes high transport impacts.” Moving forward, eating green [www.sundancechannel.com] can take on many forms, but there’s a fairly specific progression that can apply to just about everybody: local organic [www.sundancechannel.com], local, organic, conventional. The 100 Mile Diet [www.sundancechannel.com] has exploded in popularity of late, making it easier than ever to find local food [www.sundancechannel.com]. Farmer’s markets are enjoying a renaissance, as people care more and more about where their food comes from, and how it’s produced. Eating more veggies [www.sundancechannel.com] (and less meat) is another big step with even bigger results; remember, it takes almost 2000 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef — that’s a perfect segue into the next topic: water.

Sustainable water [www.sundancechannel.com] seems to be one of the great ironies of our time: over 2/3 of our planet is covered in the stuff, and yet, we can’t seem to keep enough of it clean and available for drinking and consumption. One Planet decrees that we must, “Achieve a positive impact on local water resources and supply. Implement water use efficiency measures, re-use and recycling; minimize water extraction and pollution [www.sundancechannel.com]; foster sustainable water and sewage management in the landscape; restore natural [www.sundancechannel.com]
water cycles.” Sounds easier said than done, but it’s really quite straightforward: stop drinking bottled water, put a low-flow showerhead in your shower and aerators on all your sinks, a low-flow, dual-flush toilet in your bathroom and don’t leave the water running when you don’t need it. Taken separately, each of these seems simple and small, but they can add up to literally thousands of gallons of water each year. Not tossing it down the drain, and not polluting it with fertilizers in your yard helps, but the big payoff here comes back to food (remember that full circle thing we mentioned before? Here it is again…) and what you choose to eat. Think of it this way: upgrading all the systems in your home is great, but it’ll never add up to the difference not eating meat will make.

Gazing in to the crystal ball, next we see that natural wildlife and habitats and culture and heritage are next; stay tuned!

After a week spent talking about flat-pack and pre-fab, it’s only fitting that we dedicate this week’s spotlight on design to another example of the efficient design philosophy. We’re scaling down a bit, though, from entire houses or rooms of furniture, to showcase a slightly smaller, but no less useful, version of flat-pack: it’s ply Design’s [www.plydesign.com] plyFOLD containers.

TreeHugger is always on the lookout for simple, creative solutions to create less waste, use materials more efficiently and incorporate these ideas into our everyday lives. plyFOLD, the handy little tabletop catch-alls from ply Design, are a great example of all three. Made from recycled leather and Climatex Lifecycle Felt (gathered from factory scraps), the containers flatten for wafer-thin packaging & shipping, and are biodegradable (for potential use in your compost pile or bin [www.sundancechannel.com]) at the end of their useful lives.

They’d be a perfect hall table accountrement; a place to drop your keys, change, phone and whatever else you don’t want to lose, but don’t want to carry with you around the house. Though much smaller, and, you might think, less consequential than something like a house, these containers represent an important green idea: that anything, even something as simple as a textile scrap, can have a second life as something useful, and that there is no reason to waste anything. As we, as a society, continue to get smarter about efficiently using materials, products like this will become more commonplace, replacing waste with substance and cutting out the landfill in the life cycle equation; until that happens, we’ll continue to look toward places like ply Design for their outstanding example. It’s the little things that matter, after all.