Tag: animal welfare (page 1 of 1)

The eco-friendliness of Walt Disney World

This is a follow-up piece to my How to eco-hack you Walt Disney World Vacation post and focuses on how Walt Disney World (WDW) is attempting to be green.

Basically, when I (Emma) wrote that post, I was very much aware that the onus should not be on the individual visitor because the entity with the power to make real change is WDW itself. And they are doing a lot, don’t get me wrong, but they can always do better.

Conservation isn’t just the business of a few people. It’s a matter that concerns all of us.

Walt Disney

What is WDW doing to make itself more eco-friendly?

Disney does do a lot to make itself a greener place and has over the years, especially at Animal Kingdom and EPCOT theme parks educated guests about issues like conservation, renewable energy use, and animal welfare. (Around one-third of WDW’s property is a conservation area.) They also take time to drum this into employees during training and have donated millions of dollars to animal and conservation charities over the years.

Giraffe ambling away from safari car
Spotting giraffes on the Kilimanjaro Safari at Animal Kingdom, where you can learn all about animal conservation

They’ve had recycling bins all across property since at least 2011 and their sanitation crew still hand sorts the rubbish bins to remove recyclables. Their hotels are Green Lodging-certified, which means that they are helping to conserve water and energy, reducing waste, and educating the public.

They’re also doing a lot to reduce energy use by utilising energy-saving fixtures, like florescent or LED bulbs. To be clear, Disney managed to save enough energy to power their Animal Kingdom theme park for a year. And they’ve created a Mickey-shaped solar panel field.

As mentioned above in our previous piece, they are committed to growing a lot of food on property, which they do using reclaimed water. However, Disney also helps to reduce food waste by distributing excess prepared food to the Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida. Their buses even run on a renewable fuel made from non-consumable food waste.

Recently, WDW has pledged to completely eliminate all single-use plastics by the end of 2019, which means that for the most part, we were served with cardboard/paper plates and drinks came without lids or straws. (On the one occasion that we got a plastic bowl for our salad, I assume it was because that location hadn’t yet run out of the plastic bowls and they were just using up what they had.)

It’s a penguin statue made from plastic waste (click through to see more)

What could WDW do better?

In my ideal world, Disney would serve every counter-service meal with reusable cutlery and crockery, but I definitely understand why that wouldn’t work. People break things and metal knives would be unsafe and how would washing up on such a major scale be done? Also, I fully accept that it would be a logistical and health and safety nightmare to place meals and (most) snacks in reusable containers that people had brought in.

The best option would, I feel, be for WDW to use compostable food containers/cutlery and put a compost bin at all rubbish bin locations. Not only would this be a bonus for the environment, but Disney could use the soil produced for its on-site food production. Yes, it would take time for people to get used to, but so did the recycling bins and those were a great idea.

https://www.instagram.com/p/By3SM2Qg-vT/

They could also encourage people to bring their own reusable cutlery/bottles by offering a discount. Disney could even sell branded ones at food locations as they do popcorn buckets and soda mugs. Also, Starbucks is happy to fill my mug in the UK, so why can’t the Starbucks in Disney do that?

Anyway, so that’s my thoughts on the subject, but now I want to hear from you. Are there any more green initiatives that you know Disney is taking? What do you think Disney could do better? Let me know in the comments below.

How I Eco-Hack My Kitchen – A Green Goddess Series

In my household eating is a much-beloved activity and cleaning is most definitely  not. In this series on eco-kitchen hacks, I (Tamara) will be focusing on my attempts at green kitchen living. I will share with you my tried and tested tips – from how to eat sustainably, to where I buy food for me and my husband, to food storage and food waste, and of course the ever-dreaded cleaning.

In this post, I will be focusing on five easy and sustainable changes I have made. So, as they sing in Oliver, let’s get started with Food, Glorious Food, magical Food, Wonderful Food!

Man eating strawberries and cream

  1. Buy Sustainable & Certified Foods

fair trade Madagascan cacao bag

My requirement of food is simple –  I want the food I eat to cause me transcendental bliss, to tickle my tastebuds into spasms of delight, to satisfy my stomach and my mind. Surely that’s not asking for much?

What I do not want to taste is worry and guilt in every bite about the unfair treatment of producers and farmers, horrific animal welfare, industrial-scale deforestation, overfishing, air miles, and pollution, and the overall negative ecological impact – ain’t nobody got time for that!

This is why, wherever possible, I buy certified and sustainable food that can relieve both my conscience and my hunger. Whatever your food preferences, whether you are a meat-lover, meat reducer, pescetarian, vegetarian, vegan or fruitarian (not an exhaustive list!) – my first nugget of green wisdom is to be on the lookout for food produced to certified and traceable standards, ideally that goes above and beyond the legal minimum.

Logos and marks I look out for include Fairtrade, the green frog of Rainforest Alliance, the bluefish of MSC (Marine Stewardship Council), RSPCA Assured, Free Range and Soil Association Organic.

Yes, some certified foods can be more expensive as there are higher welfare and environmental standards involved with the farmers and producers are being paid a fair living wage. Yes, I have to make choices and yes, compromises also have to be made. This is why I have my ‘non-negotiables’ and my  ‘if-money-allows’.

My non-negotiables include free range eggs, Fairtrade or Rainforest Alliance bananas and coffee, MSC fish and seafood, and free-range or RSPCA-assured meats.

If money allows, I have organic eggs, vegetables, meat and cheese, and Fairtrade flowers and wine for when I am feeling fancy.

And finally, I always buy local if that option is available to me – this Christmas I had family visiting from Trinidad and so as it was a special occasion, I splashed out on a local free-range goose for them from the family-run Ashford Farm near Petersfield. I won’t lie, it was expensive but (I am assured) delicious and so worth it!  I also regularly buy fresh produce from my local Milton Market greengrocers Portsmouth Fruit and Flowers who stock veg and flowers from Titchfield. My Titchfield-grown daffodils from them are nodding happily to me as I type!

Basket of Daffodils

So whether it is choosing Fairtrade bananas in your a weekly food shop, or making the choice to buy RSPCA ham from Lidl or MSC certified fish fingers from Tesco’s or buying locally grown sprouts and daffodils from Portsmouth Fruit and Flowers greengrocers; each ethical, sustainable and local choice you make means an unsustainable food item is being left on the shelf. And that my friends, is the power of consumer choice. Boom!

For more information on the various certifications I mentioned and many that I didn’t, I found this list on the Love British Food website useful.

 

  1. Make Your Own Bread

Bread Rolls

Keeping on the topic of food, mine is a bread-loving household as the Dutchman (my husband) would eat bread for every meal if he could. Bread with cheese, bread with peanut butter, bread with chocolate spread – I think I’m married to a man-child!

Last February 2017, he was gifted a bread machine from a kind friend and it has seriously changed our lives! He makes a bread every 2 days and as we no longer buy shop-bread, we no longer have to deal with the plastic bags they come in, thus reducing our plastic waste. I salute those who make bread by hand – we tried it a few times and failed miserably. I’m happy with the convenience of the bread machine, for us it’s revolutionary!

 

  1. Use cloth napkins

cloth napkin with flowers and cutlery

Another small change that has helped reduce the amount of waste we produce is using cloth napkins instead of paper kitchen roll.

I am a mucky pup and spillages are a common occurrence. Cloth napkins are reusable, can be chucked in with my laundry, and it looks fancy shmancy!

I sourced mine from charity shops and my Mum who had more cloth napkins than one person could ever need. I have greatly reduced my (FSC and recycled) paper towel usage as I just use tea towels or cloth napkins instead.

 

  1. (Re) Fill Your Own

refill spice jars

As a prolific user of herbs and spices (smoked paprika makes everything taste yum!), I was delighted to find I can refill my spice jars at Wild Thyme Wholefoods who offer an amazing self-service for herbs and spices as well as a refill service for laundry and washing up liquid.

I recently refilled my Ecover laundry and washing liquid at Southsea Health Shop and it was cheaper than Tescos! Trust me, I checked! This does require a tiny bit more planning, and I am aiming to have one bottle in use and one pre-filled under the sink so I don’t run out and have to do a supermarket dash.

 

  1. Composting

compost heap

I have been lucky that the majority of places I’ve lived in here in Pompey had outdoor space for a compost bin. I compost all uncooked fruit and veg peelings and for years had been also innocently including tea bags made from polypropyleneNow if I am unsure if the material of the tea bag is made from plastic, I just add the tea leaves to the compost and discard the bag. I am currently working my way through a back-supply of tea bags and will be moving onto loose tea to save myself those 5 seconds of extra work.

Other than that, I just throw in my veg scraps every few days with some newspaper and let the compost do its magic. I might aerate it once a year if it’s lucky, but the rest is up to the worms! So far, so good! Though eggshells and coffee grounds can also be added to the compost, I add these to my garden as snail and slug deterrents. Those little bastards eat everything except the bloody weeds!

For those of us in flats or with no outdoor space, you could experiment a wormery or bokashi bin. Years ago,  I used to have a bokashi bin, but was too lazy to look after it properly and so it went horribly wrong. I’ve been thinking I might give it another go as you can add almost all food waste in a bokashi bin including cooked food. I need to research it first as it needs to be convenient for my lazy ass!

Alternatively- or as well as- find a friend or neighbour with a compost bin who you can donate your organic waste to! Try signing up with ShareWaste, a free app that links together people with organic scraps with people who have compost bins, wormeries, or chickens. So far, there are only a few of us in the Pompey area on there, but the word is getting out there, so sign up! Coincidentally, the first request I received was from someone who has the fermented organic waste from her bokashi bin to donate to my compost.

In this post , have just scratched the surface on the many small changes that I have made to green-ify my kitchen. What green kitchen tips do you have? Do you compost and if so,  do you just chuck it all in and hope for the best like me? Have you signed up to ShareWaste or know of any other similar useful apps? Let us know in the comments below.