5 ways you can give back to your community (even under lockdown)

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Something I’m working to do more of this year is contribute more to my local community and those with less. If 2020 taught me anything, it was that local resilient communities are so important for those that live in them, and the support networks that a good community can offer are priceless.

The other lesson was that, no matter how hard you think you’ve got it, someone else has got it worse, and almost all of us have privilege that we can use to benefit those with less.

(Privilege, incidentally, doesn’t just mean the more obvious things like time or money or power. It can mean white privilege, male privilege, cisgender privilege, able-bodied privilege, educational privilege, mental health privilege, and so on. We might not have them all, but even having one or two makes life easier for us than those who lack them.)

What this ‘contributing’ looks like will vary from person to person – it depends on our privilege, after all. But there are lots of ways we can benefit others and support our community. It doesn’t need to be big or grandiose. Small actions are just as important.

Something so small it only makes a difference to one person still makes a difference to that person.

Here are five ways I’m trying to give back to my community, and contribute more.

Picking up litter

It might seem small, but litter (or lack of it) has such an impact on a community. Rubbish strewn across a park or in waterways is unsightly and harms wildlife but it also gives the impression that no-one cares about the area. And if somewhere is already covered in trash, it almost gives the go-ahead for more trash to be added.

If you want to instantly improve your local community, commit to picking up litter.

It might be that you just try to pick up three items every time you leave the house. Or you might join an organised clean-up event once a month, or even just once a year, where you collect rubbish as part of a group. Or you might decide to ‘adopt a spot’ and keep that one area trash-free.

In Western Australia our container deposit scheme launched at the end of 2020. This means most beverage containers can be returned to receive a 10c refund. Whenever I’m out on my bike, I pledge to pick up every container I see. I’d say on most trips I find 2-3 containers. The funds are going towards a community replanting project in the local area.

And yes, I feel guilty about all the other litter I see and leave when I’m out on my bike. But the reality is, if I stopped to pick up everything, I’d never reach my destination. So I focus on the containers (which is more than I used to do) and accept that I can’t do everything.

In March every year there is a national ‘Clean Up Australia Day’ event. So this year I got together with some like-minded neighbours and we organised a Clean Up Carlisle event, picking up litter along the train line. It’s the first time I’ve ever organised a clean-up like this myself – so it was pretty exciting that people outside of our group turned up!

When I was talking to my neighbours about the event afterwards, they were annoyed that we hadn’t decided to choose one of the main roads in the area, which also has a litter problem. And so I suggested another event, to come soon. When people take pride in their community, these things start to happen…

Donating what you no longer need

I’m a huge fan of donating stuff we no longer need – or more accurately, finding new owners and homes for our old things. It’s one of the things I talk about in a lot of detail in my book Less Stuff.

I have mixed feelings about donating to the charity shop. Too many people use charity shops as a dumping ground for stuff they feel guilty about throwing away. Charity shops are overwhelmed with stuff, only selling about 15% of everything that gets donated.

If you’re going to donate to the charity shop, ensure it’s your best stuff, its clean and not broken, and it’s appropriate for the time of year (charity shops don’t want Christmas decorations in January, or ski ware in summer). You can even call before you drop off to check it’s stuff they actually need right now.

Charity shops are an easier option, but there are lots of other places to donate items to people who need them.

Try your local Buy Nothing group.

Ask on a local community Facebook group for ideas of local places to drop things off (such as homeless shelters or refuges, community projects, schools or playgroups).

If you have excess food (even if it’s open or past its expiry) try Olio. They’ve recently expanded into non-food items, too.

Givit is an online Australian platform which lists items needed by individuals or organisations.

Supporting a local food bank

Food banks often have specific needs and won’t accept items that are open or past their use-by (use Olio for these things). You might have items in your cupboard to donate, or you might decide to make a donation by buying extra groceries.

I found a local food bank run by church just two streets away from me, and I started the habit of making a monthly donation box at the end of last year. Being local I like that it benefits people in my area. Every time I got to the shops I’ll buy a few things to add to the box, and then once a month I make a delivery.

It felt strange to me to buy items in packaging at first, but I feel better about supporting the food bank than I would if I avoided the groceries and didn’t contribute. I still try to keep to my values where I can – buying Fairtrade coffee and locally grown tinned vegetables.

Something else I’ve been able to do, and this might work for you if you don’t have the budget to contribute financially, is take food that’s been offered up on the Buy Nothing group to the food bank on behalf of others.

(The drop off hours are quite specific, being Wednesday and Friday mornings only, so not everyone can get there. I have flexible working hours and can pick things up and drop them off.)

I want to add, that the very fact that food banks need to exist at all is quite outrageous. In a world where 1/3 of all food grown is thrown away, the fact that millions of people go hungry in countries like the UK, Australia and the USA (so called ‘developed’ countries) every day is quite unbelievable.

Our food system is in crisis, and there is a lot of work to be done by corporations and governments to stop allowing this waste on this scale and to redistribute resources more fairly. In the meantime, people need to eat and donating to food banks is one way to share our resources with others.

Making a monetary donation

The obvious one, possibly. But making monetary donations to organizations you believe in and/or whose work you value – whether it’s a regular donation or a one-off, whether it’s a small or large amount, whether it’s a big organisation or a small community project – is always going to be of value to them.

I want to get better at this. It’s easy to get stuck the rabbithole of where’s best to donate, which type of organisation, how do I know my donation will be effective, am I making the best choice etc etc.

To get unstuck, I’m learning to let this whole idea of ‘best’ go. Donations are more than money, anyway. They are a show of support and belief in the work.

My new rule is, don’t fixate on what’s ‘best’. If a donation drive crosses your path and it’s something you believe in and you can spare a few (or many) dollars, make a donation.

You might not be able to spend that money on cupcakes any more, but that wasn’t going to make the world a better place either.

I make a monthly donation to IndigenousX, who fund and give a platform to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices across Australia. I’ve learned so much through their writing.

Because I’m self-employed and my income isn’t regular, I don’t commit to regular monthly donations other than this – although I have plans to when I can. I made a donation to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation on my birthday, I made a donation to Boorloo Justice (Boorloo is the Whadjuk name for Perth) for their Decolonise Pride fundraiser, I supported the Learn Our Truth crowdfunding campaign organised by the National Indigenous Youth Education Coalition and In My Blood It Runs.

I also purchased a photo print that was a fundraiser for the National Suicide Prevention and Trauma Recovery Project. (Does that count?)

And at the other end of the scale, I supported a local community garden in their fundraiser to get new chickens.

Making an in-kind donation

You might not have money to donate, but you might have a product or service you can donate. I’ve donated copies of my books to the Hilton Harvest community garden, and Free the Hounds (a greyhound charity) simply because they reached out to ask me – and I like gardening and greyhounds!

If you’re a writer, needleworker, an artist or some other creator, maybe you can offer your creations to organisations to help them with their fundraising efforts.

Volunteering your time

If you don’t have money but you do have time, maybe volunteering is for you. Volunteering can mean so many things, from getting out and about and hands-on to helping with social media. It can be a regular commitment, or one-off jobs as required.

It can be helping an established organisation, an informal local group or even helping one person (for example, with their weekly shopping).

In the past I’ve volunteered for not-for-profit organizations, but currently my focus is on much more local activities – such as hosting the community Grow Free cart and helping get our new community Street Activators group up and running.

I also admin a couple of zero waste Facebook groups.

My energy, enthusiasm and time for volunteering ebbs and flows, and right now this is all I have the capacity to do. But I’d love to volunteer at the Food Rescue place sometime in the future.

…

2020 (and 2021) have left me feeling a little bit ‘stuck’. Unsure where I want to concentrate my focus, and unsettled by all of the change. Simple acts like picking up litter, buying some (plastic-free) teabags at the grocery store to give to the food bank or making a donation to a group whose request popped up in my feed are tangible things that I can do, today, in the moment, to help make things a little bit better.

As Anne Frank said, no-one has ever become poor by giving.

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From landfill to refill: cleaning products that clean the ocean

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This post is a sponsored collaboration with Zero Co.

When I started my waste journey back in 2012, I primarily wanted to reduce my plastic. A few month in I realised that reducing waste isn’t just about the plastic, and so I worked on reducing all my single-use packaging – metals, paper, cardboard, steel and aluminium as well as plastic – and of course, reducing my food waste.

I even went as far as the ‘fitting a year’s waste in a jam jar’ challenge.

And what I realised from that challenge is this: whether or not I can fit my waste into a jam jar or not is not the point. (And frankly, who cares?) If a handful of people can fit their waste into a jam jar, it’s not really game-changing stuff.

It’s definitely not where I want to be focusing my attention.

I’m much more interested in how we can get everybody reducing their waste, whether it’s 90 per cent or 50 per cent or even 10 per cent.

Much better to have everybody doing something rather than a few people doing everything.

And for everybody to be doing something, we need options. There’s no one way to reduce waste. What works for some of us will never work for all of us. The more alternatives, the better.

Zero Co and their mission to untrash the planet

I’m going to confess, the first time I came across Zero Co, it was hard to see past the plastic. Even though my views have changed on plastic since my first plastic-free month challenge back in 2012, I’d still rather see as little plastic as possible.

Zero Co make (palm oil free, greywater safe, plant-based, vegan) cleaning and personal care products. And although it’s plastic, the the packaging that they use to distribute their products is not single-use – the containers are made out of recycled ocean plastic and the pouches are returnable and refillable, to be used and reused over and over.

When I heard about their model, I was intrigued.

As much as I dislike plastic, I dislike single-use even more. Anything that can be used again and again and again is a better use of resources than single-use. For me, it’s about the waste, and how we reduce it.

So yes, I was intrigued, but I had a lot of questions.

(Like, how much ocean plastic? From which ocean? Who collects it? How are the pouches refilled? How many times?)

And so I emailed them, and we had a great back and forth, and then I poured over their website and sent a bunch more questions.

And I’m happy to say that I learned a lot, and I changed my mind.

Zero Co offered to send me a box of their products to try so I could test their products, the packaging and the return system. (And we had an agreement that if I didn’t like the products, there was no expectation to share with you. And if I did share, that I’d be honest and tell it like it is.)

But I think their re-use model is interesting and their transparency is refreshing. That’s how they won me over. It’s one thing to pledge to do things, but quite another to showcase how.

How it works: the Zero Co circular economy (reuse) model

Zero Co have a mission to “untrash the planet” through stopping the production of new single-use plastic, and by cleaning up the plastic already in the oceans.

They do this by distributing cleaning products in reusable, refillable pouches. The dispensers (which you can choose to use with your refills) are made of ocean plastic.

You order the products you want (all packaged in the pouches) and if you need them, you also order the dispensers. They are shipped to your home with no additional plastic packaging.

The box contains a reply-paid (cardboard) envelope for the empty refill pouches. Once you have 15 empty pouches, you send it back for the pouches to be reused.

They describe the model as “like the milkman, reimagined.”

Sounds good so far, but I’m a details person. Luckily, they provided the details.

Ocean plastic

The ocean plastic used in the dispensers is collected from the waters outside Jakarta, Indonesia, via an initiative called Ocean Waste Plastics. Local fishermen collect the plastic, which they sell to Pack Tech, who reprocess the plastic into (amongst other things) the Zero Co dispensers.

These dispensers contain 70% recycled ocean plastic, and 30% non-ocean recycled plastic.

So far, Zero Co have pulled 6,000kg of plastic from the ocean to make their dispensers.

OCEANS 21

One of Zero Co’s newest initiatives is OCEANS21, which has the goal of collecting 21 tons of Australian ocean-bound plastic waste, to turn into Zero Co bottles.

From March until May 2021, Zero Co will invest $5 from every starter box sold to fund their ocean clean-up projects. Their launch event will be in Sydney where they will be making a record-breaking attempt to clean up Sydney Harbour.

From there they will head to Cape York – but they are also working on some more local and grassroots initiatives.

Refillable pouches

The refillable pouches are made of 40% recycled plastic, and are designed to be refilled 100 times. (Yes, it would be great to use 100% recycled plastic, but they found that this compromised how many times the pouches could be refilled – 40% seemed to be the sweet spot.)

Carbon emissions

There’s always going to be a higher footprint with delivery models versus getting refills at a bricks-and-mortar store. It’s worth remembering that not everyone has access to a bulk store that sells cleaning products. To combat this, Zero Co use couriers that carbon-offset their emissions, and ask that empty pouches are not returned until there are 15 of them, to reduce transport emissions and packaging.

They are also looking at how they might get their products into brick-and-mortar stores in the future, whilst maintaining the circular reuse model.

Zero Co Products – a review

The core range of Zero Co products includes air freshener, bathroom and shower cleaner, bodywash, dishwasher tablets, dishwashing liquid, handwash, laundry liquid, stain remover and toilet cleaner.

(They have just finished reformulating the multi-purpose cleaner, which is part of their core range but whose shipping was delayed.)

They also have plans to launch shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste and deodorant later in the year, but no firm dates on these yet.

I didn’t try the air freshener, as this is a product I’d never use, and I didn’t try the dishwasher tabs because I don’t have a dishwasher.

And yep, all the products I received worked as they are meant to do – they clean!

(To me, cleaning products are cleaning products are cleaning products – except when they don’t work at all. These worked just as well as any cleaning product I’ve ever bought at the bulk store. But don’t just take my word for it, because since when was cleaning one of my strengths? Zero Co went to the trouble of getting their products tested by an independent lab.)

The one notable feature of all these products is that they are very strongly fragranced. I tend to use unfragranced or lightly fragranced products, and this was quite a shock to my senses. Most of their fragrances are based on essential oils, so it’s not artificial fragrance, it’s just… strong.

(You can read their ingredient lists here.)

This is probably a polarising feature, so it’s worth pointing out.

Someone on my local zero waste Facebook group recently was asking about zero waste laundry detergent with a long-lasting fragrance as she said she was sick of her laundry smelling of “wet clothes”, and a lot of people recommended Zero Co. I actually really like the Zero Co laundry liquid for washing my for towels and linen, particularly when it’s going in the cupboard.

I also found that the strong fragrance of the bodywash and handwash means I use a lot less, which makes the products go further.

But if strong-scented cleaning and personal care products are not your thing, this will be a dealbreaker.

(I wonder in the future if they will launch an unscented range, but for now there isn’t one.)

Could Zero Co products be for you?

As I said at the start, there’s no one zero waste product or idea that works for everybody.

Zero Co probably won’t work for you if:

  • You already buy all your personal and cleaning products at the bulk store, and you’re happy with them;
  • You DIY all of your own personal and cleaning products;
  • You dislike strong fragrances;
  • You live outside Australia (so far they only ship within Australia, but they are looking at overseas options).

Zero Co might be something to consider if:

  • You currently buy products in single-use packaging;
  • You don’t have access to a bulk store (for example, living in regional areas);
  • You don’t have time to get to the bulk store regularly, or you’re not happy with the products on offer at the bulk store;
  • You like the idea of a one-stop shop for all your products;
  • You want to support an Australian start-up on a mission;
  • You like strongly fragranced products.

(If you have any questions, their FAQ page is probably one of the most thorough I’ve ever come across. So be sure to have a read.)

If you’d like to try their products, Zero Co have very kindly offered a discount to my readers. Use the code TREADING10 which will give you $10 off all products (new customers only, one use per customer, minimum purchase $80. Don’t forget you can always go halves with friends or family if you don’t need quite this much, and don’t want to stockpile!).

Visit the Zero Co website here.

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