Sustainable Living Magazine

SL
Sustainable Living Magazine
THE PLASTIC
PROBLEM
WHAT IN THE
WORLD
CAN WE DO?
March - April 2019 Volume 1, Issue 1 sustainableliving.com

SUSTAINABLE
3
12
16
38
March - April 2019
In This Issue
LIVING
Editor’s Note
Learn about what
sparked SL
6 Home
Stop doing that, start
doing this
Fashion
The top sustainable
brands emerging into
the industry
How-To
Build a better living
room with these
affordable products
DID YOU KNOW
20 Climate Change
The truth about its impact on animals
24
28
32
36
World
This small country is making a big impact
on the environment
Earth Day 2019
How long do we really have?
Policy
Cities and states around the U.S. are
pushing to become completely
renewable by 2050
You Asked, We Answered
We took your online submissions and
responded to the questions you
were most curious about
COVER (Photo via Marketing Week)
The UN struggles to reach an agreement on the plastic crisis
20
FROM THE EDITOR
Hello and welcome to the debut issue
of Sustainable Living Magazine, your
go-to publication for information and
resources on living more sustainably.
Looking out for our planet has always
been a passion of mine, and I’m so excited
to share with you all this magazine has
to offer!
Each issue, we will present you with
new and innovative ways you can live sustainably
in your workplaces and in your
homes. We will offer you insight on the
state of the environment while simultaneously
showing you and giving you the
tools to make a positive change in your
own life.
Climate change is happening and
it’s happening fast. Sustainable Living
addresses this problem and highlights the
effect humans have had and continue
to have on our planet. In this issue, our
cover story focuses on the plastic crisis.
Human waste fills oceans and litters habitats
of a variety of animals and sealife.
While the world has attempted to come
up with universal steps to combat this
disparity, no real solution has yet been
agreed upon.
Aside from work, life and information
on sustainability issues, we provide you
with recipes and tips for sustainable cooking.
In this issue, you can learn about the
tomato and all the ways it can be used to
create waste-free, homemade dishes.
I hope this issue helps you learn something
new, and keep living sustainably!
Jasmine Patel
Editor-in-Chief
SUSTAINABLELIVING.COM MARCH - APRIL 2019 3

ON THE TABLE
WORKING
44
46
50
52
56
Office
Create a green, sustainable coworking
space with these 10 easy tips
Goodbye cubicle, hello outdoors: How
these companies have brought nature
into the workplace
How-To
Discover a cleaner, environmentallyfriendly
commute
Design
Look at the architecture behind some
of the most sustainable hospitals
in the world
There’s more to this desk than meets
the eye
58
61
The Tomato
Learn what you can do
with this simple
ingredient
60 Recipes
Homemade tomato
sauce
62
64
66
67
68
Mango and tomato
salsa
Veggie burgers three
ways
Tomato basil soup with
a twist
Vegan tomato tortilla
soup
Scalloped tomatoes
and croutons
Sundried tomato
cheesy kale chips
60
LIVINGmagazine

FROM TOP
KNOW?
Climate change is affecting
animals at an alarming rate
By JASMINE PATEL | Sustainable Living Magazine
DID YOU
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting
industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard
dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer
took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen
book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap
into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It
was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets
containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop
publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions
of Lorem Ipsum.
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted
by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout.
CONTINUES PG 23
Elephants:
Droughts due to
global warming have
led to food shortages,
reduced habitat and a
disruption to mating
season, which leads
to fewer offspring.
Giraffes:
Habitat loss due to
climate change has
contributed to the
decline of the acacia
tree, the main food
source for giraffes.
Birds:
Oceanic birds are
the most threatened
group of birds,
because rising sea
levels are expected to
submerge their nests
and habitat.
FROM LEFT
Sea Turtles:
Gender is determined
by temperature of
the surrounding
environment. As the
ocean gets warmer,
fewer males will be
produced, which will
result in reduced
reproduction.
Great Apes:
Prolonged droughts,
decreased rainfall and
forest fires limit the
availability of food
and destroys habitats.
20 MARCH - APRIL 2019 SUSTAINABLELIVING.COM

THE
WORLD
CAN
SOLVE
THE
PLASTIC
PROBLEM
BUT WILL IT?
Although the UN did not reach an agreement on plastic
pollution at the environmental assembly in Kenya,
efforts to come up with a solution continue at
national and international levels.
By LAURA PARKER | National Geographic
What can you do?
Look out for tips
throughout this story
on ways you can reduce
plastic use in your
daily life!
It didn’t take long after the recent United Nations
environmental assembly in Kenya ended for
environmentalists to sharply rebuke the United
States for allegedly derailing global ambitions
to prevent plastic debris from flowing into the
oceans.
“The tyranny of the minority,” their statement declared
as environmentalists denounced the Americans for what they
said was slowing progress on marine plastics by diluting a
resolution calling for phasing out single-use plastic by 2025
and blocking an effort to craft a legally binding treaty on
plastic debris.
Yet that unsparing critique doesn’t fully reflect the negotiations
that played out in a small roof-top conference room
on the UN’s campus in Kenya’s capital city of Nairobi. What
happened is perhaps best viewed not as tyrannical but as
isolationist, more akin to the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris
climate agreement. Yes, the U.S. won concessions in Nairobi
to the wording on two resolutions involving the fate of
marine plastics, but it waged the argument essentially alone,
with backing only from Saudi Arabia and Cuba.
“I would not say the U.S. is making itself irrelevant,” says
David Azoulay, a Geneva-based lawyer for the Center for
International Environmental Law, who observed the negotiations.
“But it is true that the U.S. is setting itself further apart,
as it did with the withdrawal from the Paris accord, from addressing
the critical challenges of our generation. The whole
world is addressing the plastic challenge at its roots. The EU
is doing it, India is doing it. The world is moving forward.”
The Americans sought to define marine debris as an issue
solved exclusively by waste management, said Hugo-Maria
Schally, the European Union’s lead negotiator on marine
plastics, in an interview, while “virtually everybody else in the
room was focused on the idea that there is a problem with
production and the use of single-use plastic.”
Photo via National Geographic

Animals around the world are threatened by broken glass, plastic waste and other pieces of human litter.
So, the goal of “phasing out” single-use plastics was
replaced by the vaguer wording to “significantly reducing,”
and target dates for action slipped from 2025 to 2030. The
documents that emerged are not legally binding. But in the
end, a deadline remains in place, and a UN working group
on marine plastics will continue to work the problem, with
the full backing of the UN purse.
“It’s fair to say that the UN environmental assembly has
put out a very clear message,” Schally says. “Single-use
plastics are a problem. There are a variety of ways to address
the issue. Waste management is one, but not the only
one. We need to look at alternatives and reduce the use by
2030. That’s the global message.”
Ola Elvestuen, Norway’s minister for climate and environment,
expressed disappointment after a panel discussion
about the best solutions, but not defeat. “We didn’t get
the wording we wanted,” he said. “But we have enough to
continue.”
KEEP IT IN A CONE
Choose a cone over
a cup with a plastic
spoon. Talk to your local
ice cream shop about
switching to
compostable utensils!
Photos via National Geographic
International treaties?
The only existing international
treaty addressing marine debris
on a global scale is MARPOL, adopted
by the International Maritime
Organization, which banned
ships from dumping plastic waste
into the oceans as of 1988–so
long ago, that in the fast-accelerating
world of plastics production, it is almost antique. Age
aside, the trouble with MARPOL is that 80 percent of the
estimated 8 million tons a year that flows into the oceans
originates on land, according to research published in 2015.
Not surprisingly, as the visibility of plastic waste has
become more prominent, so have calls for a new international
treaty that gets to the crux of the problem. In 2017, a
group of seven marine scientists tracking how microplastics
have altered genes, cells, and tissues in marine organisms—
causing death and decreased reproduction—reviewed those
findings in an opinion piece published in PNAS that urged
the UN to write a new treaty on plastic pollution.
Later that year, at the UN’s last environmental conference,
193 nations, including the U.S., endorsed a Clean
Seas pact. It was nonbinding and toothless, though significant
enough that Norway called it a strong first step.
Adopting global treaties is not supposed to be easy. The
UN is, by design, slow-moving, cumbersome, bureaucratic.
It took more than a decade, Azoulay points out, for the UN
to adopt a treaty protecting human health from mercury
poisoning.
What’s notable is how far marine plastic moved up on
the agenda for this year’s conference.
Delegates pushed for substantial action. Guðmundur
Ingi Guðbrandsson, Iceland’s minister for the environment
and natural resources, arrived in Nairobi with hopes the
conference would lay the groundwork for a legally binding
treaty on marine plastic.
“Better
to have a
weak
resolution
than
no
resolution.”
- Siim Kiisler, UN assembly president, on an
international marine debris solution
“It’s production of plastics that needs
to be tackled,” he said in an interview.
“We need less plastics. We need to look
BUY IN BULK
at how much we are putting into the
Purchase items in
system and we need to reduce that. We bulk to cut down
on packaging
need to increase reuse of what we already
use so that we are trashing as little to put it all in a
waste. Be sure
as we can. Industry needs to find more
resuable bag to
solutions than we already have today and carry home!
they may need a push from governments
to do something.”
Siim Kiisler, the UN assembly president, who also serves as
Estonia’s minister of environment, opened the assembly by urging
delegates to take strong action on marine debris, and called for the
phasing out of single-use plastic by 2025. and called for the phasing
out of single-use plastic by 2025.
Even the visuals focused on plastics. A large dhow made from
discarded plastic bottles and flip-flops stood tilted, as if tacking
along the UN’s entry driveway, as its makers announced plans
to sail from Kenya to Zanzibar to further the campaign against
the plastic menace. A separate Clean Seas venue hosted day-long
panel discussions throughout the entire week that drew in dozens
of scientists, engineers, politicians, and activists from all corners of
the world to debate best solutions.
Joyce Msuya, acting director of the UN Environmental Program,
cautions that global ambition “is one thing, but you have to
translate that into what it means for the local condition.” Member
states, she says, do not start “from the same baseline. We have to
customize and look at what can be done and share the experience
of what has worked elsewhere.” The two marine plastics resolutions
under consideration included a proposed legally binding
agreement, promoted by Norway, Japan, and Sri Lanka. The
phase-out of single-use plastics, contained in the second resolution,
was argued by India, drowning in an estimated 550,000 tons of
mismanaged plastic waste every year, with strong support from the
Philippines and other Pacific island groups.
Few were surprised when the United States balked at targets,
deadlines, and any reference to bans or levies on various plastic
products or reductions in plastic production and consumption.
The U.S. negotiators declined to be interviewed; a State Department
spokesman said in a statement that the U.S. considers marine
plastic “a growing issue” needing urgent action and that improved
waste management is the fastest way to achieve that goal.
“We support reducing the environmental impacts from the
discharges of plastics,” the statement says. “And we further note
that the majority of marine plastic discharges comes from only six
countries in Asia where improved waste management could radically
decrease these discharges.”
Stewart Harris, director of marine and environment issues at
the American Chemistry Council, an industry trade group, echoes
the U.S. stance on waste disposal as the most practical immediate
solution to reducing the flow of plastic litter to the ocean.
“We are looking at actions that will make the largest impact
in the shortest amount of time,” he says.
CONTINUES PG 43
SUSTAINABLELIVING.COM MARCH - APRIL 2019 41

FEATURED INGREDIENT: THE TOMATO
What makes the tomato sustainable?
T
omatoes are simply dummy text of the printing
and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been
the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the
1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of
type and scrambled it to make a type specimen
book. It has survived not only five centuries, but
also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining
essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the
1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum
passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like
Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the
readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point
of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution
of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’,
making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing
packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default
model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many
web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over
the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected
humour and the like).
Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random
text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45
BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin
professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up
one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem
Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical
literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes
from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of “de Finibus Bonorum et
Malorum” (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in
Turn the page for recipes!
ON THE TABLE