By Sahana Senthilkumar
Everything from our culture, to our health, to our monthly income plays a direct role in the choices we make at the grocery store. With so many immediate factors consuming our attention, unfortunately enough, the environmental impacts of purchasing certain products often go unconsidered.
In order to truly be “smart shoppers”, we have to recognize that advertisers will try to manipulate us and our own desires can blind us. We can prevent ourselves from falling into these traps by actively taking charge of our decisions and attempting to weigh in all factors.
That means the next time you find yourself considering adding any of the following items to your shopping cart, think twice about the product’s environmental impact. If possible, choose an alternative - you’ll certainly be doing the world a favor.
Foods with Palm Oil (healthier alternatives: foods with coconut, olive, avocado, or peanut oil)
Palm oil, often one of the ingredients in vegetable oil, is widely produced because of the crop’s high yield and low cost of production. Oil palm trees thrive best in tropical conditions, so many tropical rain forests are being destroyed to maximize palm oil production. Tropical rain forests are highly productive and biodiverse ecosystems that help keep the planet healthy by stabilizing the global climate and absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Therefore, they cannot be replaced by lucrative crop plantations; they must be protected at all costs.
Disposable grocery bags, plates, cups, cutlery, straws, and water bottles (alternative: reusable versions of these items made of materials like steel or ceramics)
Disposable plastics are harmful for the environment because of their inability to degrade quickly in landfills. It takes around 500 years for a single plastic bag to be broken down into microplastics, at which point the plastic particles will simply absorb toxins and pollute the atmosphere. Disposable plastics also pose a tremendous threat to marine life once they’ve made their way into the ocean. Marine creatures may mistake these items for food or rocks, interacting with them in ways that are detrimental to their health.
It can even be unsustainable to use disposable paper products - once they’ve been contaminated by food, they can no longer be recycled and will simply take up space in the landfill. Even more trees will need to be cut down in order for manufacturers to have a constant supply of materials.
Animal Products (alternatives: plant-based milks and proteins)
A much larger input of energy is needed to cultivate livestock than to cultivate crops.
For example, 5 times the amount of energy required to produce 1 lb of soybean is required to produce 1 lb of beef. If we all just ate soybeans, far fewer natural resources would have to be consumed to feed the same number of people.
Cultivating livestock is also associated with emitting greenhouse gases like methane into the atmosphere. Methane is 28 times more effective at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, raising concerns about the impact of livestock cultivation on global warming.
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