It’s becoming pretty hard not to live a sustainable life...

For a long time, living a sustainable life meant you would stay in a small shack in the forest or grow your own crops in your garden far away from cities and urban life. In the eighties, some companies started to go on a path to sustainability but there were not many. One of them was Patagonia, founded by Yvon Chouinard in 1973, who has been a source of inspiration for us long before we started Evergreen Capsules.

But what was once, no longer is. The fact of the matter is that things have changed. In a good way.

The Awakening Of Consciences

Ecology has never been more at the forefront than today. This gradually happened over the last few years, and at the origin of this we can find several factors: the ever-increasing obviousness of global warming and need to do something about it, the positive publicity of celebrities (Leonardo Dicaprio and others…) who put the topic on the headlines, the successes of some major events like COP21 etc.

This led to the rise of other sustainable movements like Zero-waste or Minimalism.

Today, however you look at it, being sustainable is being cool. But being cool will not help the movement long-term, and one day ecology may just be another fad. What really interests us is: does it make sense for anyone to be sustainable in their daily life? Is it the rational thing to do at the individual level?

The Greater Choice

If you go beyond the noise surrounding sustainability, something we have tried to do for the past few years, you will find very interesting things. If you look well, in almost every aspect of life, you can see sustainable alternatives to traditional products. 

We have a made a small list: 

• You can get sustainable cosmetics with Lush Cosmetics;
• You can get organic shoes with a new positive impact from Veja;
• Getting filtered tap water has never been easier with Tappwater;
• You can get sustainable sport clothes made from recycled sea waste with KOA Yoga;
• Installing a Solar PV on your roof has never been easier with companies like Tesla;
• Heck, you can even get sustainable bee wax candles from our friends LabougieHerbivore.

But we could go on. If you knew some of this brand, well congratulations you’re on well on your way to become a sustainable master :). If you don’t, please be aware there are many others, you just need to be curious and get into it.

The Economical Choice

When you think about it, not being sustainable results more expensive. This is pretty obvious for some eco-friendly products like the Evergreen capsules, or the TAPPwater filters, where you can directly see the monetary impact of your decisions. 

It is slightly less obvious in the cases of solar PV energy, which over a longer period of time will end up being economical, but will require a substantial investment at the beginning. 

It is much less obvious for other things as crucial as food, cosmetics etc. Yet the long term impact of eating unorganic food, putting industrial chemicals on your skin or drinking contaminated water are undeniable, and can be sometimes very costly in terms of health (and therefore in terms of medical bills in some countries). So you have a choice at stake and you need to realize that at some point you will pay. In the case of the average supermarket processed food, you might think they are cheap, but they are only cheap now. Over the long term, they will be expensive as it has been proven this type of food can increase health risks such as cancers.

The Awakening To The Current State Of Sustainability Yet Needs To Happen

So while the consciences seem to have gradually awakened, we still have a long way to go. The pioneers of sustainability had to make their prices higher to compensate for a lack of economies of scale of their products, which could only be sold to a handful of early adopters. Such is not the case anymore. And the more sustainable people become, the more obvious it will be that going green is actually the rational and correct choice to make. Meanwhile, the job is on every one of us to show with rational argumentation that going green is the future, both for an individual and for the Planet.