Have a Planet Friendly Friday!
Black Friday it came from America…..Along with school proms, trick or treat and a host of other ideas. Black Friday, when we must all cooperate to help keep up the profits of large retail corporations, whose own philosophy seems closer to free market dog-eat-dog economics than communitarianism. Even the most hardened addicts of the shopping habit must agree that the charms of Black Friday are starting to jade. The wrong lines discounted. Massive ranges of stuff you don’t really want. Vapid special promotions of things you feel they couldn’t give away if it weren’t for all the hype and glitz.
Followers of Sussex Green Living, being a progressive, well-informed lot, will ask: what’s the environmental cost of all this? We’ve found quite an interesting little piece by Lucy Harley McKeown of Yahoo News that makes for sobering reading. We urge you to read the link; but we’ve filleted out a couple of take-aways, just to give you a flavour:
….Black Friday purchases via Amazon alone could result in at least 18,854 tonnes of additional CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere. Delivery service Hermes is predicted to produce the most CO2 from Black Friday deliveries; 58,313 tonnes of CO2, while DPD is also expected to rack up around 42,000 tonnes.
To be fair, Lucy does try to cover some mitigating efforts as well.
So, what can the ordinary citizen do? Experience shows that it’s not easy to opt out of social obligations, especially when everyone else is doing it. We could try nudging our responses. Stay in Black Friday net by all means but shift it towards a Planet Friendly Friday instead. Make your own cakes and bread, and send them as presents- and explain why you’re doing it. Or if you want to be more radical, make a Black Friday donation to an ecological association or charity, you can support our charity Sussex Green Living here! No one says we shouldn’t have nice things – but do there have to be so many, and at such a price? The fightback against mindless hyperconsumerism has started, and it can be carried on in a thousand imaginative different ways.
Lucy’s piece is based on The Dirty Delivery Report for Money.com, which we link here:
https://www.money.co.uk/guides/dirty-delivery-report-2020
By Keir Hartley
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