Sustainability! We hear this word all the time, yet very few of us live truly sustainable lives. At times it seems like just a buzz word, a trending hashtag on Twitter, a sticker to put on your laptop. Many of us bring our reusable coffee cups to cafes and proudly tote around our stainless steel straws and bamboo utensil sets. It is amazing that people are actively trying to reduce their plastic waste, but it can be disheartening to see, while sitting in the same cafe, twenty people unwrap single-use plastic straws and spoons for their coffees. In the U.S., it can seem like fighting an uphill battle. While personal changes are taking effect, it seems like companies haven’t caught up on the institutional level.
Enter Australia, a country for which I am coining the term “subtly sustainable.” Why subtle, you ask? Because sustainability initiatives are everywhere, and although they’re not invisible by any means—nor should they be—they’re subtle. They don’t interrupt the flow of daily life, production, eating, or coffee acquisition. They are simply integrated into everything, into the way of life. In the most modern offices, in the most traditional institutions, and in the oldest museums, the way people care for the environment, even in the smallest ways, is abundantly clear.
Take utensils, for example. About three days into my stay, I had a realization: I hadn’t seen a single plastic cup or utensil. At every cafe and takeaway restaurant, the utensils were wooden or bamboo. Restaurants did not offer straws, or only carried cardboard straws. The cups were paper—recyclable, not the kind with plastic on the inside—or PLA (made from compostable corn starch). Most cafes simply had water glasses you could fill up, drink from, and return to a bin. I barely noticed the difference in utensils, until I finally did encounter some plastic a few days in.
To give another example, people are heavily incentivized to bring their own reusable cups and to-go containers. Most restaurants charge 50 cents for a container if you want to take the remainder of your meal home. And I’ve never seen a single piece of styrofoam here—the containers they provide are washable and reusable. Coffee shops generally discount your drink if you bring your own mug. Some bubble tea places provide reusable cups, then give you a discount if you bring your cup back next time. At outdoor events like barbecues, plates are always compostable paper and ice cream is given in cones rather than cups.
After a while, it becomes commonplace to practice this everyday version of sustainability. It becomes instinctive to politely refuse plastic straws or utensils when they are offered. I started feeling guilty for taking a paper coffee cup with a lid, because all around me, almost every person in the cafe had brought their own mug. This was a situation where peer pressure was definitely a good thing!
Living in Australia taught me a valuable lesson: Even with just these tiny shifts toward sustainability in everyday life, propelled by companies’ desires to do their part for the environment, reducing plastic usage quickly became second nature. I hope that the rest of the world will adopt a similar approach!
