This Easter, Celebrate Life!

Even if Easter is not part of your culture, let us take our precious time off to celebrate all living things, the natural cycle of birth, life and death and how our interaction with our environment can foster the former or the latter.
Like every commemorative date, we celebrate by consuming food and drinks, giving presents and congregating with our family and friends.
Just as we take into consideration how we will get somewhere (and come back) and we put some thought to plan the time, transport, route, etc, so should we do the same for all the other things we consume during the festive period (and every other day of the year). Have we thought: about how our food, drink and gifts get to us; how they were made and where they came from; where our money is going to and what we are financing? And ultimately, what happens when we've used it all up?
A nice concept that I like to use to think about consumption is that for everything we buy, we are making little investments in our present and our future. What do we want to invest in?
I want to invest my money in things that won't have a big impact on the our environment, those that will mean we are making small steps to reduce poverty or social problems and those which will translate into respect for humans and animals.
That's how big a statement everything we purchase makes: from that morning latte to choosing your holidays, including your cosmetics.
So have a look at your Easter table and see if it makes you feel proud. See what kind of little investments you're making and if the things you're supporting are in line with your values.
If you happened to walk into a Lush shop this Easter and picked up one of our Easter Eggs, make sure they go to a good home and will be used throughly!
During Easter alone, we create an extra 8,000 tonnes of waste just from Easter Egg packaging!
At Lush, we were careful to use as little packaging as possible for our eggs. None of the contents are individually wrapped and the film is a compostable celullose film that will quickly biodegrade in your home compost or buried under the soil.
The cellulose comes from sustainable sources of wood. The company has also planted a 3,000-tree woodland near their manufacturing unit and have done a thorough life cycle assessment of their product. We like to know where our money is going to.
At Lush we like to help you find out what exactly you're buying, where it comes from and make sure it is appropriate to your needs, so that you really know what the little investments you're making when shopping are truly buying.

Corn is Pop

When rethinking our parcels, Jill, one of our Mail Order gurus, had this idea of using popcorn to fill the boxes and make sure our products would arrive safely in the hands of our customers.
After some research, we had a bespoke popcorn machine made for us that could produce 32 kg of popcorn per hour or 2,127 kg per week! And would we need all of that when we decided to use it to fill our gift boxes, as well!
Popcorn goes into our parcels and most of our gifts as a replacement for the shredded paper we used. The paper used (and still present in some gifts) was end-of-the-reel and fairly local, so not much environmental damage there; however, popcorn is 60% lighter than the shreddie, it protects the products a lot better and it much more fun than just boring shredded paper.
The other clear advantage of popcorn is that we are transporting unpopped kernels, which are concentrated and compact. Popcorn vendors make their money by buying per weight and selling by volume. My guesstimate is that about 1 litres of kernels will be transformed into 35 litres (0.035 cubic metres) of packing material (I later googled it and found that popcorn have an expansion rate of 36-44 to 1). To make these numbers more practical, I’ll use my lorry metaphor again. If we were transporting say polystyrene packing material (those puffy things), we would need 35 lorries on road carrying the same volume as would potentially be in 1 lorry of kernels, after being popped. Still following?
What’s more, last year we bought roughly 70 tonnes of shredded paper to fill of our gifts and parcels. To get the same volume in popcorn, we would need only half that tonnage in kernels. That also means our parcels are about 10% lighter.
Putting our products in popcorn also meant that we could reduce the number of plastic bags used to wrap individual items. Products like ballistics and bubble bars are happy to sit naked in the popcorn. Sticky products like massage bars and some of the soaps still have to go in bag, but we are working on changing that, as well. We felt we could reduce the number of bags used by half, which should mean at least 2 million plastic bags saved, possibly more.
Popping the corn is an energy-intensive business, but so is making polystyrene puffs or the now commonly found biodegradable starch version. The latter goes through an extrusion process using very high temperatures and high pressure. Turning a tree into paper is also energy intensive, but that is done far from our eyes, so it’s not as immediately obvious as the popcorn. The good thing about popping it in our factory is that we have control over our electricity supplier, which is something difficult to have over up and down our supply chain. As of January 08, when our current contract finishes, we will move that building to a green supplier and should then have wind-powered popcorn.
After you’ve used you box contents, popcorn makes a lovely addition to anyone’s compost. I personally wouldn’t recommend eating it, unless you like eating soap, as it absorbs some of the Lush scents and you get slightly fragrant popcorn.
If you don’t have a compost heap, it’s time to start one. Go to Compost Now for some advice or if you don’t have a garden, friendly microorganisms can help turn your food into lovely liquid fertilizer. Try these websites and get some kitchen digesters this Christmas: Living Soil, The Green Shop. Oh, don’t forget nagging your council for them to set up a food waste collection scheme! If you’ve got kids or need some relaxing time, use your imagination and make some pop(corn) art.