This blog post is about something as girly as shopping. Impulse shopping even. In a nationwide trinkets store called Søsterne Grene (The Grene sisters) I stumbled over a table filled with different kitchen utensils. They were all made of bamboo, and even better, they were all made of sustainably grown bamboo! And it was really cheap, something you value when you’re on a student budget. There was cutlery, plates, cuttings boars, pallets, salad tongs and even those tiny plates you use for your chopsticks when you eat sushi.
Wow, I thought, this is everything I need, and more! And it’s all from sustainably grown bamboo. The entire table of stuff is from sustainably grown bamboo. And when I reached this sentence, my smile faded. The entire table of stuff is from sustainably grown bamboo. Not sustainably produce, not sustainably transported. I won’t question that the bamboo is grown with attention to the use of pesticide and good working conditions, or that no illegal deforestation took place. I’m sure the bamboo pallet in my hand had a great and sustainable growth. But that pallet has been on a long journey from it sprouted out of the ground till it ended up in my hand. Now, I do not have the knowledge of this particular product, but let’s break down some of the possible steps that this pallet has been through.
Growth: sustainable (yet, information about it is not transparent). I think I recall a ‘made in China’ sticker on one of them.
Harvest: For an industrial production this size, I’m willing to bet my hat that it’s not harvested by hand. More likely it’s harvested with big fuel consuming machinery. If it’s produced in a 3rd word country, then there are probably limited restriction in relation to particle filters and energy consumption.
Transportation: Again, big heavy machinery. Trucks, trains maybe even freighters; all of these consume fossil fuel.
Production: Here lots of machines cut and sand the bamboo. Water (too often drinking water in heavy quantities) is used to clean the dust and dirt of the raw material, as well as the cut product. The finishing might be done with oils i.e. sesame or coconut oil (are these sustainably produced with regards to illegal deforestation?), or they might be finished with lacquer (I wonder what chemicals are in that). Seeing as we don’t know anything about the production method, we don’t know if the production process had good working conditions for the employees, or if the processing chemicals are toxic or environmentally hazardous.
Packaging: The utensils are given individual stickers. The cutting boards are wrapped in plastic. Some of the utensils are packaged in individual cellophane bags. Stickers, wrapping plastic and cellophane have all been produced with the help of energy consuming machinery, chemicals, and at some point, crude oil.
The now individually wrapped and price tagged products need to go in boxes. Boxes and more wrapping. If it’s an older packaging procedure this could involved Styrofoam, which releases toxic gasses when burned. If it’s a newer packaging procedure the Styrofoam will most likely be replaced with paper. The packaging product in-between these two, is of course bubble wrap, something I shamefully admit I am big fan of. Pop, pop, pop!
Shipping: Yep, you guessed it; Trucks, train and ships. All very fossil fuel consuming
And then I’ll skip elegantly through distribution to warehouses and the re-distribution to the store, both of which requires more transportation. And now the pallet is in the store. Lying there all pretty and inviting with its ‘sustainably grown’ label on it, screaming “buy me! I’m sustainable and cheap!”
But we don’t see the full price. We don’t see the other raw materials in use, we don’t see the energy consumption and we don’t see the working conditions for those involved. We only see the price tag and the word sustainable. So why do we want to buy it?
There’s a lot of psychology and sociology underneath the choice of buying sustainable, and I will get back to them in a later post. The following is the ultra short version:
We have in recent years been told by society that buying sustainable and “going green” is, for various reasons, the right thing to do, and we feel like a good person when we perform “green acts” i.e. save electricity, eat organic food, use biodegradable fabric softener or buy pallets from sustainably grown bamboo. And the psyche likes to feel like a good person and likes to show itself as a good person. In Britain there is a trend happening now; People are buying and installing solar panels of their roof in massive numbers. Great right? The only problem is that homeowners are primarily installing them on the roof side facing the street, instead of placing them on the roof side which is actually getting sun, resulting in very low efficiency of the solar panels. A much higher efficiency could be obtained by installing the solar panels on the roof side facing the sun, not the one facing the street. Why then install them on the street side? To show your neighbors that you are a good person because you use renewable energy.
So how do we make the right choice if it is not necessarily the same choice that makes us feel like good people? (Also, I promise to deliberate further on this in a later post, but at this point you have been reading for a while so I’m not gonna push it). I will here give you the example of milk. Milk is used in most household and has a huge global distribution with a ton of different varieties. I use it in my coffee.

So what can we learn from the pallet and the milk? If we are to make choices that benefit not only our own feeling of self good, but the environment as well, we need more knowledge about the products we buy, or don’t buy. There is a need for a solid foundation of empirical knowledge about the product. A product that has the label ‘sustainable’ on it, it not necessarily a sustainable choice, just as organic milk isn’t necessarily just an expensive version of an ordinary dairy product. With the global market as intertwined as it is, mapping all the different steps in the production chain is almost impossible, but in those steps we lose the actual price of the product.
There is a need for more transparency in regards to the production of our goods, and to promote this we as consumers need to not be dazzled by a shiny “sustainable” object. Our first step is to think, to be critical in our choices, and let those choices be base on knowledge instead of assumptions. “But that’s so hard…” Yes, yes I know, but you also feed the I’m-a-good-person-feeling by making smart choices, not by buying whatever has a green label on it.
There is no easy answer and no obvious solution on how to be sustainable. But we need to be conscience about these questions and the choices in our daily lives.
And now you might be wondering if I bought the Sustainable pallet. I didn’t. I decided that my old pallet at home was just fine, because it had already been produced and bought and is after all still a functional pallet. But some day that pallet will break and I will need a new one, and when that day comes, I’ll look for a somewhat sustainable one.
All photos by Mona Jensen
Disclaimer: I am not accusing ‘Søsterne Grene’ of being unsustainable or unethical, I’m simply making a point.