For the year of 2024, the team here at Fifty Shades Greener have decided to focus our energy and efforts into spotlighting small, community driven sustainability projects from anywhere in the world that are operating on a grass roots level.

The world of sustainability itself can often be perceived as a minefield. From the enormity of the climate crisis, CSRD regulations and measuring carbon emissions, the efforts being made on the field by individuals or groups can often get overshadowed.

However, we always say at FSG, that small actions do count, especially when being carried out by many. This blog series will endeavor to highlight those people or communities who are driving REAL action.

We hope their stories inspire you, and more importantly that they spark hope.

Our second story of hope for 2024 looks at The Compost Kitchen, based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

This company, was developed by Himkaar Singh, with the purpose of repairing South Africa's soil using compost...

 Responsible Consumption and Production!

In 2015, leaders from 193 different countries agreed on 17 global goals they felt the world needed to achieve by 2030. The twelfth of these goals is Responsible Consumption and Production which considers the way the Earth’s resources are used.

The main goals of SDG 12 are to steer consumers toward responsible consumption, to shift producers away from current and unsustainable production practices, and to foster a culture of awareness when it comes to our use of resources.

Our world today increasingly revolves around our consumption. From the products we buy (and the ease with which we throw them away), to the natural resources that we exploit without a second thought, it is clear that much of our planet has come to revolve around consumption and consumerism. Globally, we consume much more resources than our planet can produce. In fact, every 7 months we are consuming what it takes the Earth 1 year to produce.

The...

Is achieving Zero Hunger possible???

In 2015, leaders from 193 different countries agreed on 17 global goals they felt the world needed to achieve by 2030. The second of these goals is Zero Hunger, which is about creating a world free of hunger!

What is the aim of this SDG?

The main goal of SDG 2 is to create a world that is completely free from hunger by 2030. The main aims are to completely end hunger, achieve food security, improve nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture.

The world is currently on the verge of a global food crisis, with millions of people experiencing hunger.

Currently 821 million people experience hunger daily, with 100+ million enduring chronic hunger due to many different factors.

The global food supply system has been particularly under pressure due to a cascading combination of growing conflict, climate-related shocks and widening inequalities. As many as 828 million people may have suffered from hunger in 2021. With the outbreak of the war in...

Do you own or run a Hospitality Business? And do you know how much money are you putting in the bin? 

There is a staggering statistic that 70% of the Food Waste produced by Hotels and Restaurants is actually avoidable. While we are putting food in the bin there are millions of people starving in other countries but for this piece we are going to move away from the human side of this problem, and look at it from an angle that motivates the majority of business owners: Cost Savings!

Stop throwing your money in the bin 

Putting food in the bin is quite literally the equivalent of putting your hard-earned cash in the bin. Of all waste types, this absolutely applies to food waste because of the many elements you have to factor in; 

1. You have purchased the raw produce at a cost. 
2. You have stored at your premises in fridges and freezers and therefore using energy that also costs you money.
3. You have then cooked it, using energy as well as staff wages to...

In this piece I will offer some handy tips that any Hospitality business can take to start reducing their waste production, and what happens when you produce less waste? You save MONEY off your waste bill! 

Waste is one of the most colossal challenges of our times. Waste production continues to increase, Ireland is facing a potential waste mountain with no place to go, for some facts and stats continue reading to the end of this blog. 

What is one of the first but most important steps to start reducing waste at your hospitality business?

Check your bins.

It's a simple task but certainly not one that people want to engage with. I myself have carried this task out during my time as green manager.

However one thing is for sure, I learned from it and I in carrying out this onerous task, we managed to reduce our waste by 30% in one year. 

Investigating your bins allows you to understand what waste is produced at your business, so you can then take the necessary...

Odran Lucey, executive chef at the Rose Hotel in Tralee, Ireland, has become the first person in the world to successfully complete a brand-new qualification for Environmental Sustainability Management in Hospitality.

Fifty Shades Greener (FSG) and the Confederation of Tourism & Hospitality (CTH) joined forces in late 2021 to create the first Level 4 (Level 6 in Ireland) certificate in environmental sustainability management in hospitality. This is the first qualification of its kind to be regulated as an official qualification on the Ofqual framework of education.

“Reducing carbon emissions should be something that becomes paramount in our daily routines if we really want to provoke a mind-set change. Environmental education is key to driving this transformation and the general education system has a responsibility to not only prepare learners for the world of work, but provide them with the skills to influence employers, politicians and the wider society. This can be...

Food is necessary for human survival, yet, over the last few decades, the fast-paced society and world capitalist economies have slowly but surely made us lose our connection with the food we eat.

Producing food requires a huge environmental effort: land that has been deforested, species that have been driven to extinction, indigenous populations that have been made homeless, uprooted soil that has been degraded and a huge amount of water used.

The reality of the modern global food systems is that we produce way more food than we need to, 30% of it ends up in the bin before it even reaches our supermarkets, while millions of people in the world die of starvation.

It is clear that our food systems are broken and a total re-think of those systems needs to happen on a global scale, to create a system that is sustainable at all points of our food journey. From its production, processing, transportation and even disposal at the end of its food cycle.

Environmentally, one of the most...

 I’ve often spoken about food waste and could continue to do so for the rest of my life, this is primarily down to the fact that our food supply systems are broken, and a shocking one third of all the food we produce ends up as waste before it even hits the shops.

When we talk about bridging the gap - this is clearly a social issue as well as an environmental one.

In terms of impacting the environment - when food waste ends up in landfill, which due to poor waste segregation is often the case - it produces methane, a gas that is far more damaging than carbon dioxide.

It currently accounts for between 8 - 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions however, we are forgetting the energy it takes to produce this food, the water required and the land destroyed to grow it. As I said - it is not a straightforward figure when it comes to its cycle of life and the greenhouse gases it produces along the way.

These are the global figures of food waste, but what about  for us mere...

We have often heard of the spread of invasive species, plant species like Japanese knotweed in Ireland, for instance. We come up with measures to remove them, so they do not wreak havoc on the local plant species and land.  Yet we have not really considered the most destructive and invasive species of them all. 

Us Humans. 

We are exhausting our freshwater supply, filling our environment with waste, exploiting natural resources to extract oil, gas and raw materials.  

Everything we ourselves need to survive; we are destroying it.  We have shown concern as our hunting and pillaging habits have brought plant and animal species to extinction globally.  Our concern is met with very little preventative action though. As a species we are the catalysts of our own demise. 

A recent article in the Guardian said that the source of the world’s food, it’s seeds, are in the control of just four companies. It also highlighted, for instance,...

Food, what a waste!

It is estimated that we waste about a third of all the food that we produce for human consumption. One third...that is a LOT of food.

Producing food requires an enormous environmental effort; Land that has been deforested, species that have been driven to extinction, indigenous populations that have been made homeless, uprooted soil that has been degraded and a huge amount of water used – all to produce food that we purchase and then throw away uneaten?

This is not a scare tactic, but unfortunately this is the reality of the food waste problem we have worldwide. These are facts. It is hard for us in the western world to understand the devastating effects that food waste has on the environment, because we can’t see it with our own eyes.

Where are we going wrong?

There is no question that globally, our food systems are broken. I have spoken previously about the disconnect that currently exists between us and our food. Purchasing food is no longer the...