What Inspired Sustainable Living 4 U ?

* Today's article was submitted by author and business owner Trent A. Romer. Trent has worked hard to shift his plastic bag manufacturing company Clear View Bag Co., Inc (www.clearviewbag.com) toward a more sustainable direction through a new vision of Healthy Planet, Healthy People, Healthy Company.  His book Finding Sustainability details his journey to ultimately find sustainability in multiple places.  Visit www.trentromer.com for pictures and details about the book.  

What’s your moment to push you toward sustainability?

We had just finished a 20 mile bike ride through the Berkshire countryside.  It was a clear and cool spring day in 2018. A light jacket made our ride more comfortable even in the bright sun especially as we sped down hill. Rolling hills, small towns and open country roads made for the perfect getaway weekend for my wife and I.  We stayed in an historic hotel outside of Lenox MA. Our reservation for dinner was in an hour.  As I waited for my wife to get ready, I received an email that would change my life.

A blast email from National Geographic found my inbox promoting the magazine for the month to come. The short email revealed the June 2018 cover.  The image showed a profile view of the ocean, a third of the cover above the waterline and two-thirds below. Above the water, the image appears to be an iceberg, but below the surface the true image is revealed as a carry-out plastic bag. The white plastic pokes through the surface of the ocean in a pyramid shape like an iceberg, providing a powerful revelation of how we neglectfully interact with and negatively impact our oceans and our planet. 

The ocean plastics epidemic began to gain notoriety, most notably with the Blue Planet II television episode on the BBC in 2017. National Geographic was one of the first major media outlets to hit the United States more directly.  

I am the 3rd generation co-owner of a family owned and operated plastic bag manufacturing company.  For many years, the issue of plastic pollution had seemed to me too large to tackle. I was just a small manufacturer with a business to support. What could I possibly do?  

However, now it seemed too large to ignore. I did not feel great about the product we made. Our main raw material is plastic, and pushing for ever-increasing sales was a benefit to me, my family and our employee’s families, whom our business supports. I knew that plastics help our lives every day in many ways, from food protection to medical devices to car and airplane parts. Still, more sales also meant more plastic in circulation, and I learned that eight million tons of plastic winds up in the ocean each year. The plastics conundrum lies in the great value to our everyday lives and the simultaneous damage to the environment if plastic is treated as disposable rather than as a resource. 

I had my own personal conundrum. Up until May 2018, I had done very little to explore alternatives or even flesh out my feelings. 

Years of experience and contemplation led me to indescribable feelings. My gut told me that it was time to change. The National Geographic image made me understand that this is real, this is big and it would be transformative in some way directly affecting me, my family, our employees and our business. The cover forced me to confront my own thoughts, along with determining what our company was going to do in the wake of the tsunami of anti-plastic narrative. 

All my life, I have believed that hard work wins out in the long run. The anti-plastic narrative made me double down on this belief, working extra hard and seeking the right direction for our business and for me personally—before it’s too late.

My journey to sustainability had begun.

What’s your moment?

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