LIVING, THINKING + BEING

PLASTIC FREE JULY STARTS IN THE KITCHEN

Plastic Free July® challenges people to be part of the solution to plastic pollution by saying ‘No’ to single use plastics. Making better habits stick means changing our environment rather than relying on willpower.

Start with one of these Plastic Free July kitchen challenges and nail it first before moving on to the next one. Think of the difference you could make by the end of the year.

Eliminating plastic cling film There’s no need for plastic food wrap anymore. Try the plantbased, biodegradable alternatives, or better yet, invest in reusable solutions.

Kitchen challenge: Phase out your cling film and stock up on reusable beeswax wraps, silicone lids, or high quality metal or glass food containers.

Starting a refilling habit It’s surprisingly easy to create an artful, sustainable wholefood filled pantry – start saving jars and lids to reuse them. Chantal pasta sauce jars are a generous size, making them great for storing nuts, beans, pasta and dried fruit.

Kitchen challenge: Get into the habit of refilling your favourite ecostore liquid products at your local ecostore refill stations in the supermarket or green store.

Buying your favourites in bulk Buy bulk formats (space permitting) and decant them into smaller items to fit your pantry or kitchen cleaning cupboard. Bonus – most bulk products also come in recyclable or compostable packaging. Kitchen challenge: List all the kitchen items you know you can buy in bulk like oil, flour, kitchen spray, nuts, etc… and pop it on your fridge. When these items run out, make a note on your grocery list to replace them with bulk or other low waste alternatives.

Concentrating on cleaning products Not all the packaging in your kitchen will contain food and drinks. Buying concentrated cleaning products is another way to shrink plastic waste in your kitchen.

Kitchen challenge: Try ecostore’s Cleaner Refill Concentrates. One tiny recyclable glass bottle makes a whole 500ml trigger pack.

Leaving out the takeaways Takeaways usually come in single-use, non-recyclable packaging. But who feels like cooking when you get home after a long day at work?

Kitchen challenge: Prioritise your health, wallet and planet by cooking from scratch with loose fruit and veges from the produce section. Meal prepping on Sunday night can help you get through a busy week.  PN

ECOSTORE, 1 Scotland Street, Freemans Bay, T: 09 360 8477, www.ecostore.co.nz

LIVING, THINKING + BEING TADHG STOPFORD: GROW YOUR OWN - THAILAND GIVES 1MILLION CANNABIS PLANTS TO CITIZENS

“Dr Ganja” is worth a google. He's from Thailand's Ministry of Health, and he wants you to love cannabis. An adorable cannabis headed character in a doctor's white coat, Dr Ganja’s a plush cuddly toy that young kids will love.

Dr Ganja wants everyone to love ganja, and to grow it at home if they can. The Thai Government is even willing to buy it back from you - which is what I'd like to see our government do too. Imagine a win-win PPP instead of a corporate exploitative model. Wouldn't that be cool?

The Thai Health Ministry said it has approved 1,181 products containing cannabis extracts, including cosmetics and food, and it expects the industry to earn as much as 15 billion baht ($435.16m) by 2026. It's giving out 1 million cannabis plants to encourage public use of the once forbidden medicine.

If only New Zealand had a kind government like Thailand’s. Here in New Zealand we have about six cannabis medicines after five years, all unaffordable to most Kiwis. All made by companies burning half a million dollars a week trying to get into the most profitable industry in the world -Pharmaceuticals.

Thailand is famous for punishing drug users. So this transition, to pushing plants onto the public, needs some explanation.

Cannabis is good for you. Not just that, cannabis is very good for you. Cannabis is so good for you, that the government should be encouraging you to grow it. It's a neuroprotectant, an antioxidant. It strengthens bones, protects against cancer. There's evidence cannabinoids have anti-covid action, protect you from dementia, and more.

It's a fact that cannabis is safe. Yes, it has some harms, but the Dunedin Study has shown that they are “unlike tobacco” in that they are not statistically significant. Maybe read that again.

Last week I heard from a radiographer who has had leukaemia for the last four years. Sally has been treating herself with cannabis for the last two years, and is now in better health than when she started. I have her monocyte counts if anyone's interested. Cancer is a major problem. So is diabetes. Cannabis can help with both. But that would reduce pharma profits.

In the last six years I've lost several friends and family members to different forms of cancer. I think I could have helped them. But when someone doesn't want to try anything different, what can you do; it's not appropriate to pressure sick or dying people. Misinformation, as well as the lack of access, is killing people we love.

The 2018 Farm Bill let the CBD craze go nationwide in the USA. Thanks to Helen Clark, New Zealand had its own Farm Bill in 2006. So why are we still empty handed after nearly six years of a Labour government? What does that tell us about ‘Labour’?

My friend Chris Woodney was the first Kiwi to legally trademark CBD products grown in New Zealand thanks to the 2006 Hemp Regs. But MoH strangled them, put Chris out of business, and replaced “farmer CBD” with “pharma CBD”. They replaced the accessible with the inaccessible. They replaced the affordable with the unaffordable.

“The biggest problem with the regulations is the way we are interpreting them,” said the GM of Medsafe in 2018, just before they gave the farm to pharma with the ‘medicinal cannabis amendment’.

I'm sad about the lies of omission told here in this country. Politicians and regulators think it's okay to stop us from protecting our own health. They mislead us about the truth and they mislead us about the options. They have undone legal opportunities for easy access. They have erected obstacles, leading to suffering and death. They prefer overpriced medicines to kindness, and evidence.

Why isn't this government being kind to us? How come Thailand’s Government is being kind to them?

Why can't we grow hemp? And why can't the public just be told the truth? If they just made cannabis a herbal remedy (duh), we wouldn’t have problems. We could even start with a Dutch solution. There’s a lot we can do to help each other without doing much; just remove the obstacles, if you are kind. And that’s where it seems to always become a problem. (TADHG STOPFORD)  PN