Factoids

Shopping at the supermarket on the way home tonight?

Did you know that only 5% of the bags we use in Australia get recycled? The rest either end up in landfill sites – where they will stay for tens, if not hundreds, of years to come – or in rivers and waterways, killing 100,000 marine animals each year.

Love your Australian beef?

The industry thinks we don’t need to know that 40% of our cattle is raised using growth hormones. And have you heard of the feedlotting system, where cattle are kept in pens and fed a grain diet to bring them to market weight?

Think you know what ‘Australian made’ means on food labels?

An ‘Australian made’ product could contain, for example, Belgian carrots and Thai peas cooked and packed by Aussies employed by an American company.

Automatically think of Asian workers in Indonesia when you hear the word ‘sweatshops’?

If you think this is something that happens over there and not over here, think again. Sweatshop labour is alive and well in Australia, and it’s hard to find an Australian brand that isn’t in some way involved.

Backing bio-fuels as green alternative to petrol?

Good for you, except palm oil, the most efficient source of bio-fuel, is currently being produced at the expense of millions of hectares of rainforest and the orang-utans who inhabit them. Nothing will stop this happening unless you make a stand.

Thinking of investing ethically?

Make sure you ask your investment fund what this means to them. Sustainable Asset Management, for instance, has included British American Tobacco in its ‘ethical investment’ portfolio because the tobacco company now admits that smoking is addictive.

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