Sustainability Looks Different for Everyone

Teddi:

I am not a picture of environmentally sustainable living because my life is centred around my health. Every medication I take comes in printed boxes, plastic capsules, or plastic bottles. A month's supply of everything that keeps me functioning creates a lot of waste. If the chemist runs out of the small plastic bottles, I might get them in a glass jar which I can recycle. But either way, they end up in my pill organiser, which is more plastic. 

I have to drive to pick up prescriptions. My local chemist is not within walking distance, and with buses being what they are for my suburb, it would take me an hour to get there and back. Using the bus would probably mean I wouldn’t be able to do much else for that day. I don’t know if my medications are made in the country, but as long as they are working, I would import them if I had to. 

Other times my health can make me live  sustainably. I can’t eat much meat or dairy products. “Budget vegan” is what I call my diet. I try to live as sustainably as possible. Sometimes I can’t and that’s okay. 

Sustainability is not a single-person movement, so it’s okay if your sustainable life sometimes has plastic packaging. 

Kelly:

As someone with chronic illness, within a few short weeks I accumulate so much waste from different things, including plastic medicine bottles, tablet blister packs, metal canisters, plastic inhaler shells, cardboard boxes, and paper scripts. Even living in a reasonably sized room, I find myself drowning in empty blister packs and boxes every second week. I look around and wonder how much I, and all people who use medicine, contribute waste unnecessarily. 

Medication is a necessity, but does everything need to come in plastic these days? I can visit any chemist and find supplements I need in a sturdy glass jar.  I’m always aware the average person may be able to open this but that someone with a physical, mental, or neurological disability may not. Thinking about that makes  blisters make a lot more sense. 

There are other ways we can package these things, but it would be less convenient and might increase the cost and accessibility of the medications we rely on. This issue has become one of sustainability versus accessibility. While I and most of the public rightly prioritise accessibility, why should we have to give up sustainability? 

We shouldn’t. But currently the world relies so much on plastic that anything else is a little less accessible or more expensive. I don’t need to tell you how important it is to ensure costs are low and accessibility is high. 

So for now, we will have to make do. Sometimes there is no way to be completely sustainable. Doing your little bit creates a huge positive effect, but that should not come at the cost of adding difficulty to a life that may already be a little bit difficult.