I really enjoyed learning about the brief cases because it opened my eyes to a lot of new aspects of sustainability. A lot of the cases opened my eyes to new sustainable products, like Thistle Farms and Loop, and taught me more about companies I’d already heard about with Bird and Founding Farmers. In the case of Founding Fathers, I’d been to the restaurant before and known that they sourced their products locally, but I was unaware that their commitment to sustainability extended beyond that. I really enjoyed learning more about all of these companies, and it’s definitely inspired me to look for more sustainable options in other industries that I use in my daily life, like fashion and school supplies.
However, these cases also made me realize how difficult it is to be truly sustainable. A lot of the companies presented focused on online presence, which makes sense given that it takes a lot of capital to have a brick & mortar location, and consumers are moving away from physically shopping anyways, so a lot of companies which emphasize sustainability, especially for necessity products, often have a subscription based business model. But this means that the companies have to ship their products, and no matter how sustainable the product itself is, the shipping methods rarely are. A good example of this is Loop or Bite. Both offer products that come in sustainable containers, and emphasize that you can just refill these containers to minimize your waste, but they don’t acknowledge that the shipping to get the refill to the consumer is out of their hands and ground and air shipping are both very harmful to the environment. Of course, it’s not realistic to expect these small start ups handle the shipping themselves, but, as one student brought up in class, it makes me question if the benefit of these products only cancels out the pollution they create through their shipping. Overall, these brief cases made me aware of how important it is to consider all inputs of a product, its lifespan, and its delivery to evaluate its true sustainability.