Intentional Minimalism: Sustainability

Sustainability and environmental factors seem like an overwhelmingly ginormous problem to solve, but are we already doing more than we realise?

I was walking through Portobello Market one afternoon and glanced a guy sat behind his table under the white tarpaulin by the Westway, with his arms folded and a look of contentment like he was just where he needed to be. All around him were tables laden with vintage jewellery, hats, CDs, and military uniforms mishmashed together. This guy was selling just one thing: metal alphabet letters.

There was something really comforting in this and the image stuck in my head. Imagine being a kid at school and answering ‘he sells metal letters’ when asked what your dad does. It’s a little different from the answers of ‘policeman’ or ‘fireman’ or ‘doctor’ that the children’s books of my youth seemed to think were the professions that everyone’s dad does. This guy, he just did the one thing.

Photo by Bench Accounting on Unsplash

Do you ever open the bin lid and throw in an object, and think ‘Oh, shit’ as the bin lid closes? What happens to the objects I throw away? Not all of them can be recycled so does that mean that these are going to be buried in a landfill site somewhere for a future generation to deal with? It’s a bit overwhelming and I often get a pang of guilt that no matter what I’m doing, it isn’t enough. Environmental factors can seem so huge and so unattainable that I feel the topic is unapproachable.

This idea of doing one thing in a world of bombardment got me thinking about other companies that primarily sold one product. I was intrigued and wanted to know more, and sent off a couple of emails to a few business owners of single product businesses that I had found on Instagram. Happily, I got a couple of emails back and Billy Field of brick sixty, who sells soap bars, and jeweller Polly Collins, who primarily sells jewellery with a single face motif, agreed to chat and answer my questions.

One of the interesting things that came out of these conversations was the positive but unintentional outcomes that come from adopting minimalism. Polly Collins is a trained silversmith who runs her jewellery business part-time alongside her full-time job, where she’s an apprentice shoemaker at an ethical shoe company. She told me that being eco-friendly wasn’t the main consideration in running a single product business but was actually a factor that had become part of everyday decision making, a subconscious motivator.

Photo by Omer Lotan, courtesy of Polly Collins

Her workshop creates very minimal waste and she can easily work out what she needs to make her products. This is linked to her day job, too, where material choice and reducing waste are important considerations. As the first generation to have grown up without council-collected recycling bins and to have adopted it as part and parcel of everyday life, perhaps making decisions with sustainability in mind has become so normal that it’s not obvious as an external motivating factor.

Billy Field of brick sixty has an engineering background. He’s ‘always been interested in construction and materials, but then also the stories that go behind the materials you use in engineering and design.’ He has learned more about the stories as he’s worked on projects in his engineering day job and enjoys ‘embedding these stories in the soap bars.’

The original London Bricks were made in a sustainable way with clay dug up from the same site where the finished bricks would be fired in a kiln, Billy says, and this sustainability is important to Brick Sixty. A long trial and error prototyping process led him to decide on the soap bar as his first product, and there is now very little waste created in the production of the soap bars. Their ingredients are all sourced from the UK in a bid to keep travel distances down: ‘the stickers are made in Doncaster, the boxes in Manchester.’ Sustainability is at the core of the business growth as well, with the desire to do one thing well before expanding.

Photo courtesy of brick sixty

But what about the motivators for minimalist consumers? James, a Human Rights Researcher, told me that he’s most interested in aesthetics, price, and quality when buying new products, and always looks for durable products that have longevity. Like Polly, at first, he didn’t think that environmental factors were a big motivator for him. ‘The product is the most important. I wouldn’t search out environmentally friendly options.’ he said, but as we chatted it seemed that environmentally friendly factors, such as minimal packaging, did matter.

Perhaps, then, there is an issue in our fatalistic all-or-nothing determination of what is environmentally friendly. Although daily recycling is ingrained as part of our psyche, we still see ‘environmentally friendly products’ as a whole, often characterised by hemp or being second rate, rather than seeing environmental factors as being an acceptable added benefit to our everyday habits.

Spending your money with single product businesses seems a good place to start. Products made by a small business often produce little waste, as they only purchase what they need due to economic considerations. This means the products are thought out and made by hand by individuals. Purchasing products intentionally in this way allows us to be part of that sustainable production chain, and means we produce little waste by buying individual products that we like and need. We make a decision each time we make a purchase. It seems to me that making good choices is a good place to start a sustainable lifestyle.

My Clothes Map

“Each piece of clothing has a story behind it!” my friend said in a tone that half-marked a baffled derision. “Well, yes, of course!” I thought. We were standing in my damp bedroom in the student house we shared with five others. I’d got the biggest room and thought I’d lucked out. Not so much, it turned out; waking up to glistening slug trails on the carpet was just one reminder of this.

My friend's surprise at the emotional nostalgia each piece held for me took me by surprise. The woven threads hold the stories and emotions of where why and each piece was bought, and the places it accompanied me on my body. The shock was so jarring to me that she may as well have been shocked that it was usual for people to wear pants rather than introducing the world to their genitals each day. That’s how normal my clothes map was to me.

Photo by Renata Fraga on Unsplash

I met up with my friend recently-ish on a wintry morning, cold and the air was heavy with the threat of rain. Most probably eight years have passed since the brief clothes-map conversation in that damp room. We sat on stools which might have been a nice design if they had not been approximately the size of only one of my butt cheeks. The discomfort made me feel a bit uneasy, as though I was on the back foot, or left butt cheek. I had to make a decision, you see, and it turns out that the left butt cheek was that decision.

We were talking about music, my friend and I, which is something that adds so much meaning to her life. I love hearing someone talk about something that makes them tick, although sometimes I hear a little nagging voice pulling my barriers up against this strength of feeling that is alien to me. However, for the most part, I find it fascinating to hear what occupies their mind when it’s not filled with errands and the like. The empty space between. If Burke hadn’t been such an awful misogynist I might be inclined to think of this as the modern sublime. However, he was and is, therefore, a prick and so I am loathed to give any more brain cells to this line of thought.

Anyway, yes, I listened as she spoke about music and then heard myself say “I rarely listen to music. If I do, it’s the same song on repeat for, perhaps, a couple of months.” This didn’t really add much to the conversation and I feared I was saying it in that bit of an arsehole way that people gleefully position themselves as a popular culture outsider, boldly declaring ‘I’ve never seen Star Wars.’ My friend didn’t react as I thought, though. I was ready for a verbal tussle where we’d each site our opinions, only becoming more steadfast with time rather than engaging in anything more meaningful that actually resembled a conversation.

Photo by Mitch Lensink on Unsplash

"That’s okay,” she said, not taking the bait. This is not what I was expecting. My butt cheek dilemma no longer bothered me, either, which is also not what I was expecting. I pushed it a bit more, exaggerating my stance further, seemingly missing the bit of unease that the butt cheek incident had introduced to my morning. She remained sure in her laid back position. She was confident in the essential nature of music in her life and didn’t need to join this head-butting competition.

“But it’s the same for you with aesthetics,” she said. And, with that, I felt a feeling of calm envelope me welcoming me back to home turf. Yes, aesthetics help me interpret the world and derive meaning from it. My visual language improves my life. This reminder from my dear friend helped me to see this and, along with aesthetics, helped me to understand the pull of something that I thought I could not.

It’s strange, isn’t it, that a brief conversation was split into two acts over the best part of a decade. And that it was quite so transformative. I wonder what I will realise next, eight years after the first lines have been uttered.