Sustainability is vital for the longevity of our future. But achieving it can be really hard. Charlie Gill, co-owner of Life Before Plastic, talks to feature writer Amina Ali about using social media to empower individuals into living more sustainably.
It’s 2018, and 25-year-old Charlie Gill is spending her summer in Nepal.
She is with the International Citizen Service, supporting them in digging out toilets and building hand-washing stations for the Nepali communities who lost many of their facilities in the 2015 earthquakes.
But what stuck with her from this trip was not just the devastation the earthquake left behind, but the river. What should have been a place of quiet tranquillity was ruined by the sheer amount of plastic sachets floating in the water.
Charlie, now 32, explains: “There was no waste management system in the particular area I was in because it was so hilly and they don’t have access to the main towns.”
While she was already considering studying a Masters in sustainability, it was this trip that opened her eyes to the reality of the world’s plastic consumption.
“It’s quite a Western, White saviour-kind of view that you go somewhere and you see something. But it really did impact me as to what the issue was here,” she says.
“Unlike them, we have got a waste management system. But plastic is just everywhere. That’s what led me to set up the business.”
After Charlie and her older sister Trina both saw the amount of waste produced through their lines of work, they decided to set up Life Before Plastic, an online plastic-free shopping site.
“It’s hard to search for eco-friendly products yourself as a consumer, because nobody has any time,” Charlie says.
“And so, it was a one stop shop for everything that you could need from brands that we’d done the research on. We knew that they were ethical, that they were small businesses and fulfilling certain things.”
But Charlie and Trina both felt that they could offer more than just the shopping site. After all, Charlie had studied a master’s in sustainability and Trina was seeing the impact of plastic in her work in hospitality management.
“We’re not really e-commerce experts. There are other people out there doing better things,” Charlie says.
“Our passion is more in our storytelling and our community building. That is what we focus our time on now.”
Life Before Plastic now prides itself on being a content hub that gives advice on how people can live more sustainably. Over the years, Charlie (who runs the social media) has built a community of more than 58,000 people on Instagram.
She highlights how individual sustainability, which can often feel like a small drop in the ocean of eco-actions, can have a massive impact.
“I get this quite a lot where people say, ‘what is the point of individual actions?,’” she says.
“Say for example, somebody comes over to your house and sees that you’ve got a soap bar instead of a pump soap and asks you about it. You telling them why and explaining can have them go on to change themselves or tell someone else about it.
“Whilst you might not think that one bottle has the impact it does in the scale of things, it actually can impact so much more than that. It’s much more than just one piece of plastic.”
Charlie can recount many times that people have reached out to her, but it was one incident with a little girl and her backpack that sticks in her mind the most.
A follower reached out to say that her daughter felt upset after seeing all her friends at school with new backpacks, while she still had one from the year before. But Charlie’s post about second-hand clothing gave her a new-found confidence.
“I posted about how re-wearing is an amazing thing because it shows how much you love something, it can remind you of other times you wore it and can become part of your identity.
“She (the follower) said it completely changed the perspective of her daughter and that she started to think about how it’s so cool that she has this backpack that she wears and everybody knows it’s her bag.
“That was such a cool message to receive and it made my day. That’s exactly what I want my content to achieve. I want people to realise that living sustainably is cool and can make you feel good while also helping the planet.”
Charlie reiterates that it’s so easy to feel overwhelmed by the state of the world (known as eco-anxiety). But it is this anxiety which fuelled her to highlight grassroots and community projects in her hometown of Manchester with the hope that it’ll inspire others to help their local communities.
“When you read the news, it can be really depressing. But there are a lot of people doing good things that just don’t get reported on. Sometimes we just need a reminder.”
The power of community is at the heart of Life Before Plastic, and Charlie says individuals have a lot more power than we believe.
“The biggest change comes from communities. It doesn’t come from the top.
“If you look back at civil resistance, change comes from people on the streets wanting that change. Then it goes from there. It doesn’t come from the other way because it won’t work. It’s communities and the people’s mindsets that have to change before anything else does.”
She also says that while eco-anxiety can make us believe that we don’t have any power over what governments do, voting and collective action can be used to hold those in power to account.
“One of the most impactful things you can do is voting because you can take a really simple eco-step by voting for somebody who is going to create a regulation or put a green political thought into action.
“Even your local council elections can make quite a big impact. I always say the top action that anybody can do is vote.”
The idea of living a sustainable lifestyle straight away is daunting to those who are just starting out. But Charlie always encourages others to start small. It is the key piece of advice Charlie wants others to take away from her content.
“You don’t have to be perfect. Even I’m not perfect,” Charlie says.
“It’s like when you go on a fitness regime and a diet at the same time that you just immediately stop after a week. You have to do it step by step and slowly change your life. Then you’ll look back in a year and think ‘wow, my life is totally different.’
“Do the best you can and don’t beat yourself up. Remember all the good things that you’re doing, that others are doing and keep moving forward. If everybody is working towards the same goal, we will get there.”
