It was great to connect with Lauren, who’s a Student Veterinary Nurse with a passion for being eco friendly and encouraging sustainability in practice. Here she reflects on how she first got interested, the domino effect that occurred by sharing and talking about her passion with friends and colleagues, and inspiration she has taken from online communtiies.
“I went on to follow likeminded pages on social media and started to get more ideas of swaps and changes I could make.”
Lauren Burnand
Joining team green!
Ever since I was first introduced to environmentally friendly products a few years ago by one of my closest friends I was hooked! The idea that me making small changes would make a difference to the planet was like a light bulb coming on in my head. It started off simply with me buying a twin pack of metal straws from paperchase and that was it, I was off. I kept making more and more small changes over time and I felt I was making a difference. Suddenly, I noticed my waste bin was not getting as full each week and I did not have to spend as much on items such as kitchen roll as the ones I replaced them with were all reusable. I was making a difference.
The domino effect
The more delved into it, the more I started discussing sustainability in everyday life with family and friends and some of them had the same views as me and others were like me in the beginning and had not really given it much thought before. Suddenly I had gotten others interested in it and they started to make small changes. Then it occurred to me – who else shared this passion? I went on to follow likeminded pages on social media and started to get more ideas of swaps and changes I could make. Each day I would go into the vets for work and started to feel almost guilty at the waste we were creating each day. I thought maybe there is a way I could get some sustainability and eco friendliness into my workplace.
The eco-friendly vet nurse
It was New Year’s Day when I decided to create my Instagram account, I know very cliché ‘new year new me’ but I wanted to start an account that not only shared my passion for sustainability and all things eco-friendly but my other passions like veterinary nursing and how they could come together. I then found other pages and groups that shared these two passions as well which I thought was great! An eco-friendly veterinary community! My first little creation was my eco-friendly checklist, small changes that can easily be implemented in veterinary practices. I have called it the phase 1 checklist as I feel having planned gradual phases will not only allow for gradual, realistic changes in everyday practice but this way there will be more compliance from others if change slowly happens over time. As not everyone likes to change, people get stuck in habits of doing the same thing each day or buying the same product each week, so hopefully this will help. Over time I hope to find more ideas that I can share and implement into practice and of course my main goal is to help create a more sustainable practice environment!
Lauren Burnand
Follow Lauren @ecofriendlyvetnurse