🌊 Living the sustainable Island life: Sunny Pal
🌊 Living the sustainable Island life: Sunny Pal
LoTW: Dehydrating soap, Start-Up events and Facebook Meta
Hey!
I'm Sunny Pal and I manage a bond brokerage business in my day job and am an entrepreneur in my spare time trying to help tackle the plastic problem in Hong Kong. Originally from Scotland (via London) and have have lived in Hong Kong for the past 4 and a half years.
During the Covid period and resulting lockdowns and travel restrictions, myself and my fellow co-founder Kevin (also my work colleague from Ireland and also living in HK for over 4 years), had a bit too much time on our hands. We began talking about business ideas and soon both realised we wanted to try something which may also have a positive impact on the place we now call home.
Several scrapped ideas and a couple of drinks later, we started to think about how many of the cleaning products that we buy for the home are made of water, sometimes up to 90%! It seemed pretty strange to us that we are paying for all this water to be shipped around, stored and also all the associated plastic that gets used and thrown away, often ending up polluting our environment.
Essentially we realized that by using dehydrated products, the water in our taps to activate them and resusing bottles, we can dramatically reduce our plastic consumption, save space in the home and achieve competitive results with existing products. And so Island Life was born.
The name reflects our backgrounds and experiences being from UK and Ireland and now living on HK Island and also the unique characteristics and resourcefulness that islands (and their inhabitants) must maintain to remain sustainable.
~ Sunny
News without the water weight
Everyone knows by now that Facebook’s rebranded, but the whole metaverse idea’s pretty cool. An integrated, virtual world that’s not controlled by any one entity, seems almost too good to be true. This interview between the Verge and Mark Zuckerberg talks all about it and other new developments. I'm particularly getting interested in the NFT space and how it relates to existing brands and physical products.
Skimpflation is a new term floating around my daytime economics life. Essentially its a recent phenomenon where the price of a product stays the same, but you the consumer gets less of it and at a lower quality.
Ultimately fiat money is worth less and less and asset bubbles are inflating. Its a strange world.
Instead of ‘phase out’ coal usage, India and China changed the wording of the COP26 ‘Glasgow Accord’ deal in the final hour of the conference to ‘phase down’, saying that developing countries are ‘entitled’ to coal usage.
At Island Life, we care a lot about plastic in water ways. Myself and Kevin have been to a few beach cleanups ourselves to try and help with things, but there are some plastics you can’t just pick up - microplastics. According to Nature magazine, every time you load up a washing machine with synthetic clothes, approximately 640,000 and 1.5 million pieces of synthetic microfibre is released.
Cool businesses and events to rehydrate to
Swop It, Don't Shop It with Take Out Plastic
Run by Take Out Plastic, ‘Swop It, Don’t Shop It’ lets you drop off clothes you no longer wear and then take something home for free for a minimal price. We all have our favourite clothes and those we never wear. A great, fun initiative to make use of the stuff we don't wear.
When: 730-930pm, 29 Nov (Mon)
Where: Quality Goods Club; 39-43 Hollywood Road. Central.
PMQ Xmas Startup Fair
Island Life and some other local startups are hosting this event at Bamboa in PMQ. Come say hi!
When: 28 Nov (Sunday)
Where: Bamboa (Shop S304) PMQ, 35 Aberdeen Street. Central.
Sai Kung Market
Looking for the perfect sustainable Christmas present? Join us at the Sai Kung markets this weekend and get your hands on one of our brand new Christmas gift boxes. These products will not only help get your house spick-and-span but it will help cut back on single-use plastics too! 🌎✨
When: 11am-8pm 20-21 Nov
Where: 25 Man Nin Street, Sai Kung
Cool sustainble businesses to look out for
We met Andre at ReThink and had never heard of sustainably focused wine company before from product to packaging. Eco friendly corks, labels, less glass in their bottles, sustainable vineyards. Last but not least, tasty!
Toby Crispy designs and makes clothes from upcycled fabrics and pieces. Has recently collaborated with Patagonia and New Balance. Very talented HK designer with interesting designs, making use of clothing and fabrics already produced to minimize wastage.
Sunny has a secret hangout
Riddle me this: which place in Hong Kong feels the most like London (not Central) and why?
Find out on today’s Paid Tide