Paul Hellier is the founder of Fair Food Forager and he’s pretty serious about the planetary plastic issue.
Paul likes to start the day with an early morning run on his local beach. Unfortunately, over the decades he noticed his run peppered with countless pit-stops to collect single-use shopping bags, balloons, plastic straws, styrofoam, and a myriad of discarded household items washed up on the shoreline. ‘It is an extensive, eclectic and occasionally entertaining list of stuff,’ says Paul. ‘By far the most common and concerning rubbish item I collect is discarded plastic food packaging.’
In response this pollution, Paul founded Fair Food Forager which is a phone app covering all elements of sustainable practice within the food industry. ‘There is no other tool generating a business reason to include sustainability with a comparable user experience in a broad range of markets,’ he said.
‘Within a few clicks you can choose to support a business that deserves your money. A business chosen by your peers as making a real effort to care for our planet by reducing their impact.
‘After recognising a food venue for its current efforts, we aim to assist further and together create a sustainable food system.’
Recently Paul travelled extensively throughout south east Asia and with the app, with the intent of listing businesses in the region reducing their impact on the environment, helping conscious travellers find more sustainable options.
Enter Jamie Lepre. Jamie is the founder of Environment To Be and Mane Collective. He is a sustainability advocate who frequently runs local clean ups, environmental film nights and is the resident MC at the Alive Plant-based Festival.
He is also a filmmaker and this is where he and Paul collaborated.
Travelling through South East Asia
Together Paul and Jamie are so passionate about cleaning up the oceans they the took a little bike ride together to make Peloton Against Plastic, a film that deals with the issue of single-use plastic head-on.
The two cycled thousands of kilometres through some of the world’s biggest plastic polluting countries in an effort to understand the problem and to meet the local champions who are making a difference.
What’s more, they did the journey while trying to avoid single-use plastic – and if it was unavoidable – they had to take it with them. Cycling 100km a day in temperatures up to 47 degrees celsius and unable to speak the local dialects, Paul and Jamie still manage to see firsthand the problem and importantly local solutions, drawing inspiration along the way while having a lot of fun in some beautiful locations.
This isn’t the type of documentary you might imagine, its main focus is a story of working together, sharing knowledge, travelling consciously, while having a great time.
They want you to go for a ride, set the example, join forces with others and have many laughs. All that might just help us get the job done.
The Peloton Against Plastic is screening at Byron Community Centre – November 18 at 6pm.
Tickets are $14 for Children and $25 for Adults. The filmmakers and other local plastic fighting warriors will be there for a Q&A after the film as well. So come along for this one and only screening.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
