Today we visited Stanford fishing. So far I found this sustainable business most interesting. Supplying fish to over 500 customers, and holding 20% of the islands catch quote, it’s a very large business. I think it is often a lot easier to look at sustainability in small businesses, because there impact can easily be small. Also changing their products to be more sustainable doesn’t mean a whole new rollout over multiple locations across the country. So when looking at Stanford fishing there are a lot of areas that to people who don’t know much about the business, would see as unsustainable. For instance I thought the amount of water and plastic they used seemed like a big problem area. However because they are such a big business changes like that seem to take years to find new sustainable products, test them out, then finally implement them. One thing that did sell me on the fact that they are striving and succeeding at sustainability, was the focus on science and constantly updating their practices. For example the new net that they showed us that will allow for less bycatch. Overall I learned and incredible amount about the fish industry and what it is like to have sustainability be implemented in large industries.
