Palm oil is so pervasive and so bad for the ecosystem! I check the labels to avoid palm oil but learned that it can often be under a different name and sometimes companies even use "forest friendly" labels to defend their use of palm oil even though they're practices for palm oil isn't forest friendly. I'll be keeping a keen eye out whenever I shop!

I find that the hardest thing to part with in going low waste is grocery bag for produce or food items. California's restriction on plastics bags has really helped a lot in less plastic consumption. However, when shops' products are all covered in plastic (looking at you, Trader Joe's), I find my trash bins always fill up. I know I won't be able to cut it out all together immediately, but I will strive to reduce by bringing my own linen or mesh bags and picking plastic free produce where I can.

Working from home makes it easy to just use a cup for water but we also use steel bottles when we hike and camp. I'm guessing the only single use plastic we use frequently is in product packaging, garbage bags, and ziplock we use for leftovers. Product packaging is a tough one since our income is not high, but we are slowly transitioning to bar shampoo instead of bottles and now that our youngest is potty training soon we won't be using diapers either. I think one thing I would like to cut back on is just purchasing of 'stuff' less useless knickknacks. Less low quality toys that are going to break. But you can't enforce that on the grandparents haha

Pollution, especially polluted storm water, is a big problem here. It's mostly from commercial agriculture and badly designed storm water systems that can't handle storm events. But we also are dealing with the after effects of heavy hydropower use and the political fallout as some of the dams are beginning to be removed