2023 ESG Report
Taylor is passionate about plastic waste
April 5, 2023
It all started with a pandemic project. In 2021, Taylor Edwards came home from an overseas trip and had to quarantine for two weeks. Faced with an abundance of free time, he was inspired to write a children’s book starring an adventurous and sweet sea turtle named Talbot, a character that he hoped would help kids understand the importance of environmentalism.
The result, Talbot the Turtle: The Plastic Ocean, was published by a London, Ont.-based indie publisher in March, and Taylor is already receiving tons of positive feedback from kids who are newly passionate about cleaning up the world’s lakes, rivers and oceans.
A Senior Financial Analyst at PC Financial, Taylor had never written a book before, but he loves storytelling and nature, and during the pandemic, he’d spent a lot of time learning about environmental issues.
“I started going out and doing shoreline cleanups, and I even took a continuing studies course at U of T, just for fun,” he says. “Most of the people in the course worked for the government of Canada in different environmental offices. But I was like, ‘I work in finance at a bank.’ It had nothing to do with my job, I was just interested in learning.”
Perhaps the biggest inspiration for Taylor’s book was a book he first read in 2020. Plastic Ocean: How a Sea Captain's Chance Discovery Launched a Determined Quest to Save the Oceans recounts sailor Charles Moore’s 1997 discovery of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a massive collection of floating garbage that is now bigger than France, Germany and Spain combined.
“It inspired me because he wasn't a writer or anything like that either,” Taylor says. “He just saw a problem and wrote about it, because he wanted to bring awareness to the issue.”
During his two-week quarantine, Taylor wrote three books featuring Talbot, one about ocean plastic, one about ocean acidification and another about slowing ocean currents. They’re complicated concepts, but he says his status as a non-expert made it easier to communicate these ideas in kid-friendly language. His publisher also helped fine-tune the language to make sure it was suitable for kids aged four to seven, an age group he says is the ideal audience for this type of story.
“It’s important for everyone to know about these issues, but they’re going to impact these kids even further in the future,” he says. “So I think it's good for them to learn about the environment early on and for us to explain the importance of these issues early too. And, when kids learn about the impact of how we treat our world, they then want to learn more, and they want to talk about what they've learned. Hopefully, they'll start encouraging their parents to stop using plastic bags and single-use plastics.”
That’s very aligned with Loblaw’s goals, too. The company’s ESG targets around plastic waste revolve around reducing plastic waste, with a target of having all control brand and in-store plastic packaging recyclable or reusable by 2025.
Colleagues can find Talbot the Turtle: The Plastic Ocean on Taylor’s website, www.coralforest.ca(Open in a new tab). He also posts additional information for kids (and their parents) who want to learn more about the importance of reducing plastic waste, including blog posts, videos and photos.
