Shailene Woodley’s job as an actor requires lots of travel, frequent wardrobe changes and lots of meals on the go, so she probably knows better than most how life can make it challenging to be as eco-conscious as one might want to be. But the star and environmental advocate wants to share the message that it’s all about the small steps someone can take in the face of larger forces that make it difficult to be “perfect” when it comes to living sustainably.
“I think taking the pressure off has to start with yourself,” she told PEOPLE after speaking at Uber’s Go-Get Zero conference in London Oct. 8, which highlighted the company’s sustainability efforts across its ride-share service and UberEats. “It has to give yourself the grace and compassion to go, ‘I am a human being. I’m not perfect and the systems that surround me do not support the choices that I want to make. And so until those systems can support that, I will do what I can when I can and have the grace to trust that eventually those systems will start changing.’ ”
During her talk with Jill Hazelbaker, Uber’s Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Vice President, Communications & Public Policy, Woodley pointed out that even the most environmentally aware person can have to make choices that aren’t always ideal.
“The message that I always try to get across is not about being perfect it’s about doing what you can when you can,” she said. “It’s constantly just asking myself these questions: All right, you know what? Right now, I do need water, and this is my only option: I’m going to drink out of this plastic water bottle. But next time, maybe I’m not, because I’ll have my stainless steel water bottle. … All we can ask is being aware and doing what we can.”
She praised Uber Eats’ innovations, like creating a green packaging marketplace for merchants and $50,000 in award money for top vendors to continue to pilot green initiatives and be ambassadors for the sustainability programs, as an example of how corporations can make it easier for consumers to make more environmentally-friendly choices.
“That’s massive,” she said of the shift towards eliminating plastics from food packaging (as she noted to PEOPLE, “microplastics are not only in our oceans and in our land, but in our blood”). She added, “I spend half my life on a film set where I don’t have a kitchen that I can cook in, so I’m Uber Eats-ing, and oftentimes the food comes and everything is plastic and it’s tied in plastic over top.”
One other way she tries to use her purchasing power for good is by shopping secondhand, as she did for the event.
“I do a lot of my shopping online … It’s also not the most sustainable because there’s shipping and returning and boxes and air freight,” she told PEOPLE. “But when I use The RealReal, it’s because I want to wear nice clothes and oftentimes I’m doing events where I’m expected to look a certain way or dress a certain way. What I really love about it is they makes it very easy to track how many trees have been saved or how much of the ocean has been saved by not participating in any [new] purchases.”
Gamifying sustainability, she says, could be key to getting more people to see how fun green living can be.
“It makes it fun! We are reward based as a species. We really enjoy rewards,” she said. “And so I encourage all companies, when it comes to that circular economy of clothing, to participate more in the reward-based aspects.
Ultimately, she said, making small changes (like turning off the water when you brush your teeth) a and staying “curious” in your path to achieve sustainability will help drive larger societal change.
“Being aware in our personal lives and encouraging corporations to do the same and then watching those ripple effects,” she said on the panel. “Consumers drive everything.”
She elaborated to PEOPLE, “Four or five years ago, Uber wasn’t in the place that it is now is now in terms of its sustainability efforts. Things take time, but when people are dedicated, it does switch. So take the pressure off of yourself because the world is always going to put pressure on you. It’s always going to tell you you’re not enough and you’re not doing enough because for some reason, this is why what humans have decided is the thing to do to one another. But it doesn’t have to be that way.”
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