"We have to give to the next generation what we took and provide them with a better future."

Christos & Lila
Creator of a zero-waste, cruelty free and vegan sustainable shop in Athens

Describe yourself and your project in a few words.

We are Christos and  Lila.

We are living in Athens in Greece and we are running a concept store in the centre of Athens. Our concept is to have zero waste, sustainable and vegan products.

We are trying to educate greek people to this way of living and to be more sustainable ourselves. We are making some small steps in our job : we are collecting boxes from the neighbouring enterprises so we can reuse them if we send products abroad, we also plant a tree for every order we receive so we can balance or eliminate the cost of CO2 emission we create, we are composting in our home and we are giving free compost to every customer if they want, we are giving them some of our plants if they want.

We are glad to meet people like you and people who share the same ideas and thoughts!

What drives you to live this kind of life ?

Lila: We want to live totally in harmony with nature.

Christos: For me the starting point was veganism. When I stopped eating animal products and meat I saw that our way of living causes suffering to a lot of animals, so everything is connected. Living sustainable is not only good for the planet but also for the other human beings and non human beings. It's like a circular energy of life.

What do you think of the way we live on this planet ?

Let me describe it with a greek saying : “Your belly can get full but your eyes cannot.”

That means that we always want to produce more, consume more and more and more - It's never enough. So here we are today in a situation where we have no resources, our planet is in a very critical position. We cannot act like all the others, we have to protect our ecosystems.

We have to give to the next generation what we took and provide them with a better future. Because we took things that we should have kept at the place and we should make the world a better place.

Also that's the meaning of our store:

Sillage is the trace that we leave on earth, we always leave something, and humanity now is leaving a very bad trace. We want to change that.

How would you describe success / happiness ?

Christos: It is our connection with nature and for everyone to understand that most things that make you happy cannot be bought by money.

There are images, feelings, landscapes that you cannot buy with money and it would be better for everyone if we could understand this very soon.

Lila: We are not alone and holding hands (takes the hand of Christos) like this and move on, go on with joy. We have to protect everything around us, animals, everything.

Christos: All of us have difficult days, we have to wear a new smile every day and start our day thinking positive and even if we are going to make a small change, this seed may become a very big thing in the future.

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What are your future plans ? 

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We would love to move out of Athens to a village and start a small production of sustainable soaps. We are going to produce everything from scratch and we are going to work with solar energy. We are getting water from the sources of the mountain, which we are going to use for the soaps. We are going to get the oil from our trees and we want to be committed to something 100% zero waste and of course from our production.

Which message would you like to spread on this planet ?

There is no planet B, and that’s true nowadays.

So every day you throw away trash from your house and you think that it magically disappears.. It is going to stay for a lot of years.

It is going to pollute, kill animals, kill sea life and become your own food and at the end it's going to kill you.