When you think about altering your lifestyle to be more sustainable, it might feel daunting due to the perception that you feel as though you have to overhaul everything, often leading to less convenient ways of living. How true this ends up being is up for debate, but it’s important to note that you can make big differences to how sustainably you’re living with smaller changes than you might expect.
Not only will these changes make positive differences, but the amount that you need to change your lifestyle in order to accommodate them might be much smaller than you would expect – leading to the best of both worlds.
Coffee and Tea
For some people, coffee and tea are regular parts of their daily routine, so it’s understandable that the idea of big change in this area might be off-putting, especially if you find yourself especially attached to one brand in particular. However, the changes that you make here could end up improving your experience, as well as netting you a more sustainable lifestyle. Look to options such as buying fairtrade coffee online, that specifically states its determination to provide you with a more environmentally conscious result.
Looking into the brands behind the coffee or tea that you’re drinking, as well as the values that they have, can be something that begins to inform your purchases going forward – even ranging out into being something you do with other foods.
Shampoo Bars
You might be familiar with the possibility of substituting your shower gel for a soap bar. The ability to simply squeeze as much as you want into your hands is doubtlessly convenient, and potentially preferable if you have regular guests, but the amount of hard plastic bottles that you go through as a result can tip the scales in the opposite direction. However, such an option also exists for shampoo, meaning that you can further de-plastic your bathroom.
In fact, this is once again an approach that you can look to take into the wider network of items that you buy. Looking towards refill stations can stop you from buying things like rice, pasta and lentils that come in a disposable plastic package and instead relies on your own containers.
Kitchen Sponges
Among the different types of plastics that you might hear about being bad for the environment, microplastics might be one of the more recent due to the increasing understanding of how widespread they are in parts of the world that they simply shouldn’t be, such as the deep ocean. Finding out which household objects contribute most to this problem can help you to start cutting them out, but some, such as the classic kitchen sponge might prove hard to remove due to its sheer utility. Fortunately, alternatives exist and seeking out sponges that are designed to be compostable in some way can provide you with a clear path ahead.
Once again, this might encourage you to look elsewhere in a similar vein, as with items like floss picks or face wipes.
