A healthy planet is a basic human right yet the catastrophe of climate change continues to get worse every day. As a concept, climate change is sometimes immeasurable, I mean, it’s a whole planet. How can we, a single individual amongst billions see our impact? The planet is slowly dying and becoming unsustainable. There’s still time to change, though. Making a sustainable and educational choice with our money is a great place to start. We can each do our part by being more aware of our habits and consumption.
I’m a firm believer that the best way to enact change is by steady improvement and development. When we first started our journey to healthy eating and vegetarianism, we focused on red meat, then pork and seafood and finally we’re cutting back on chicken. It’s been a year in the making but it’s been easier than I would have imagined. The same can be said of our daily changes towards a more sustainable household.
What is a sustainable household?
Sustainability has multiple definitions, for me, it’s the ability to be sustained while not being harmful to the environment or depleting natural resources (therefore, sustainable for the environment).
All of these suggestions are ones we have implemented in our house for over six months and I think are simple and easy ways to live life more sustainability over the long term. Not included are recommendations like reusable bottles and bags, which I think (I hope) are already common practice.
8 ways to become a more sustainable household
- Go paperless – do you actually need your bank statements through the post, probably not
- Save gift bags and boxes to reuse for holidays – I save boxes for the entire month of December, our garage is typically overflowing in a matter of weeks. Get creative with what you save, I’ve been known to wrap even a gift card in an old box of coffee…
- Reusable cloths and cotton pads for makeup removal – I have a huge stack of cotton pads for removing my makeup and they’re so easy to wash. Probably one of the easiest changes I’ve made.
- Re-use bath towels – this sounds weird but I used to wash our towels every other day, which I thought was fine, but recently I switched to just once a week. It uses less water and energy and honestly Rich didn’t even notice the difference.
- Avoid fast fashion – I only own one pair of jeans. A concept foreign to all my friends but I would rather have one pair of high quality sustainable and ethically made jeans than half a dozen from fast fashion companies. The same can be said for loungewear during the pandemic. Read more about fast fashion.
- Wash clothes in cold water – a very simple change with a significantly large impact. Also, hang dry when possible.
- Use refillable cleaners – we personally use Koh, which I really like. Koh is a simple, effective and eco-friendly cleaning system for the whole house. Free from harsh chemicals, vegan and cruelty-free. It’s also an easy way to remove unnecessary plastic from your day-to-day.
- Reuseable cleaning cloths – again, we use Koh cloths, but any microfibre would work. We do keep a roll of paper towels in the house for cleaning up dog messes but that’s all. We even use reusable mop pads!
This is just a small list of things I’ve found easy to implement in our journey to a more sustainable household. I look forward to the day when I can share about growing our own vegetables, but in a small London flat that won’t be happening anytime soon. We all have to start somewhere! What everyday sustainable hacks and tips do you have?
Note: I didn’t include green energy because there’s a lot to unpack when discussing green energy and I think it deserves a longer post in the future. But we also use a green energy provider and smart meter in our home.
Photo by American Public Power Association on Unsplash
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