We all know that it’s the smart move to bake sustainability into our lifestyles. Nobody wants to actively wreck the planet, do they? But then again, if you’re not regularly taking private jets to tyre burning festivals it may not be obvious what you need to cut out – and you may not want to cut out anything at all.
All is not lost, however. We’re here to help.
Read on to find out simple solutions to help you live a little greener – without giving anything up.
☕ Your morning coffee
The US gets through an astonishing 50 billion paper cups every year – and for global giant Starbucks, paper cups are 20% of its total worldwide waste footprint.
At the same time, it’s been estimated that the US gets through enough single-use coffee pods every year to encircle the earth 12 times - coffee pods that can take up to 500 years to decompose.
You don’t need to be a green genius to see that getting your morning fix in a reusable cup or popping recyclable pods into the office machine will mean you’re doing your part to get these numbers down.
💲 Save sustainably
Whether you’re saving for retirement, a rainy day or next year’s vacation, your investment provider doesn’t just take your money and stuff it under a giant mattress.
If you want a little visibility on what your funds are actually used for, look for investment accounts with buzzwords like ‘SRI’ (socially responsible investment), or ‘dark green’ attached.
There’s been a crackdown lately on products like these where the environmental, human rights or other exclusions have been half-hearted at best, so today you can be reasonably sure your money is going places that are supportive of a sustainable future.
Even better, some of the more jazzy online wealth managers like Aspiration put this front and center.
🐢 Get into slow fashion
We all get 17 emails a day from companies we bought socks from three years ago offering enticing deals.
They’re bargains for sure – but there’s a reason those jeans are so cheap. They’ll have been manufactured thousands of miles away and shipped to a fulfillment center, then shipped in turn to you – adding up to a pretty grisly carbon footprint for something you’ll wear a few times a year then eventually wear to paint the kitchen.
One alternative is the growing number of online marketplaces making sure you don’t have to live in the fancier parts of New York to find the best second-hand fashion.
eBay is a popular choice, of course, but check out other options like Vinted or Depop.
♻️ Get serious about recycling
We all sort out our paper rubbish into the council bins – but what about things it may not be obvious you can recycle?
There are a growing number of services like TerraCycle that promise to deal with hard-to-recycle waste and will send you boxes where you can ship them your non-hazardous, non-recyclable and non-organic waste for recycling.
It may not feel like much, and you don’t have to go the full Marie Kondo, but you can definitely recycle more than last week’s Sunday papers.