10 Tips to Adopt a Sustainable Lifestyle in Your Daily Routines

With increasing environmental awareness, many individuals are striving hard to help the environment by adopting an eco-friendly lifestyle, which can be as simple as opting for a refillable water container instead of bottled water or setting up a compost bin to recycle organic wastes.

In this article, we will outline a few ways on how you could incorporate a sustainable lifestyle into your day-to-day life so keep reading:

1. When you wake up, immediately turn off your AC or heater. It will also help you get rid of your desire to go back to bed once you feel uncomfortable with the temperature.
2. As much as possible, don’t use hot water to shower. Cold showers actually have a lot of health benefits which include waking you up, increasing your blood circulation, and improves your skin and hair.
3. In the bathroom, use eco-friendly products. For example, instead of using a plastic toothbrush, there are now options for biodegradable brushes, the ones made of bamboo the most popular. Shampoos could now also come without plastic containers. There are organic shampoo bars in the market that are packed with a variety of essential oils perfect for any kind of hair. The same goes for bath soaps.
4. Use your bathtubs sparingly. The water to shower is less than what you waste when bathing in the tub.
5. About your clothes, keep your fashion extravagance in check. If you don’t need to buy new clothes, make do with what you have. Buy classic pieces instead of trendy ones so you don’t have to buy every fashion season. There are also brands that accept old clothes in exchange for points you could use later to shop in their stores.
6. In the kitchen, have a compost bin. Clear up the bin daily in a compost pit that you could use in your garden.
7. When buying food, opt for groceries that don’t have individually packed meat and vegetables. Bring paper to wrap them instead of plastic. You could also bring your own container so that they don’t have to be wrapped. For condiments, buy large containers instead of tiny packets of products you often use.
8. Cook only what you could consume in one meal or a day. So much food is wasted because people don’t know how to estimate how much their family actually eats in a meal. Take note that you might have members who are on a diet, or who don’t like a particular dish you are serving.
9. If mass transportation is efficient in your area, opt to use this instead of bringing your car to work. It will greatly help lessen the carbon emissions from vehicles. If it’s not too far, walk to your workplace instead. It’s not just helping the environment. It’s also contributing to your health.
10. Stop the throw-away mentality. People have the tendency to throw things that they no longer like. In the first place, if you are buying something for one-time use, see if you could borrow instead. For example, if you need plastic storage to transport something once, if you don’t foresee using it again, just borrow. Otherwise, it might end up in the garbage or gathering cobwebs in the attic.
11. In line with this, when your gadgets break, have them fixed instead of buying a new one. It will save you money and will also contribute to resource conservation.
12. Finally, don’t buy groceries when hungry. Studies say a hungry shopper buys more than what they need.

These are all simple things that you could do to adopt a sustainable lifestyle in your daily life. However, a lot on the list needs strong willpower. Especially since we are in a very consumerist society, we have been trained to consume as much as we can instead of consuming only what we need.

Change your mindset from the start. The by-product will be beneficial to you. You will save on unnecessary expenditures and foster a sustainable future for the coming generations.