Beginners guide to mindful shopping and consuming:
- Take your stainless steel water bottle everywhere.
- Bring your own reusables such as cutlery and lunchboxes.
- Say “no” to plastic bags and bottles.
- Make sure that you always inform waiters and waitresses that you do not want a plastic straw #stopsucking
- Say goodbye to plastic straws completely. Alternatives to plastic straws are reusable ones made from glass or stainless steel.
- Invest in reusable produce bags and use those when you go shopping for fruit and veggies.
- Ditch plastic toothbrushes and switch to bamboo toothbrushes that are compostable. Plastic toothbrushes stay on Earth forever, which means that your childhood toothbrush still exists somewhere on Earth today!
- Boycott all polystyrene packed products as they are usually non-recyclable, lead to the destruction of ozone layer and are also endocrine disruptors.
- Sell or donate your old clothes and buy thrifted good-quality second hand clothes.
- Buy local and support the industry and workers of your country!
- If it is possible in your region adapt a zero-waste lifestyle were you try to produce as little waste as possible by buying bulk, bringing your own bags, glass bottles, containers and refillable bottles.
- Do not use balloons! There are so many alternative decorations and balloons are non-recyclable, non-biodegradable and will stay as pollution on Earth forever, while affecting wildlife and ending up in our own food chain! Having two minutes of fun is not worth it.
- Use shampoo and conditioner bars instead of plastic bottled ones (see my blog post on the lush products).
- Take two for the ocean! Pick up litter that you find lying around and recycle it if possible. Otherwise dispose of it safely so that it does not land in the environment and ocean again.
An individual person creates lots of waste in the course of a day (please look up the current statistics of waste produced per person). Now imagine all the waste produced by a single household every day. Multiply that by 356 days and add the years together. These are mind-boggling amounts of waste produced by the world population. It is unsustainable and not even necessary. There is no need for us to depend on plastic and non-reusables! Our oceans are under serious constraints regarding plastic and other toxic waste pollution.
If we continue this plastic dependency trend our oceans will contain more plastic than fish by the year 2050! Whatever plastic has been produced is still somewhere around us. But you can personally contribute to avoid this kind of ongoing pollution of our environment.
Just because you can’t do everything does not mean you can’t do something!