A Contributed Post: Easy Ways to Reduce Your Waste
There are so many areas of our lives in which to reduce our effects on nature that it’s sometimes difficult to know where to start – and the simplest forms of reducing your carbon footprint get overlooked. Perhaps the simplest of all is being careful about the materials that you use and throw away, creating waste that itself has a carbon footprint, while also filling landfill unnecessarily. If you make a move to reduce waste, you’ll be joining millions of people worldwide who have decided to be conscious about their trash habits – you’ll find out just how easy it is to do in this article.
Have a Recycling Plan
If you just have one large trash can in each room, with all sorts of rubbish mixed into your weekly load of trash, then there are ways to improve on the recycling front. Buy alternative trash cans – some come with separate compartments for recyclables – and start life with a new habit of recognizing what’s recyclable so that you can enter tins, bottles, cardboard, and paper back into the system, saving the world from excessive resource consumption and instead allowing it to reuse what it’s already got.
Go Paperless
The paper trade is one of the most devastating for the world’s forests, having knock-on effects on ecosystems and soil configuration that can cause real environmental damage. Paper is a constant feature of daily life, but there are preventative methods not that computers are a staple for many. If you’re an artist, start creating documentaries or moving image pieces, or use a banner maker for YouTube to share your work. An accountant? Then you should have digital records that need not be printed. Can you receive your daily paper online on a tablet? These considerations will reduce paper waste.
Practice Food Management
US households trash as much as $640 of their food annually – a statistic that represents not only financial waste but a real waste of a resource that has a large carbon footprint for nothing. Consider the journey a steak goes on to get into your fridge – from farm to production to fork – throwing it in the trash because you didn’t plan your weekly meals may not seem particularly harmful, but with planning, such occurrences can be avoided. Have a sensible and achievable plan around how you and/or family eat, and that way you can ensure you prevent unnecessary purchases on perishables and reduce over-filling plates that’ll end up scraped into the trash can.
Reduce Energy Wastage
As important as physical waste, the wasting of energy provided to our homes can be a very easily reduced through small adjustments regarding how we live our lives. Turning off lights as we exit a room, turning appliances off at the socket when they are not in use, fitting low-energy lightbulbs, turning the heating down and investing in blankets for the cooler evenings are solutions that may drastically bring down your energy bills while ensuring you’re not wasting energy that’s come from fossil fuel burning.
By taking tiny and simple measures, it is possible to reduce your wasting of materials, food, and energy, so that you’re doing your bit to save the planet.
