If you want your footprint on the environment to be a positive one, start thinking about the distinctive methods sustainability might be executed in the various stages of productions of the things you buy.
An aspect you can be mindful of when choosing which product to purchase is their expected duration: for example, you can attempt to avoid buying disposable goods if there is a reusable solution. Buy a fabric tote bag for your food shop and remember to maintain it in your everyday bag, so you will not have to purchase a disposable plastic bag every time, thus producing less waste. If you try to stay hydrated throughout the day, as you should, invest in a nice reusable water bottle, much better if made out of metal or glass, instead of buying bottled water and then discarding the packaging. Due to sustainable design products marketed by the likes of 24Bottles’ partnerships, there are many alternatives out there for you to know, and it is an investment that will pay off in the long run.
One among the main environmental causes that we should be looking out for is the size of waste that our consumerist society produces: as we cannot usually dispose of it in a sustainable way, finding alternative tactics to utilise the discarded materials can be a creative alternative. Some examples of sustainability in business feature some figures like Rothy’s banking investors, where funding rounds actually have allowed products to be manufactured out of recycled plastics. The range of environmentally sustainable products can vary from clothing and accessories, usually constructed with recycled plastics from water bottles or the likes, to books, as pages can easily be produced with recycled paper. If you don’t want any of these products, obviously, there is one influential thing you can do: recycle your household waste, and minimise the amount that gets discarded!
When thinking of how to make your consumer decisions more sustainable, do not limit yourself to the tangible things you can purchase in a store: every so often, the aspects that might have actually the biggest influence are things like electricity. One of the very best examples of green products in this case is power: we all consume electricity in one or another, and most of the times we cannot make it ourselves, but one thing we have actually power over is when we decide the provider. Just so, an easy thing for you to know to do is to prefer an energy distributor that uses renewable resources for their energy, to make sure that your electricity bill will not be the result of carbon emissions. Many energy organisations are literally changing towards greener procedures and resources, often encouraged by their supporters, as seen with EDP’s activist shareholders: if this continues to be a trend in the marketplace, the environment will greatly benefit from it.