10 Simple Steps to a More Sustainable Lifestyle
The new year is a great time to get your eco intentions into action. Maybe you already started the year with good intentions but they have slipped (I hear this is common!) or maybe, like me, you don’t set strict goals but just raise your awareness of your actions and try to improve gradually on a daily basis. I have been having more and more fully vegan days and intend for those to become the norm and non-vegan days to be less and less frequent.
If you need some help and some guidance on the ways that you can live a more sustainable lifestyle and reduce your impact on the planet, then we invite you to download our free guide to help you along the way. You can complete the steps in your own time and you can check them off as you go (some will naturally take longer to “complete” than others as it’s an ongoing change in lifestyle you’re really after), but we would still love you to share your progress with us as you go along.
Here is a snippet of the first 3 steps of our 10 step guide to a more sustainable lifestyle. To find out in more detail and follow the rest of the steps, go ahead and download it.
You might already be doing several of these, or you might have just started out. Either way we hope you will gain some inspiration and ideas on how to further reduce your impact on the planet and live a more sustainable lifestyle. If we all share these with the people we know, we really can make a collective difference:
- Stop buying bottled water – Plastic water bottles are hugely wasteful to produce, consuming massive quantities of oil and water to produce and most of them ending up in landfill. It’s easy to stop buying bottled water by simply drinking water from the tap, using a water filter if you need to, and taking a reusable water bottle with you when you’re out and about.
- Take reusable bags to the shops – Millions of plastic bags each year end up in landfill, breaking down to small, toxic particles which are bad for the environment. Many end-up in our oceans, and it’s estimated that 100,000 marine animals die each year due to plastic bags in our oceans. So, stopping using plastic bags is one easy change to make. Reuse any you have until they break, recycle them properly and then purchase a few reusable bags. Get into the habit of taking them to the shops by leaving them in the boot of the car, or by the door and they will last you for years.
- Reduce your meat intake – According to Greenpeace, mass farming of cows, pigs and chickens generates as much greenhouse gas emissions as all cars, trucks and automobiles combined and we know the meat industry destroys vast amounts of forests per year for grazing pastures. We recommend becoming vegetarian, vegan or reducing the level of meat in your diet, by just a few meals per week, and encouraging others to do the same.
You can get the full 10 STEP guide here and keep it with you to refer back to each time you want to focus on another area that you can improve or to get more ideas and inspiration.
Print out the checklist at the end, put it on your fridge or in your kitchen/bathroom/office – somewhere you will see it plenty.
Share your progress on social media by tagging us (@ecopassionspain on Facebook/Instagram/Twitter or hashtag #ecopassionlife).
Feel free to share the link with your friends and family too or link them to this article. We can’t wait to see how everyone is doing. Good luck!
