When you first set out on your sustainable, eco-friendly living journey, the sheer amount of new criteria you have to consider can be daunting, and you might not be sure where to begin.
It may be tempting to start over completely and buy every single sustainable alternative on the market in order to transform your life and your home all at once. Don’t give into this temptation! For one, your wallet will thank you.
The most eco-friendly thing you can do is use what you already have – use up every product, empty every bottle, and wear down all the sponges. Throwing away these non-eco-friendly products is wasteful and harmful to the environment.
Instead of trying to do everything at once, going green gradually is the way forward, and is a huge part of our ethos here at Between Green. We know that taking small steps and making small swaps is a lot better for sustainability in the long run.
Think of it like a diet – we all know crash diets, where you try and drastically change your lifestyle all at once, never work. It’s the same with going green. If you try and completely reinvent yourself and your lifestyle, it’s going to be overwhelming and you’re going to give up!
As you’re using up these less sustainable products in your house, replace them as you would anyway, except with reusable or eco-friendly alternatives. For example, if you’re out of kitchen roll, keep the inner tube and pick up reusable kitchen roll sheets to replace the roll with. Or if you’ve used up a pack of makeup wipes, invest in some reusable cotton pads next!
If you go green gradually, you won’t even really notice your new eco-friendly lifestyle forming and it’s more likely to stick. If a new product has a bit of a learning curve, instead of having so many new things to try and getting confused, you can really focus on getting the one product to work for you. You don’t need to be juggling so much at once!
Once you’ve got your reusables sorted, you can start looking at your other habits – or start the other way around, it’s all about what works best for you and your family! Changing one habit at a time means you can really focus your energy into it and create a new routine. Perhaps you want to start eating more plant-based foods, or start a compost bin. Taking it slowly and adding one habit at a time to your life is almost guaranteed to help you create a sustainable green lifestyle that will last.
Science agrees – according to strategist Caroline Arnold, “the key to creating long-term change is to set smaller but winnable goals that then lead to a pattern of sustainable habits”. That means instead of setting a big goal of ‘be more eco-friendly’, we should be setting micro-goals like ‘take reusable bags to the supermarket’ and ‘use a reusable cup at the coffee shop’.
Small changes are like stepping stones and achieving them can boost your confidence and resolution, making your big ‘go green’ goal seem manageable and achievable.
If you don’t know where to start, why not try our subscription boxes? We send letterbox-sized reusables and eco-friendly products every month! Make sure to sign up for our newsletter below so you can get advice and guidance for sustainability direct to your inbox!
