Sustainable life means reducing our negative impact on the environment in our daily lives. According to the UN descript, sustainable living means understanding how our lifestyle choices impact the world around us and finding ways for everyone to live better and lighter. In simple words, the way you eat, buy, move, consume and live should be simpler and better to create less waste and pollutants to our planet!
1.Recycle whatever could be recycled, reduce the waste
Should the packaging or materials that could be recycled instead of one single use packaging to reduce the waste we created in our consuming behaviour. However, most important is the action of collecting the recyclable items and sending them to the recycle centre. That is because if you buy the packaging materials are made from recyclable materials like glass or high density plastic. But if you did not collect and recycle it, it would become rubbish too and no different from buying one single use materials item.
2. Reduce food waste and change to low foot carbon diet
In the process of growing crops, we use a lot of natural and synthetic resources like water, fertiliser, pesticides and electricity or fuels to operate the farming tools. So, if we create a lot of food waste it means we have wasted the farm input and in the same time created more methane (greenhouse gases)that contribute to the problem of climate changes! And the problem of climate change is the major factor that creates a lot of natural disasters.
3.Create your own edible garden, grow your own foods
Because of globalisation, our diets actually include many different foods growing in every corner of the world. For example, when you have a sandwich as breakfast. The flour is made from the wheat grown in Canada, the leafy salad and tomato grown in Cameron Highland , the mayonnaise is manufactured in Indonesia and the cheese is produced in Thailand. None of it is produced locally and it creates a lot of carbon footprints. Although it is hard to have all the food ingredients locally,we could reduce the carbon footprint by increasing the portion of our diet that comes from locally produced foods. Therefore, creating edible gardens and growing our own foods would be smarter choices.
4.Shop locally, buy more organic
Besides eating in a more sustainable way, we should consume in a more sustainable way too. Buying more items which have lower footprint carbon is a better choice than buying imported items. Besides that, buy from the local market instead of the shopping mall which is far away from your living place. Besides that, buy from the producers who could produce their products or crops in a more sustainable way. For example, buy the fresh veggies and fruits produced by organic farms. Organic farming is forbidden to use pollutant input and less nutrient leaching compared to the conventional farm.
Planting trees and making use of live plants surrounding the house could reduce the indoor temperature efficiently. So that could reduce the usage of electricity of air-con and fans. Beside that, planting trees and assorted plants which could produce oxygen and absorb the carbon dioxide that is one of the greenhouse gases caused warming effects of the earth.
6. Alternative Gift giving
Instead of gifting material items that might be useless for the receiver, try to send something else like potted plants, food vouchers, grocery vouchers which will not create more rubbish or sending some experiencing gift like diy planting set, growing kits, a weekend movies tickets, a tour tickets or even a short course voucher. Besides that, send some potted plants which could survive for a long period instead of a flower basket for the memorable and important event in life. In the perspective of environment protection, potted plants are a better choice than cut flowers for gifting.. That could express your care and gratitude in a more environmentally friendly way.
We should realise the mistake we have done for our earth and take the action to make change as soon as we can before we are regretting. We could not have a better life if we did not care about the environmental health of our living space.
