Small acts, big change
What small changes can you do in your everyday life to make a difference in saving the environment while reducing pollution? Here are a seven small but effective habits you can implement in your daily life to be more eco-conscious.
1. Revolving Doors
If you look closely, you may notice that buildings usually have a sign on their regular doors that request individuals to use the revolving doors. This is because of air flow- to contain the warm/ cold air depending on the season. Although the automatic or push/pull doors are usually minimal effort and faster than revolving doors, keep this in mind the next time you find yourself with an option.
2. Sippy Cup Lids = No Straws
The amount of times I’ve seen someone in Starbucks putting in a straw in their new sippy cup lids is a number I can’t keep track of. If you remember, around the time of the #savetheturtles trend, Starbucks, followed by other food chains, quickly revamped and replaced their lids to eliminate the need for straws. However, this seemed to be redundant as people still opted for straws. Eliminate the use of plastic and if you prefer to use a straw, try carrying around reusable metal straws. These will last you a lifetime!
3. Bring your own mug
Speaking of Starbucks, try bringing your own mug next time to avoid the use of a coffee cup.
4. Always carry around a reusable water bottle
My family has grown to eliminate the use of plastic water bottles over the years. So much so that we don’t have any at our house. Without the option (and convenience) of plastic water bottles, we opt for re-usable water bottles for when we are on the go. Reusable water bottles are most often bigger and can carry more water and are usually a healthier option anyways as plastics are not always healthy to use long-term.
5. Stairs over elevators
I get it, we all have those days. It’s an early Monday morning and you’re commuting to work and still in weekend mode. Why would you voluntarily opt for stairs? However, when faced with the option of elevators or stairs, I recommend going for the stairs. Did you know, there are about 325 million elevator rides every day?1 Escalators require the use of electricity and as a by-product, produce CO2. As a bonus for opting for the stairs, you get your body moving and get extra steps in.
6. Bring your own shopping bags
With the rise of trends in reducing plastics, make sure you remember you bring your own shopping bags, not only to the grocery store but also to the mall! More and more stores are implementing the sale of their own branded reusable bags without the option of plastic or paper bags. Although some stores still provide plastic/ paper bags, this comes with a fee.
7. Delete your emails and unsubscribe from spam mail
Did you know that emails do in fact leave a carbon footprint? Don’t get me wrong, going paperless has a significant impact but opting for email notifications doesn’t relieve us from the responsibility of sorting our inbox. Because our emails are stored on the cloud, our emails contribute to carbon emissions.2 How many emails do you have in your inbox right now? I am certainly not pointing the finger, I have 10,000 emails in my inbox.
So what can we do? Let’s starting by putting a stop to flooding our inboxes with subscriptions to emails that we don’t read. Once you see an email from a subscription ie. from a retailer, unsubscribe right away (usually an option at the bottom of the email). When was the last time you sorted through your junk email? How about making it a habit to delete or file your email right after you read it. Implementing these habits will make a difference in our “email pollution” and slowly decrease our flooding inboxes.
Sometimes these small changes can seem pointless. What difference will it make? With the alarming evidence of global warming, can we afford to think this way? Small acts can result in big change if a large number of people implemented these practice. So start today! It will and can make a difference.
1 Schwartz, Todd. Interesting Facts You Might Not Know About Elevators. Connections Elevators. November 22, 2017. https://www.connectionselevator.com/interesting-facts-you-might-not-know-about-elevators/#:~:text=The%20average%20user%20takes%204,Earth’s%20population%20every%203%20days
2 Krosofsky, Andrew. Deleting Emails Might Help Lower Your Carbon Footprint. March 15, 2021. Greenmatters. https://www.greenmatters.com/p/do-emails-leave-carbon-footprint
