The path to environmental sustainability begins at home
While climate change is the top-of-mind issue, concern for the environment extends beyond greenhouse gas emissions, for instance.
The multitude of ever-changing targets to combat climate change are all but guaranteed to fall short, likely by a larger margin. Likewise, many, if not most, government programs purported to help will prove to have been ineffective at best.
As individuals, there are many things we can do to help combat climate change and improve the environment. Moreover, such measures can improve our own lives.
Better still, there are steps that can save us money.
Small changes that can pay dividends are where Candice Batista suggests each of us starts. Specifically, she points to the kitchen as the ideal launching point to a more environmentally mindful life.
“Typically, one of the easiest places to begin the journey is in the kitchen. Kitchen waste is monumental. In Canada, the average family is throwing away between $1,100 and $1,600 worth of food every single year,” says Batista, author of the eco-living handbook, Sustained: Creating a Sustainable House Through Small Changes, Money-Saving Habits, and Natural Solutions.
“The point is to pick one small area and start there. I feel with food, because people are trying to save money and don’t really want to throw away food, it’s a good place to start to develop those habits.
“I like people to start in the kitchen, because with the kitchen and also with food – and we can take it one step further with cleaning products – I know how much money you can save, and the savings are substantial. Once you start realizing this, and you realize, ‘Wow, I have a little bit more income, I can now buy organic food or I can now afford this or that,’ it really is quite an amazing shift to see.”
Batista, founder of
The Eco Hub, notes that making changes can seem daunting at first, but done gradually the shifts can become part of a more environmentally friendly lifestyle.
“I always tell people to start somewhere. That means literally picking one area in your home and starting there – sustainability is about building new habits, about buying less and really building on those habits.”
Buying less starts with being mindful, recognizing that most of what we think we need is just stuff we want.
Beyond the three Rs of reduce, reuse, recycle, and even the five Rs – refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, and rot – of the zero-waste efforts, Batista outlines her nine Rs in her first book, which was released last week: rethink, refuse, reduce, reuse, repair, repurpose, refill, rot, and recycle.
“My approach to low waste expands on the traditional five Rs by emphasizing the importance of rethinking our consumption habits, repurposing items, repairing broken items, and refilling containers whenever possible. By prioritizing these additional Rs, we take a more active role in waste prevention and embody the spirit of a circular economy,” she writes in Sustained.
Refusing to buy something in the first place is the first and best step, as you’re definitely not creating any waste. One person’s decision to buy less will help that individual – both from a financial and carbon footprint point of view – but won’t lead to systemic change. If many of us start making such choices, then the collective impact would be far greater.
If that seems like a long shot, Batista points to the greening of the beauty industry, which started on the margins little more than a decade ago to prompt a key shift in the sector.
“Ten or 12 years ago, the green beauty industry started as a very small indie industry. It was small businesses that were popping up all over the place to reduce chemical load, to reduce toxins, to be very much more transparent about the kinds of ingredients that they were using in their products,” she says.
“A lot of people were like, ‘Oh, this is kind of a fad, it’s never going to last.’ Consumers really came to the table and demanded transparency from companies, demanded better ingredients, demanded better packaging – packaging is still an issue in the beauty industry, but we saw an incredible movement, the green beauty movement, and now it’s a billion-dollar industry. Now we see big companies like the Procter & Gambles of the world, or the Unilevers of the world, either buying out the indie companies that were started 10 years ago, or developing their own lines.”
People are now starting to shift that way of thinking to the fashion industry, questioning the prevalence of cheap, disposable clothing. (Cheap and disposable applies to many of the products we consume, of course.)
Turning away from that mindset doesn’t require some new line of thinking: it’s the way most people of our grandparents’ generation lived. They would never dream of simply throwing something out rather than repairing it. Not to mention goods were made much better and could be repaired.
“Today, we have a rip or we lose a button and we literally throw the item in the garbage instead of just sewing on a button. It’s just the whole thing of mending our clothes and, again, saving money,” says Batista.
“The concept of fast fashion is so interesting. Because it’s cheap, we think that we’re saving money. But when you look at how much you spend over a year, because you keep buying the same thing over and over again, because it doesn’t last, you could have actually bought one or two really good pieces and had those for years and years and years as opposed to this constant conveyor belt of cheap garbage.”
Some companies are serious about making changes for the better. Others are content with greenwashing, hoping we’ll be fooled. Many are simply carrying on in their own ways. Public pressure is going to be needed to move the needle when it comes to those companies not wholly embracing change. That pressure