- How are you being environmentally friendly?
- Have you made any changes to your lifestyle?
- Do you have any tips or ideas on how to be greener?
- Any ideas to reduce plastic wastage (easy-swaps are always a good shout)
- Anything else that anyone wants to add?
I would recommend the following easy steps (I’ll list the first 10 that come to mind)
- Get yourself a stainless steel water bottle that can be reused
- Look into refillable products (eco-refill). Carex, Detol, Air Wick, L’occitane, Naissance and other brands do refill packs,
- Bulk buy (if this won’t result in wastage)
- Buy local produce
- Ditch plastic teabags and go for a brand that uses paper or go for loose-leaf tea.
- Swap out washing up liquid (plastic bottles) and sponge (non-biodegradable) for dish soap and a bamboo brush
- Swap out shampoo and conditioner bottles for shampoo and conditioner bars
- Swap out cling film or plastic bags for reusable sandwich bags
- Make your own snacks at home such as hummous or crisps (hummous takes minutes and tastes much better)
- Drink milk? Get your milk in glass bottles or a tetra-pack (e.g. UHT, Soya, Almond, Cashew, Oat).
1. Not applicable in northern Norway.
2. I buy refill on what I can except freeze-dried coffee, which comes in glasses. I recycle the glass and that just strikes me as more environment-friendly than buying a plastic refill bag and recycling that. Microplastics and all.
3. :thumb:
4. :thumb:
5. Don't drink tea, only coffee, see 2.
6. :thumb: though my brush is plastic. I've had it for 3 years and it's still going strong. I wash it in the machine from time to time. I brush carefully. It still looks like it's fairly new.
7. I don't have hair and use the same soap for everything, so see 2.
8. I keep leftovers and etc. in hard plastic boxes instead of film/bags. Considering getting some glass jars instead at some point.
9. I do make a lot of food from the ground up, but I need potato chips. A lot of the brands over here come in paper bags though, particularly, most of my favorite brands except the norwegian equivalent to cheetos. That still comes in a plastic bag. Too bad, nature. This is a dealbreaker.
10. I hate milk. Only dairy product I eat is cheese. That only comes in plastic over here.
If we disregard the fact that Norway drills for oil, we're doing pretty good on the environment front. For example, I sort all my trash in color coded bags, so about 50-75% of all my wastage gets recycled. So we have a lot of solutions like that which makes it easy for me to be environment friendly. Also, any bottled or canned liquid you buy in a store, you pay a little deposit (something like $0,3-0,5 per bottle/can) that's refunded when you recycle it. So any beverage that comes in a plastic bottle, the bottles get recycled. Another nationwide thing that just makes things easy for me. As far as water and electricity goes, we get our power from water dams, so it's 100% clean power. We have LOTS of rain and snow throughout the year. I could leave my tap running for an hour, and it doesn't affect the local environment in any detrimental way. And as far as I can understand, there's no way it can affect the global environment either, so I basically don't even have to think about water or electricity usage. I drive a diesel car, so that's a little less bad than a regular gasoline car. I would drive an electric if I could afford it.
But yeah, my main idea for being greener is, get glass jars, metal boxes, or something like such to store leftovers and unpacked food in the fridge/freezer, instead of plastic film/bags, aluminum foil, etc. Something that will last you years. Get lots of them, so you can keep everything in different sized boxes. Plastic boxes, though plastic, are superior to glass and metal due to how water expands in a fridge. If you bought ten plastic boxes in different sizes and never used plastic film/bags again, I would argue that's an environmental improvement, even though it still includes using plastics. But then if you wanted to be "hardcore" you could go for metal or glass. But then you have to consider what you put in there and how much, as frozen food could expand and break glass jars.
