3 Easy Steps to Greatly Reduce your Household Waste
Getting started is the hardest part of any lifestyle change, and with constant racket from every corner of the internet, it can be difficult to see where we should focus our attention first!
My advice? Start with the easy things:
Acquire a couple of re-usable water bottles.
Single-use water bottles are horrifically wasteful. While they aren't entirely avoidable in a pinch, we can almost completely eliminate them in our day-to-day life and easily replace them with reusables.
If your tap water is gross, which is unfortunately the case for many of us, look into a filtered pitcher that suits your budget. For a long time, my household just kept a filtered dispenser in the fridge. Easy peasy and super affordable!
Invest a few dollars in reusable bags for the grocery store.
Will you remember them every time? NO, absolutely not! You'll get into the habit though. With so many of us choosing not to use single-use plastic grocery bags these days, more and more stores don't bat an eyelash if you just don't bag your groceries, either (should your forget your reusables). Usually, if I forget my bags, I just throw the groceries in the back of my car and bag them before I take them inside at home.
Evaluate other single-use plastics in your home:
I'm talking sandwich bags, snack bags, wrappers, bottles.
This is the toughest one with kids, and will certainly be a "progress-over-perfection" moment, but it's doable!
In my house, we use storage containers for just about everything - cheese, sandwiches, goldfish, leftovers (of course), washed produce snacks. For cabinet-space and sanity purposes, it is not necessary to have 12,000 storage containers, though. We all know that all but 4 will be lost within a week anyway, right? Ha!
If you focus on these three things, you will see a massive drop in your household waste, I promise. It really does not take much, just any amount of your attention (and intention) will make a huge impact over time.
If you're feeling overwhelmed, keep in mind that this is just as much a lifestyle change as starting daily exercise or ditching processed foods and drinks - long term consistency trumps short term intensity.
If you need some more words of encouragement, check out this blog post.
Talk soon!
Courtney