Baby Steps…
If you’re like me, you have acknowledged that there is an environmental crisis going on all around us, or you feel there is more you can do to help you may be where I was a little while ago realising I have no idea where to start.
Don’t panic, BeingGreen isn’t about leaving your home in the suburbs and moving to a fully self sustained tiny house and making your own clothes. It definitely can be those that, and I admit my greater vision is to live in a self sustained “off the grid” home, but BeingGreen is about intention and doing what you can. If you choose to take a reusable coffee cup to your local cafe with you then you are BeingGreen, if you think about the products you buy and whether the packaging is recyclable or whether you can get it without the packaging then you are BeingGreen. It is not about doing everything, it is about doing SOMETHING. If we are taking responsibility for the impact we have on the environment then we can start to influence change. I had no idea where to start when i “woke up” to what impact I was causing, but I knew I could find out. I knew I wasn’t the only one, and I knew that if I had been made it this far in life with no thought to how my little decisions affected the environment, then there were people out there that could benefit from some help and some guidance. If I’m honest for me it just seemed too big, it seemed like a big problem that I could not fix. I was partly right, it is a big problem but I could help fix it, but certainly not all at once, and certainly not alone. But was I alone? Are you alone? If you are reading this then you know you are not, and that is a great thing in itself. You are not alone and you can make a difference. A baby does not start out running, before that it must walk and in order to walk it must take it’s first steps. We too must take baby steps or else we could too easily become overwhelmed and disheartened if our goal is to run right from the outset.
But where to start I asked and you may be asking too. I would love to say that there is an easy answer to this, a step by step guide to create a minimal waste home. I say minimal waste because I think zero waste is an excellent goal and I would love to be able to achieve this but if that is the milestone, if that is the metric for success, then we may end up beating ourselves up every time we have to put an item in the rubbish, every time we receive a gift that isn’t packaged in something recyclable, every time we have buy something and it goes in a plastic shopping bag. So if we focus on minimising and set our goal to minimise our waste and in turn our affect on the environment then I think we will get closer to zero waste than if we treat any waste as a failure.
And so in no particular order we will begin to talk about some things we can start with, and if you have any great tips of your own, then feel free to leave a comment or send me an email, I am sure other readers will get some great value out of your contributions.
