Positive changes donât always have to feel like a grand gesture, or a big sacrifice. Sometimes itâs the smallest good actions, repeated consistently, that end up having the biggest impact. As I mentioned in my previous post, over lockdown in 2020 I launched my own small business Mission Better, selling a range of plastic free and planet friendly products. I wanted to share where my own interest in sustainability, and the small changes we can all make on a day to day basis, came from, and how I believe small swaps are the best place to start!
That has been one of the biggest lessons Iâve learned since I made the decision to try and live a little more sustainably. Now, Iâm not talking moving to a farm, growing all my food from scratch, and having no carbon footprint at all (pretty much impossible anyway) â in fact, I still drive a car, eat meat, and take a flight occasionally. Instead, I want to acknowledge those small but still important, intentional sustainable swaps. Looking at the choices we make every day, and how we can be making those a little more consciously.
My âeco-epiphanyâ happened while I was in my second year at university. Weâd just come back to campus after the Christmas break, and I had gone to grab a coffee with a friend before our lecture (the lovely Jessie Lu Hutchinson!). As we ordered, my friend reached into her bag and fished out a reusable coffee cup, telling me that sheâd been watching Blue Planet over the break, and was shocked to learn about the amount of single use plastics which end up in our oceans every year. Sheâd therefore decided to try and make a more conscious effort to bring her reusable cup with her. Before this, I must admit I hadnât really given it too much thought, and while I had used travel cups in the past, it was more likely that it was only because I was making a drink at home to take out with me. However, my friend had now got me thinking â why not try and bring a reusable cup to our pre-lecture coffee meet ups too? That evening I ordered myself a cup that I liked the look of, and was therefore excited to use, and decided that for the next month I was going to try and not use any single-use cups at all.
What I wasnât expecting when I made this decision, was how motivating I would end up finding this swap. Not only did I love using my own cup, but each and every time I used it for a takeaway coffee, I found myself visualising the paper cup I had just saved â watching it be added to the accumulating pile of âsaved cupsâ in my mind. As a person, Iâm pretty motivated by progress, and this mental image of these cups encouraged me to keep this up for longer than just one month. As I said, I had used travel cups off and on in the past, but for me, it was using them intentionally this time that had made all the difference.
Once bringing my own cup had become all but habit for me, I began to start thinking about other areas in my life where similar easy swaps could be made, that would have the same sort of accumulative impact. I already carried my own water bottle everywhere (got to stay hydrated!), but soon I never left the house without some metal straws, bamboo cutlery, a reusable shopping bag â it became quite addictive! I discovered beeswax wraps for storing food, reusable cotton rounds for applying my skincare â I even found a couple of zero waste refill shops near my campus, and paid them a visit for some essentials, snacks, and to have a browse and see what other reusable and sustainable swaps were on offer.
It seemed like the pile of âsaved objectsâ in my head looked like a skyscraper at this point, and I felt quite accomplished about what my small swaps had been able to achieve â as well as how seamlessly they had now become my new routine. While these changes werenât going to save the planet on their own, it has shifted my mindset, and made me a little bit more of a conscious consumer. In some ways weâve made ourselves comfortable with being a bit of a throwaway society. Perhaps we wouldnât think twice about using a plastic shopping bag just once before throwing it away, bagging our bananas (already with their own natural packaging) in a small plastic bag at the supermarket only to take them out and throw the bag away as soon as we get home. Once you start really thinking about it, thereâs quite a number of things that we have become accustomed to using for only a matter of minutes before throwing them âawayâ â just for them to sit around on our planet for generations.
I saw a quote once from Annie Leonard, director of Greenpeace USA, where she said that âthere is no such thing as âawayâ. So, when we throw anything away, it must go somewhereâ. Again, this reminds us that itâs so easy to take an âout of sight, out of mindâ approach to waste, believing that in some ways itâs not our problem or responsibility once weâve decided to get rid of something. However, if every time we put something in the bin, rather than thinking of throwing it âawayâ, we instead thought about the fact that weâre simply just relocating it, and that itâs going to sit elsewhere on the planet for however long it takes to break down, perhaps this will help change our mindsets about the types of packaging and plastics we purchase in the first place. This alone doesnât fix anything, but itâs definitely been an eye opener to me, and I think itâs an important first step to changing the way we consume things!
So why not try it yourself this week, and see how you find it? Pick one swap – whether that be opting for a reusable coffee cup like myself, or perhaps a refillable water bottle, compostable dog poop bags, or even just skipping a straw with your drink (mushy paper straws aren’t much fun anyway) and see if you can find one that sticks!
Let me know in the comments what your small swap is going to be!
Emma đ
