The 5 R’s of Green Living

Over the past 6 years, I really started to focus more on living green because I’ve been so worried about the fate of the world and climate change. It was causing me a lot of anxiety (and still does), and the best thing I know to do when I’m feeling anxious is to find one small thing that I can do about it. I don’t know if my steps toward being more eco-conscious will change anything on a significant level, but it definitely helps to take action as opposed to doing nothing. Hopefully sharing the small changes I have made over time will help motivate you to do the same thing!

The Benefits of Green Living

Becoming more eco friendly can become a fun creative project. It’s a great way to get creative with the “trash” in your life. The designer in me gets off on the efficiency of finding ways to use an item and therefore its lifespan. It’s exciting to explore new hobbies like composting or to hunt for the perfect piece of furniture (which allows for some fun creativity!).

Living green really can give your life a sense of purpose. Feeling meaningless is a very common symptom of depression, but when we bring intentional meaning into our lives, it works to counteract the darkness. Contributing to a greater good - like living sustainably - makes our decisions more purposeful and gives us a sense of value in what we do. We feel like part of a whole. Working toward a better future gives us a sense of hope that things can get better.

The 5 R’s of Green Living

You’ve probably heard of the 3 R’s of going green (reduce, reuse, recycle) - those were the main ones that I knew of too until a friend of mine, Nenah Bondi, introduced me to a couple more. There are steps you can take toward sustainability that go beyond these initial three. So here are the five R’s of green living and how you can apply them in simple ways:

REFUSE

Refuse to accept disposable products wherever possible. Take totes to the grocery store (and any other stores) instead of accepting plastic bags. When you get takeout or delivery, ask them not to give you plastic utensils and use your own dishes at home.

REDUCE

Get rid of single-use plastics. Replace plastic wrap with things like bee’s wax wrap, and single-use ziploc bags with silicon ones that you can wash and reuse. Get some reusable produce bags and bring them with you to the store instead of using the ones they provide. Grove Collaborative, an online marketplace committed to reducing plastic, has been an amazing resource for eco-friendly household essentials.

Buy used instead of new. Thrift books, clothes, furniture, etc. If you don’t have a thrift store you feel safe going to right now, you can get a lot of amazing things from online thrift stores like ThredUp. You can buy upcycled clothing from places like Tonlé, or make your own like my friend Hannah did with an old leather jacket! You can also get tons of amazing furniture from Craigslist, OfferUp or Facebook Marketplace, which often involves contactless pick-up or drop-off. I just found the perfect piece for my home studio that I’m so excited to pick out paint colors for - buying used can lead to fun creative projects too!

Reduce consumption of meat and fight food waste. If you go vegan or vegetarian, even better, but just reducing the amount of meat you’re eating in a day or week can still make an impact for the planet and for your own health! I personally have cut back to eating meat at only one meal a day, and it’s helped a lot with my energy. I like feeling lighter and less stuffed after meals because I’m not eating such dense foods. If you’re looking to go a step further with sustainable food buying, I love Imperfect Foods and their mission to fight food waste.

REUSE

Find creative ways to reuse anything and everything you have. I have a cabinet full of old jars just waiting for a project or purpose! They’re great to hang onto for food storage and work especially great in the freezer. For additional food storage, save packaging from any dry goods you buy and use it in lieu of ziploc bags. It still will likely be thrown away eventually, but you’re giving it a long shelf life and making it more worth it than if you just tossed it immediately.

If you’re a big plant lover like me, hang onto the plastic pots they come in. They work great to scoop dirt when gardening or composting.

Instead of paper towels, cut up old shirts for makeshift rags. It replaces a disposable product and give your old shirts more use!

If you have items you no longer want or need, look for non-profits to donate them to. A lot of us have been cleaning out our homes lately, so you’re bound to have a lot of stuff to get rid of! Here’s a helpful resource for any of you local to LA.

RECYCLE

This is probably the most common step toward green living that most of us take, since a lot of cities have recycling pick up included with trash pick up. However, at the end of the day, recycling can only do so much and we rely too heavily on it saving us. Yes please keep recycling - but know it is far less impactful than some of the other steps discussed in this blog.

One thing a lot of us do it wrong and send things to the recycling center that they cannot accept, resulting in more waste.

Look up your city’s recycling guidelines to figure out what they do and do not accept, and then pay attention to the numbers on any recyclable item to make sure you can recycle it through your city’s system. If not, there are often other recycling centers or drop-off sites where you can recycle those numbers along with other things like plastic grocery bags.

If you’re an artist like me, here’s an interesting resource I just discovered for recycling your art supplies that you no longer need.

ROT

One of the best things you can do for our environment is composting. So much of the food waste we send to the landfills can be composted instead and used for soil. When organic materials are sent to landfills instead of composted properly, they generate methane, which is a highly potent greenhouse gas that’s really damaging to our atmosphere. If you compost, you’re producing less trash, less greenhouse gas and also creating something new that can be used for gardening! It’s a win-win-win.

There are a few different methods to composting, and many are not suitable for small spaces like mine. I tried worms, but that ended in a fruit fly infestation. I used Share Waste for a while as well, which connects people with a proper compost set-up with people who have food scraps to dispose of. I would collect all my scraps in a bag and store it in my freezer until it was full, then drop it off at a composting house near me. There’s also a compost pick up service in the LA area!

I now use the Bokashi fermentation method, which is very manageable in my apartment since I have a good sized balcony. I like this method because it’s faster and you can compost meat, bones, and cheese (some methods can’t do this). You can read a simplified breakdown of the Bokashi process here, and I will share more about how I’ve adapted it for myself in a future blog.

Another plus, with the compost tea and composted soil created from the Bokashi method, my plants are thriving! It’s so nice to see them happy and growing so much. It feels so good to know the products I’m creating help them grow and are also eliminating waste that could have ended up in a landfill!

Don’t Feel Overwhelmed

You don’t have to do this all starting today, and you don’t have to do it all perfectly. Even something as little as buying reusable grocery bags can make such a difference, and it takes time to add all these little steps into your routine. Just pick what fits the most naturally into your life right now and get that to a good place, then pick something else to add. Eventually you’ll have a fully operative sustainable living routine that works well for you and helps heal our planet.