7 Easy Ways to Lower Your Carbon Footprint

Climate change is very real, but not unsolvable if we ALL make sustainable changes to our lifestyle. There are lots of actionable steps you can take to save the planet from an ever-changing and unstable climate. Here are 7 easy ways to reduce your carbon footprint.

1. Stop Eating (or Eat Less) Meat

The single most effective action you can take to combat climate change is to stop eating meat. Just limiting your meat consumption can make a huge difference. Greenhouse gas emissions from agribusiness are an even bigger problem than fossil fuels. So while we often talk about cutting our reliance on fossil fuels – and this is still critically important – we rarely discuss the worst culprit.

Red meat is particularly to blame, consuming 11 times more water and producing 5 times more emissions than its poultry counterparts. You don’t have to become a vegetarian, but eating meat less frequently will significantly help the environment. To get a single pound of beef, it takes over 5,000 gallons of water – as the number one consumer of freshwater in the world, animal agriculture is drastically increasing the problem of water scarcity. Don’t forget to inform others: many people simply don’t know about the connection between meat and climate change. There are so many delicious meat-free recipes about these days, give them a google. For the accustomed meat eater, you may be surprised on just how filling & delicious they are.

2. Unplug Your Devices

You might be surprised to learn that all electronics suck energy when they’re plugged in, EVEN IF they’re powered down. Anytime a cord is plugged into a socket, it’s drawing energy – so although your device isn’t charging, you’re still contributing to your carbon footprint. Simple solution? Leave your electronics unplugged at all times, unless you’re actually using them.

3. Drive Less, Move More

Choose to walk, bike, or take the bus – leave the car at home, and you’ll be making an easy decision with immediate results. Many people are opting to bike to work, especially with bike lanes becoming more prevalent. Cities are finally investing in the necessary infrastructure to make it easier not to own a car. Increasing populations have made effective public transportation more necessary than ever, and options like subways, trains, buses, and rapid transit continue to grow. Many new bus routes are even turning to hybrids, solar power, and other eco-friendly alternatives. It’s good for the environment, and good for you too!

4. Don’t Buy “Fast Fashion”

Many major clothing retailers practice what is known as “fast fashion” – selling an endless cycle of must-have trends at extremely low prices. Have you ever wondered how it’s possible to pay only 5 quid for that top? In this consumer society, we think of fashion as disposable – after all, if I only pay a fiver I might not think twice about throwing it away. Heaps of clothing ends up in the landfill, often to justify buying the latest styles. We’re talking over 15 million tons of textile waste – with quantity over quality, fast fashion retailers can charge next to nothing for items that are mass-produced. They push these garments to sell by creating more fashion “cycles” or “seasons” – where there used to be 4 per year, there’s now often 12 to 15!

There’s also the issue of contamination: almost half of our clothing is made with cotton, and unless it’s labeled as “organic” cotton, there’s a high chance that it’s genetically modified cotton sprayed with lots of pesticides (including known carcinogens). This can be damaging to neighboring non-GMO crops, cause water contamination, reduce biodiversity, and have negative impacts on human health. Don’t forget that anything made overseas has a huge environmental impact – from the physical act of shipping a product across the ocean, to the chemical runoff from garment factories (leather tanneries are particularly bad). As if that’s not enough, fast fashion is an industry still largely propped up by child labour. Toxic to the environment, detrimental to human rights – who needs it? Try alternatives like re-purposing old clothing, checking out your local charity shops, choosing locally handmade garments, buying vintage, or participating in clothing swaps with family and friends. Let’s push the materialistic fast-fashion to one side and get thrifty & creative with our style.

5. Line-Dry Your Clothes

New is not always better – the traditional method of line-drying your clothing is much better for the environment. One dryer load uses 5 times more electricity than washing – by simply line-drying your clothes, you can save 1/3 of their carbon footprint. Europeans, on the other hand, are excellent at this (95 percent of Italians don’t even own a dryer) – it might be time to follow their lead, especially considering the tumble dryer is one of the top energy-consuming appliances (not to mention the leading cause of appliance-related house fires)!

6. Invest in a Keep Cup

Ireland alone bins an estimated 22,000 single-use coffee cups every hour! These ubiquitous containers have now become a symbol of our throwaway culture. And they’re turning up everywhere, clogging up bins all over the place, the lids washing up on beaches and riverbanks, and even starring (mistakenly) in the final series of Game of Thrones.

Despite what you may think, they’re not recyclable, according to Government body My Waste. This is because most cups, even if they do contain paper, are lined with plastic to make them leak-proof and heat resistant. The lid, meanwhile, is usually made from single-use plastic and rarely recycled. In the UK, for example, just one in every 400 coffee cups is recycled.

Bringing your own cup is one small and simple step to help reduce your carbon footprint. If you drink on average one take-away coffee on weekdays, for example, you’ll save roughly 80-120kg of CO2 a year if you switch to a reusable cup. That is the equivalent of driving a (tax band A) car for 650-1,000km. (That’s not considering the carbon footprint of the coffee and milk inside the cup – which is a whole other issue.)

Once your reusable cup has been used more than 15 times, it is more sustainable than a disposable cup. And you won’t be adding to the pile of 500 billion disposable coffee cups that end up in landfill globally every year.

7. Reduce & eliminate single use plastics

Single-use plastic waste is a pressing global environmental problem. Plastic waste often does not decompose and can last centuries in landfill, or else ends up littering the streets or polluting the natural world, often killing our precious wildlife.

Bring your own eco-friendly containers when your do your shopping. Look up zero-waste shops local to you, they’re popping up more and more these days and they allow customers to bring their own containers eliminating single-use plastic consumption!

If you’re local to Belfast, make sure to check out Refill Quarter. Customers can bring their own container, which is weighed first, and they pay for as much as they want. This is a much more cost-effective way of shopping and helps tackle the extremely problematic issue of single use plastic we face. To find out more about the Refill Quarter make sure to check them out on Facebook and Instagram, and pop in to see their locally sourced, incredible eco-friendly product range.

Anyone can make these simple changes: they’re easy to implement, and are immediately effective in reducing your carbon footprint. If we all work together and make more conscious decisions, our actions and choices will ultimately make a difference. We all live on this Earth together, meaning we all share the important responsibility to do whatever we can to address climate change, big or small.