A Small Guide to Reducing Your Footprint While Broke
Most efforts to reducing our waste and being more green are usually not that affordable. While they mostly will save you money in the long run, they are expensive items to first buy, and when you’re struggling to make rent you don’t feel like going for the most expensive item - no matter if it’ll end up saving you 20 dollars by next year.
So here are a compilation of things that are cheap or free that will help the enviroment and your wallet!
- Put Ecosia as your default search engine on your laptop, phone or tablet (and grab your friend’s phones when they aren’t looking and put it there too). They are a Chromium based search engine that plants trees with the revenue from your searches! They plant a tree after roughly 46 searches, all their energy comes from solar panels, and also they don’t sell your data to third parties.
- Go into GreaterGood.com and into their Click to Give campaings! It’s free to you, and you can click once a day. Just don’t give to their Autism Campaing - they’re sponsored by Autism Speaks, an ableist organization that wants to “cure” autism.
- Not a green tip, but a money saving one: if you shop online, join Honey, its a crome extension that finds you coupons on every purchase you do. Then maybe you can, y’know, plant a tree with the money you saved or something.
- Follow @brokestminimalist on here, they are better at adulting than me, and they have some very good posts on how to save money and time in usually very green ways.
- You must’ve read this one before, but refuse panphlets and freebies. And also bags, straws, lids, and basically anything you don’t need, or anything you are able to go without and would end up throwing away rapidly. These things add up.
- Shop locally and in small businesses whenever possible It activates local economy and reduces de chances that your food had to travel long spaces or was sprayed with toxic chemicals that affect the earth around it.
- Always carry around your own bags. You don’t need a fancy bag, just use our backpack, or an old bag from a gift you recieved, or some of the plastic bags from that one bag of bags you got under your sink. (And if you ever forget, save those new bags to reuse later at least).
- Try, to the best of your abilities, to use public transit, walk, or cycle the most you can. Also try to look up which of the public transit options you have (if you have more than one) is the greener one. And for the love of god, unless you have a good reason, don’t take a bus for just 6 blocks.
- If you have no choice but to use a car, then carpool, and make sure your car is as efficient as possible: remove extra weight where possible, make sure your tires are properly inflated and have the right air pressure, and slow down your travel speed by 10 km/h (6mph). All of this will both make you have a smaller enviromental impact and also save you gas money and maintenence costs.
- Carry your own water bottle and snacks/lunch to avoid buying things out of hunger while outside.
- Honestly, go dumpster diving near closing times. It’s less gross than you think, will save you money, and will save perfectly good food from being sent to landfill and creating methane gas.
- Make your own apple cider vinegar out of apple scraps, like cores and skins. it’s as simple and putting the scraps on a jar, filling the jar with water and one or two tsp of sugar, covering the jar with some cloth and leaving the jar in a dark, warm place, stirring once or twice a day.
- Grow your own herbs and medicinal plants. Grow stuff like aloe in a pot (wich you can grow from a piece of a leaf), green onions, celery and leek (you can grow them in a windowsill by simply putting the ends on water!), and really anything else that you can grow easily that you use frecuently. Look at what your needs are, what you buy the most, and try to grow something that satisfies THAT.
- Make your own veggie stock with your scraps. Use skins, ends and leaves from carrots, potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, pumpkins, celery, zuchinnis, tomatoes, and really any vegetable you use that has a soup named after it (I wouldn’t put lettuce there, for example). I have also started to put the water that comes on canned veggies, after all its just salt and veggie juice, which is all this stock is gonna be about. Set your chickpea water apart, tho. It’s called aquafaba and its an excellent egg replacement.
- Go vegan, if you can. It’s the most impactful individual action you can have for the enviroment, and it can be made unexpesively (its just easier or harder to do depending on where you live). If you can’t, then try to reduce your meat, eggs and dairy consumption. Remember you don’t have to do it perfectly to make a difference.
- Cook more at home. You know this one. Also, turn off your heating for 20 minutes before and just warm your house with the excess heat from cooking. If you did something in a pot with water, allow the water to cool before throwing it fro that sweet sweet heat.
- Look up your local recycling plant, and see what you can recycle on the curbside and what you can’t, and also what days are reserved por picking up recycling. Make sure the things you put there are clean and dry. (yep, you gotta wash your trash if you wanna recycle it). There’s even a chance you can make a profit off of recyclables, but if you figure out how to let me know.
- Compost at home. It’s fairly simple, and it can be done in apartments too. Research your different choices and how to properly take care of it for cheap, flea-less, rat-less, and odor-less compost.
- Im not gonna tell you to buy second hand clothes, because you probably already do, but buy second hand everything. You can get furniture, home appliances and cookware secondhand. Look around for garage sales and pawn shops.
- Mend the things you already own. Learn embroidery and some basic sewing skills for your clothes. Glue the sole of your shoes together when they start to fall apart. Teach yourself how to fix your things, youtube is right there.
- Use your public library! For gods sake! Many tumblr posts have tackled this issue better than I ever could. Use your public library. They might even have some tools or cookware you can borrow just like books instead of having to buy them yourself.
- Bulk shop. It can really be cheaper than buying in package, and you can just avoid that plastic and also avoid buying more than you need.
But the most important thing you can do is protest. None of these things, as good as they are, are enough to stop climate change. We need systematic change, and it has to come from our goverments. So donate, join activism groups, or protest.
