My Top 10 Sustainable Living New Year Resolutions

Happy New Year everyone!

I guess each of you has your own new year resolutions. Me either. Each previous year―even this year, I’m sure that we have made some resolutions to live a better year, yes, plan to achieve some positive goals. Then why don’t help our earth as one of our self improvements? If we plan to achieve some sustainable living resolutions, it means we’ll do good anyway. Even today is already the first day of 2017, I still want to share my top 10 sustainable living resolutions, so here they are:

1. Spend time outside more

If you live in a big city, you can still spend time in parks or maybe in any kind of green open spaces could be your choice. The view, the breeze, and the sun can’t stop me feel grateful of everything, boost my happiness and eventually make me feel more connected to nature. By this feeling, I could keep in mind why I should live more sustainably to give back. Shortcut tip: Morning runs 2-3 times a week will be enough―especially for weekends, only in my neighborhood or in other green open spaces that possible like zoo and closest university area.

2. Leave single use plastic behind

We all know, mostly everything is packaged by plastics, various kind of it ―from 1 to 7. Most of them also single use ones, once we empty them we should put them in the bin. There are also plastic cutleries and straws which obviously we can avoid. Shortcut tip: Bring our food from home to work with reusable containers, bring also reusable straw, spoon and chopstick everywhere so you can easily avoid the single use. I’ve started as well.

3. Reusable bag with you

Yay! If you are girl you must be very happy to do this. So many cute choices of reusable bag or you can made it yourself one by old t-shirt, it is even better! Plastic bag is a super common issue all over the world, I think everyone can start to avoid. Shortcut tip: You can bring everywhere with no worries! I bring the super light & foldable one, mine only 5x10cm when it’s folded and 40x40cm when it’s opened.

4. Bring reusable water bottle

First, this is a simple way to reduce your expense on drinking water, second, to reduce the plastic bottle waste. Not only water bottle, you may also bring another thing like reusable cups for your coffee. Shortcut tip: Bring your “single wall stainless steel bottle”,  so you can bring water from home and use it as your coffee cup afterwards.

5. Eat less meat

If you think on the biggest resource of your carbon foot print only from transportation use, please find more about it. Maybe now you should think about your food choices, since the FAO announced that 18% of global emission result from livestock.
One of Shrink that Foot Print article said,”But perhaps most interestingly, eating chicken instead of beef cuts a quarter of emissions in one simple step.” So, giving up the beef! Shortcut tip: As a start you can try limit your beef consumption, first only twice a week, to once a week and making more progress until you can skip it for good.  I’ve been doing it for last 5 months and feel happier!

6. Choose eco-friendly beauty and skincare products

For me, honestly, this is a challenging one and quite new for me. From soap, shampoo, dental care― I still include it here, make up products, lotions and more. Moreover for girls, this is gonna be a significant step. Choose the eco-friendly one, from the materials: no animal testing, not containing palm oil, from natural and organic ones; the packaging: Less plastic, or unbleached & recycled paper, some provide you to bring back their bottles, or just go straight to their store and bring your own containers. For dental care, we can make our own toothpaste and shift the plastic toothbrush into the compostable one. Shortcut tip: Start with soap and shampoo, you can find and buy it easily online today. I’ve tried to use them in the last four months from Shoppasoap and it is good from its quality and yes, naturally perfumed! Well, it was still in plastic packaging for the safety shipping reason, next I’ve talked to them that I’ll go to them when I need to buy it, bring my own containers and they were very welcome about it.

7. Being a wise consumer

We should exactly know, why we have to buy some stuffs, do we need it, for how long it lasts. When we don’t really think before we choose something to buy and consume, some of them may end up on landfill or stay at our room for forever, with no function at all. Fashion items these days also in my concerns. Fast fashion sometimes make you want to buy everything in fast cycle, unfortunately it’s not friendly for our earth sustainability. The long and short of it, be wise and minimalist. Shortcut tip: Start with fashion items, there is a fun way to have a new stuffs. Swap your items with your sisters, cousins, or maybe mom! So you can buy less items this year. Since I have a sister, we did many times. Yay!

8. Paperless efforts

Use both side of paper or you can also use the used ones. If you don’t feel to print out something, just don’t. Tissue? Bring handkerchief. This point also challenging one, I will do greater effort on this by today. Shortcut tip: Some of you must love having note book each year, me either! This year I made my own from my several old notebooks from university years which actually still have some blank papers. Separating from the old and binding after, voila! New note book for 2017 journey.

9. Ethical travel

A year without traveling is not easy, I guess. You can still bring your sustainable living behavior while travel. Especially when you choose to spend time in nature. Bring back home your waste if there’s no bin out there, bring everything reusable, package your food in your reusable containers. If you plan to buy things, shop local, buy only what’s in your list instead of impulsive buying. This is exactly what sustainable means, manage your budget as economy aspect, buy it consciously as people aspect, and leave nothing while take nothing but only pictures as environmental aspect. Shortcut tip: Bring your net trash bag to start the ethical travel. Mine named Nobi Bag from a friend and it has many choices of colors. What a cute start right?

10. Join the community

There are a lot of communities around us which provide solutions for our environment. You can involve as a volunteer or even members. From Animal cause like Garda Satwa Indonesia to small things in our lifestyle that matter, like plastic bag waste reduction GIKDP. Shortcut tip: There are still plenty of them who bring out solutions for various issue , you can choose and easily find them. Another suggestion, ask someone directly, that you know really in this issue, so you’ll find clearer information.

Those 10 will be my priorities, but there still many other things I should afford. Anyways, you can pick as many as you want. You don’t really have to do all of them, seriously. Maybe you can try each of them even only once this year, I think it will be a good start.  Well, start small then it will grow bigger, I believe. If you have your own ideas, go ahead! I could guarantee this kind of resolution will make you happier this year.

Have a blessed year ahead!