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Top 20 Ways to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint
Updated: March 12, 2024
Below are top twenty ways we can reduce our carbon footprint based on where average household carbon emissions come from.
SECTIONS: housing, transportation, products and services, food, educate and advocate
Housing
- Switch to renewables: Switch to powering your home with renewables through:
- Reduce energy use: Quick steps:
- Embrace minimalist or slow decorating:
Slow decorating is an eco-conscious approach to interior design, focusing on gradually curating spaces with thoughtfully chosen, sustainable (ideally used), and often locally sourced pieces. It emphasizes quality and longevity over speed.
- Conserve water: Using less water reduces the energy required to process and deliver it, thereby reducing carbon pollution. Buy low flow shower and faucet heads, water (and energy) efficient toilets/clothes washers/dishwashers, check for leaks often, and buy native drought-tolerant plants.
- Plant trees: Trees not only absorb CO2, but planting trees and bushes strategically near your home helps to reduce both your cooling and heating bills.
- Offset your carbon footprint: While not a substitute for reducing emissions, investing in carbon offset projects can help compensate for your unavoidable emissions. Calculate your carbon footprint and buy carbon offsets from a certified provider (U.S. and Canada).
Products and Services
- Choose sustainable clothing (aka slow fashion): Buy clothing that supports both the environment and garment workers. Buy used whenever possible and build a second hand capsule wardrobe to help speed the shift away from trendy clothing.
- Buy used: Manufacturing products requires energy and resources, contributing to carbon emissions, habitat destruction and pollution. Minimize purchases of new products, especially resource-intensive, heavy or heavily-packaged ones.
- Embrace a minimalist lifestyle: Declutter your home and donate or sell items to give them another life. Online bartering or swapping groups can turn this effort into a fun way to meet people in the community.
- Reduce, reuse, recycle: Minimizing waste by reusing items, recycling, and buying products with minimal packaging (especially for repeat purchases) helps cut carbon emissions from waste management. Research ways to recycle hard-to-recycle items in your local community.
- Replace single-use items: Finding long-lasting alternatives to single-use items made of plastic and other materials is a great way to reduce emissions, pollution and waste. Next time you're putting together your shopping list, note any single-use products and research sustainable (ideally used) alternatives for each.
- Support sustainable brands: Purchase from companies that are committed to reducing their carbon footprint and prioritize sustainability.
- Choose lower carbon products, services and activities/hobbies: When considering purchases, look for the lowest carbon option (i.e., tap water vs. bottled, shampoo bar vs. bottle, massage vs. spa, kayaking vs. jet skiing, bicycling vs. motor biking). Be conscious of how your income and reference group (the people we compare ourselves to and identify with) may be impacting your GHG emissions:
Educate and Advocate
- Encourage and support greenhouse-reducing practices in your community:
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