May 20

May 20 How to start a garbage-free lifestyle.

Feeling a little overwhelmed? Start small.

What is a garbage-free lifestyle?

A garbage-free lifestyle has two major goals:

Reducing single-use items–especially plastic–to improve the health of our planet.
Reducing highly-processed foods to improve our health.

When we start making lifestyle and purchasing decisions with these two goals in mind, we bring ourselves closer to a garbage-free life.

Why live a garbage-free life?

For the planet.

Every action we take has an effect on Mother Earth. What we buy, what we throw away, how we travel, which restaurants we go to, what we eat, etc. Mother Earth provides us with everything we need for life–clean air, food, water, and a place to live.

We have a responsibility to take care of her.

The trash we produce doesn’t go ‘away’ when we put it on the curb. It is buried somewhere on the planet or floats somewhere in the ocean.

The toothbrush you used as a kid is still out there.

Reducing single-use plastics is especially important because they don’t decompose or go away–they only break down into smaller and smaller pieces called microplastics that insert themselves into our ecosystem.

Fish eat them, we eat fish...

For your health.

Garbage isn’t solely what we’re tossing into the trash can; it’s also the highly-processed foods we’re putting into our bodies. Just as trash is affecting the planet, unnatural, highly-processed ingredients are affecting our health.

Every food choice, drink choice, or skincare choice has the ability to nourish us or cause us harm. We may not see the effects initially, but over time, a diet lacking in ‘real food’ will catch up to us.

Think of food as medicine.

Highly-processed foods are not the type of medicine we want for our bodies.

Where do I start?

Let’s conquer the fist step, becoming aware:

If you don’t know, you can’t make a change. After you start to see the world through a different lens, you can then make small replacements and changes towards a garbage-free life.

Take a look inside your rubbish bin.

• What are you throwing away?
• Is there a replacement you could make to reduce your garbage?

What to do next?

Start small with 1-2 items to swap for something less wasteful. Even with one change, you’re making a huge impact on your health and on the health of the planet. Then as time goes on, pick another, and another. You’ll eventually notice the reduction of garbage and how much better you feel.

You can make a difference. With the enormous problems that face the world, it may seem our individual efforts are going to be completely insignificant, but many problems we confront are created by individual actions, and we each have enormous powers to make a change.
—Nicky Scott, Composting: An Easy Household Guide