How to Live Minimally & Reduce Your Carbon Footprint

There are a large number of ways to reduce your carbon footprint, and living minimally is by far the most stylish of them. Finding ways to reduce your carbon footprint requires reflection of your current lifestyle habits that impact the environment. Living minimally is a lifestyle that requires the same kind of reflection, so they are easy lifestyles to put together. Here are a few ways to use living minimally as a way to reduce your carbon footprint.

Minimalist Elements

Living minimally requires a few key guidelines. Minimalism began as an art form that removed the least important parts from a work of art to bring more focus to the key elements of an art piece that make it stand out. The same can be applied to a person’s life; by removing the clutter and re-organizing your life, you and observers only see the most intentional parts of your life.

 

When maintaining only key pieces in your life, you reduce the amount of unnecessary whim purchases you make simply to throw away, as well as the amount of waste you produce. Reducing your waste output is key when trying to reduce your carbon footprint, as a majority of our garbage ends up in landfills polluting the planet. Limiting nonessential shopping saves a lot of time and money, and allows you to focus shopping needs on more quality items that you’ll hang on to for a long time.

 

This includes being selective with your wardrobe and the items you include in it. Getting rid of clothes you don’t wear and limiting your wardrobe to staples that you wear often can make it very easy to manage a closet and pick out the clothes you wear each day. Work with a color palette to ensure you will have plenty of options to wear each day and follow a one-in, one-out rule to prevent your closet from bulking up again. This will also prevent you from spending money on clothes you’re unlikely to wear.

 

Some key minimalist belongings that will help decrease the amount of waste you produce are things like a sturdy water bottle and a thermos. Having these on hand will keep you from purchasing one-use items like plastic water bottles and to-go coffee cups, which people often purchase every day. You can also transition into using reusable towels rather than paper towels and tupperware rather than wrapping leftovers in cling wrap or aluminum foil.

Reduce Your Use

Reducing your carbon footprint is about being aware of the day-to-day habits and choices that deepen it. Some of the biggest contributors that people don’t realize they have control over are things like food choices, laundry, and even recycling. However, there are many ways to save the planet by making green choices each day.

 

International food production requires the use of many more resources than that of local farmers. If you live somewhere with a community garden, good agriculture and local produce markets, making the effort to buy produce in these locations rather than large grocery stores like Walmart and WinCo can prevent you from contributing to the demand of international food production and will help you support local companies. Instead of buying tons of groceries at once, visit your local markets a couple times a week to reduce the amount of food you waste.

 

Reducing your consumption of animal products also helps reduce your carbon footprint. The resources that go into raising livestock and meat production are the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, which means cutting meat out of your diet can help reduce your carbon footprint, while also having a positive impact on your health. Plant-based diets are focused on eating elaborate and nutritious meals made from plants, or using minimal raw materials that really focus flavor to create a meal, to which the ‘less is more’ philosophy applies.

 

Due to the greenhouse gas emissions caused by animal agriculture, consuming meat is also a contributor to climate change, meaning that consuming meat and animal products increases your carbon footprint. Being conservative with our resources and trying to live minimally is not only good for the environment, it’s also good for our wallets. Climate change costs money for every individual, as tax dollars are allocated to attempts to reduce our environmental impact. We only have one planet, and doing our part to live minimally and reduce, reuse and recycle will help sustain our planet and reduce our societal carbon footprint.