Eco Chic: 5 Easy Ways to Reduce Your Waste This Year

Eco Chic: 5 Easy Ways to Reduce Your Waste This Year

We love the creative process of making New Year’s resolutions every January. There’s nothing better than a fresh burst of inspiration to tackle the year ahead, and seeing items checked off the list along the way. While we love a good restart, we also enjoy keeping a continuous set of goals to be mindful of all year long. Going green and choosing all natural over chemical-laden products is nothing new here at LaurenConrad.com. We do have to admit, however, that we fall into routines and sometimes forget to make conscious decisions when it comes to what we fill our bodies and homes with. We’re feeling as motivated as ever to get this state of mind back on track again, this post serving as a reminder for all of us.

Reducing our carbon footprint may seem like a hefty undertaking in the beginning. But like most areas in life, we’ve found that baby steps often lead to bigger, more sustainable lifelong habits. In the past we’ve encouraged our readers to green their cleaning and makeup routines, so today we thought we’d list out five more ways to make a positive impact. Here’s what we came up with…

1. Swap out your paper products.
The next time you go to refill your paper towels or napkins, we encourage you to invest in a cloth alternative. Stocking your household with cloth napkins and plenty of reusable tea towels can save trees, significantly save you money over time, and reduce landfill waste.

2. Say no to plastic straws.
To put it into perspective, 500 million straws are used and then thrown away every single day in the United States according to The Last Plastic Straw. To say that we are baffled by that statistic would be an understatement! All it takes to reduce single use plastic straw waste is to just say no or bring your own reusable straw if you know you’re going to need one. Straws are nice, but not really necessary at all when you think about it.

3. Buy a bamboo toothbrush.
Why not go green and up your dental hygiene in one fell swoop? Bamboo toothbrushes use eco-friendly materials, leaving less plastic waste in landfills. Bamboo is significant less costly to produce than plastic and does not require energy-consuming extraction processes to make according to Green Product. For something as simple as a toothbrush that we all use on a daily basis, just think about all of the plastic you will no longer be wasting with a bamboo toothbrush.

 

4. BYOB.
Bring your own bag, that is. According to the Earth Policy Institute, a trillion single-use plastic bags are used every year around the world. (And we thought the plastic straw numbers were bad enough.) Here in California, plastic shopping bags have actually been banned and shoppers are charged a paper bag fee, encouraging consumers to bring their own reusable ones instead. Reusable shopping bags like these ones from The Little Market are such a simple way to leave a smaller carbon footprint these days. It goes beyond carrying your groceries home in a burlap sack though. We encourage you to use reusable produce bags as well so that you can place your fresh fruits and veggies directly into them instead of a smaller plastic bag at the store. Keep reusable bags in your purse or the trunk of your car for easy access if you know that you’re going to be out and about.

5. Skip the takeout cutlery.
Pretty simple, right? This one can get a little tricky to get the hang of, since we don’t always think to politely decline takeout cutlery. Like everything else on this list, it’s all about being mindful as consumers. If you’re going to order takeout (hey, sometimes a girl just needs a good PostMates delivery), we encourage you to make a note that you do not want plastic utensils and straws, reuse the containers if applicable, and compost as much waste as you can. Who knew that takeout could be so green-friendly?

Let’s keep each other accountable to these goals! We don’t know about you, but we’re so excited to make these changes in our own lives.

Do you have any suggestions on how to further green our routines?

Let us know what they are in the comments!

XO Team LC

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