Improving the Sustainability of my Lifestyle

I ‘did’ consider my lifestyle to be quite sustainable. On a daily basis I recycle everything from bottles, tins and plastics, to card and paper that I tend to get through often. I believe that studying Geography and my mother’s influences on recycling are what have made me realise the importance of recycling. I now feel very strongly on the matter. I try not to let food go to waste, I do not cook more than what I can eat, and anything left over I’ll use for another meal. Around the house I do use energy saving light bulbs and despite these not being as cheap as standard light bulbs, they do in fact last 10 times longer and are much more energy efficient.

However looking more carefully at how sustainable my lifestyle is, I have realised that it isn’t that sustainable at all. These are only a few of the many things I should be doing. Firstly I should watch how much water I am using; instead of spending 20 minutes in the shower relaxing, I theoretically only need to spend 10 minutes to get washed. An average person in the UK uses 150 litres of water a day of which I believe can be halved if people were more aware of how much they are wasting. Put into theory, it is in my opinion that water should only be used when a person needs to use it, not when they want to. For example a person may need a shower on a daily basis, this is ok but if a person washed their car yesterday and then washed it again today, this is highly unnecessary and what I believe to be a huge waste of water. They didn’t ‘need’ to wash the car, they ‘wanted’ to!

I tend to buy a lot of clothes, some of which hardly even get warn. After sitting in the wardrobe a year or two, I’ll throw them out. I never take into account that I could take my clothes to a charity shop such as Oxfam. In the past I have been known to have thrown out clothing that was in perfectly good condition. It has come to my attention that one million tonnes of clothing in the UK alone gets thrown away each year, which is shocking when we look at how many people living in poverty are struggling for decent clothing. I don’t have clothing clear-outs often, maybe once or twice a year, so it wouldn’t hurt for me to pop down to the charity shop with my unwanted belongings on those occasions.

When looking into the amount of energy I consume, I am not helping by leaving my TV and laptop on standby where they continue to consume energy. This is a bad habit and I should make more of an effort to switch them off as it’s not exactly hard to do. Not only am I wasting energy in doing this, but it does add to the electricity bill when on standby. I wouldn’t go out and leave the TV on, would you? So it won’t hurt any of us to go one step further and SWITCH THEM OFF!!

However there are some things that are preventing me to live a more sustainable lifestyle. An example being; the cold weather in the winter resorts to me using central heating. Despite putting on thick warm layers, I do find myself to be putting the thermostat up rather high. To cut my energy use, I should invest in insulating the walls and roof of my house. What’s preventing me from doing this though is the fact it can be quite costly to get this done. What I can do though to start making a difference is to turn down the thermostat this year by a degree or two, this will cut the amount of carbon dioxide emissions I am emitting. If everyone was to do this, this alone would make a huge difference, not only in reducing the amount of carbon dioxide being released but will save everyone a great deal of money.

Evaluating how sustainable my lifestyle is, I have come to the conclusion that it’s not as sustainable as I had first thought. I have realised that I take a lot for granted and there are so many things I should be doing to improve its sustainability, most of which are all easy to do!