Sustainable Lifestyle and Green Living Tips for Families

Living a green or sustainable lifestyle is a goal that many families have. This essentially means living a life that is good for the environment. In fact, over 75% of people want to learn how to live more sustainably. Unfortunately, many of them don’t know what they can do or how they should go about making a change. 

However, thankfully, living sustainably doesn’t mean you need to change up your entire existence. A few small changes can actually have a big impact on the overall carbon footprint of your family as a whole. This is especially true if more and more families get on board and make changes in the right direction.

Without any further ado, let’s look at some sustainable and green living tips for families to reduce their carbon footprint.

Grow Your Own Food

Growing your own food is one of the best things you can do to live sustainably. The food you buy at grocery stores is transported around the world, which relies on a lot of fossil fuels. The more you can grow yourself, the less you are contributing to that process.

Creating a home or backyard garden will not only provide you with healthy and fresh food (without needing to use chemicals), but also save you money. There are a variety of different seed collections you can choose from to make sure you can always grow the plants you want.

Of course, feel free to grow more than veggies, as there are several other plants that can not only look good, but also provide value. For example, there are several home gardening plants that can actually purify the air such as aloe vera, spider plants and peace lily. Many can also protect against pests, without the need for harmful chemicals. Some of these include citronella and marigolds.

Communicate and Get Everyone Involved

Making the changes to live a sustainable life needs to involve the whole family. While even a single person making the right changes is better than none, it’s better if the whole family is involved. As a result, it is important to communicate why living sustainably is important, and how you plan on doing it.

If you get children involved early and show them the benefits, they will carry it with them for their whole lives. Also, talking to other families about green living is a great way to make a bigger impact. Many people don’t live green because they don’t think their little contribution matters (even though it does). So if you can surround yourselves with others doing the same, it can motivate you and inspire you to stay committed.

Conserve Energy and Electricity

Another great thing to do on your mission for a more sustainable lifestyle is to conserve how much energy and electricity you use. Unfortunately, a lot of the energy and electricity we use comes from fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are notoriously bad for our environment, and aren’t sustainable. As a result, the less you use, the better it will be for the environment.

So be sure to turn off lights and electronics when not in use and keep the heat or A/C off when possible. Doing this will greatly reduce your energy usage, without having to make any huge changes to your life. Another option is to rely on another type of energy or power such as solar or hydro. However, we understand this isn’t always an option for all families.

Remember the 3 R’s

While there are several individual and specific things your family can do, there is also a general rule you can remember. That rule is none other than the 3 R’s. The 3 R’s are reduce, reuse and recycle. They are at the core of any sustainable or green lifestyle. First of all, you need to do all you can to reduce the amount of waste your family creates. For example, stop buying single-use plastics and waste less food. Next, you want to reuse or repurpose anything you can, to get additional use out of it.

Lastly, your family should recycle all that you’re able to. Make sure everyone knows what can be recycled and what cannot, as well. These 3 R’s can be a great guide for families and can make it easy to develop new ideas to live sustainably. They can be applied in many different ways and if they are always in mind when making decisions, enjoying a sustainable life can be easy.

In conclusion, we hope that this article has been able to help you live more sustainably and green going forward.