Let’s face it. Our daily life is full of things we do over and over again. From getting a coffee till spending time behind the steering wheel, we find ourselves doing the same things over and over again. What if we could all change the way we do these daily life activities? * this article is brought you by the guys of changemyfootprint.com *
Can you think about the gigantic impact it would have on our planet? When millions of us use less water, energy or even paper, it would save an enormous amount of trees, carbon emissions water and waste. And think about the amount of money we can all save. Changing the way we do our daily life activities is what we consider as the most effective way to fight climate change. What is hard, is to stop doing the things we love. But if we change the way we do them, we can save money and planet at the same time, who can resist it then? Isn’t a thicker wallet and a happier planet something we all love?
But give us some examples, we can hear you think. Well, let’s start with something we all do very often. Cooking.
There are many ways to save money and the environment starting with you cooking in your kitchen. How often do we read in our cookbook: preheat your oven? Well, many times you don’t have to preheat your oven. And that will save you money and electricity usage. And by the way, that cookbook- why is that on paper and not digital? e-books are cheaper, and don’t need that amount of trees, ink, water, and carbon emissions as printed books. But we wander off, let’s go back to creating our oven dish. We have to cook some pasta. We boil the water in an electric kettle because it’s faster and cheaper than boiling water on the gas stove. Afterwards we pour the boiling water in the saucepan, ad the pasta, and put a cover on it. Covering dishes makes the water boil faster again saving us gas and therefore money.
We also need vegetables so we take them out of the the fridge, that is perfectly set between 1-4 degrees. We bought our vegetables at the local farmer’s market which we went to on our bikes and we brought our own reusable bags and packaging. It was lovely we could choose the exact amount of everything without any packaging. No packaging waste and leftovers for us! We saved a lot of money as well because the vegetables are also cheaper at the farmer’s market.
When cutting the vegetables, we cut them in small pieces. This will reduce the cooking time and today we don’t use meat in our dish. Of course we love a juicy piece of meat now and then but we are going vegan some days of the week because meat leaves a huge footprint on our planet. Meat is also expensive so cutting down our meat consumption is an easy way to save money as well. Online there are many amazing recipes for vegan options to replace meat.
The preparations for our dish are almost done. We put everything together and prepare the oven. The dish has to go into the oven for 30 minutes but we set the timer at 20 minutes because, after heating, the oven will stay warm for at least 10 more minutes.
While our dish is getting ready we set the table. We grab some linen napkins because they look better and do not create waste. We also grab our refillable bottle of water that we had put in the fridge before. The water is now nicely cold and perfect to serve along with the dish.
And as easy as that we saved some money and the environment when cooking and preparing our daily dinner.
Make sure to visit our website changemyfootprint.com for more ideas about how to save money and the environment in your daily life activities. Remember that when we all do something small, we all do something very big!