For Environmental Sustainability, Twenty Achievable Practices Are Most Important
From composting to growing community, these twenty household and organizational practices are the most important for a sustainable future.
You can most certainly protect our environment and help secure a future for everyone on Earth by achieving twenty sustainable practices in your home or organization:
- Compost organic solid waste.
- Walk, ride bicycles, or take public transit for local errands.
- Eat more plants and little or no beef, lamb, and other ruminant meat.
- Buy food in season from local farmers who grow it using organic methods.
- Drink more water and fewer bottled beverages.
- Use green cleaning products with minimal packaging.
- Recycle metal, glass, and clean cardboard; avoid plastic.
- Insulate and weatherstrip attics, basements, windows, doors, and exterior walls.
- Install LED lighting with motion sensors and automatic daylight dimming.
- Landscape with native plants using organic methods.
- Wash clothes in cold water in an efficient machine with a microplastic filter.
- Use electric heat pumps for domestic hot water.
- Dry clothes in a condensing dryer or on drying racks or lines.
- Use energy-efficient refrigerators and freezers.
- Use electromagnetic induction ranges and circulating-fan convection ovens.
- Drive electric vehicles in bad weather and for longer trips.
- Use electric heat pumps for space heating.
- Generate electricity on-site from solar or subscribe to a solar farm.
- Install water-efficient toilets.
- Grow a community that practices environmental sustainability.
We know these practices are easier to say than do, so for the next twenty weeks, we’ll be posting a detailed “how to” action guide for each one. By the end of this series, you’ll have a handy collection of twenty “sustainability recipes” for reference when you’re ready to give each practice a go. The information in our guides has been thoroughly field-tested, but as you try to achieve each sustainable practice in your own home or organization, we’d love to know your results!
Join Our Community Feedback Groups
Along with our series of detailed action guides for our “top twenty” sustainable practices, we’ll be rolling out new versions of our online sustainability app, frequent updates to our Guidebook for Sustainability, and — in the next few weeks — review chapters of our forthcoming Handbook for Sustainability. If you’re willing to provide feedback on our resource materials, please request to join one of our feedback groups so you can follow our progress and chime in with your thoughts. As we’ve talked with early reviewers, we’ve noticed that sustainability concerns and opportunities vary according to where you live, so we’re creating different feedback groups state by state.
We encourage you to join a feedback group not only to get the inside scoop on what we’re working on but also to post notices about whatever you’re doing to protect your neck of the woods. We’ve set up old-fashioned, ad-free, invitation-only Google groups so you can communicate easily with us using regular email without suffering the pitfalls of posting on modern social media platforms.
If you do join a group, you can expect to receive a message from us every once in a while with a link to a web page or a question. It’s completely up to you whether you have time to take a look and let us know what you think. You can send your thoughts privately to us or share them with the whole group. We know many of you are working or volunteering for sustainability, so you may have news to share with us or questions you’d like to ask us. That’s perfectly fine. You can send messages to us through the group at any time (but please stick to the topic of environmental sustainability). If we think your message would be interesting to the whole group, we’ll share it with everyone. If you want, we’re happy to provide our feedback about your sustainability efforts: the feedback can go both ways!
The “invitation only” aspect of our feedback groups means you’ll see this decidedly unfriendly screen when you visit a group before you’ve been invited to join it:
Just click on the “Contact owners and managers” button, send us a message letting us know who you are, and we’ll reply with a personal invitation lickety-split. Accept our invitation, and you’ll be in the group!
- If you live or work in Maine, please request an invitation from
https://groups.google.com/g/sustainable-practice-me - If you live or work in Indiana, please request an invitation from
https://groups.google.com/g/sustainable-practice-in - If you live or work in another state or country, please request an invitation from https://groups.google.com/g/sustainable-practice
We hope you’ll choose to participate and provide feedback on whatever interests you, helping us grow a worldwide community that is practicing sustainability with superb results!
Originally published at https://sustainablepractice.substack.com.
