How does eating healthy and exercising help, if we do not have a safe planet to live on? This question changed my lifestyle!

Start with replacing plastic bags!

I and my family started off by taking our own cloth bags to the supermarket, which was an easy switch. Later, it caught my attention that we were still producing so many little plastic covers after each shopping.

Pulses, masalas, flour everything, and anything came in little plastic packets. We decided to get small cloth pouches for pulses, grains, etc and took our own containers to buy flour, masalas, and oil directly from the mill. We could see how less congested our bins were. 

What about kitchen waste?

Now the next question was; what do we do with the kitchen waste? Google search said - Compost!! I wasn’t really sure whether it would work for us. 

So instead of buying a readymade compost bin, we made a compost system with our old cooking mud pots that we don’t use anymore. It worked just fine and we still use it, there was no need to get a new one and kitchen waste is taken care of.

Cut on online shopping

I started researching on zero waste and low impact lifestyle and came across many articles by people who are on their journey to zero waste. We incorporated everything that we could into our life too. We buy clothes and footwear only when we really need them instead of when we want it. Its high time we understood that every resource is valuable.

We cut down drastically on online purchases which reduced plastic waste like bubble wraps and cellophane tapes. The natural products that we get from homegrown enterprises are sent to us with zero plastic packagings.

Use steel!

Have you ever thought of the amount of plastic we contribute every year when we send our kids to school? Every book is covered with some type of plastic-coated brown paper. We have successfully shifted to brown paper with no plastic.

Buying good quality steel tiffins, steel bottles, steel rulers and the like is pocket-friendly and also eco-friendly as they do not leach chemicals into your food and also last a lifetime. There is no need to buy new ones every year. 

As a family, making sure to refuse single-use cutlery is very important to us. We carry our own cutlery and bottle of water. We refuse to eat from any place that serves in single-use cutlery. If we are packing food, we ask them to pack it in our own tiffins and if they don’t oblige we plainly refuse to buy.

We also changed from all commercial products like paste, soap, shampoos, deodorants, face washes to natural products that come in eco-friendly packaging and are produced ethically. It was a challenge to get the children to shift from the minty flavored, floral-scented, smooth commercial products to natural products.

But it was a challenge worth taking. After all, it is to preserve their planet so that they have a clean planet to live on.

I am proud to say that so far, we are 80% eco-friendly. Now that things at home are sorted out I would like to go out and spread the word to others.  To urge them to make changes. Every small change makes a difference!

(Tanja is a homemaker from Kerala and a mother of two. I'm a nature lover, and I'm passionate about gardening, pets, art and healthy cooking. Her instagram)

(The views expressed in the article are the author’s own. Let Me Breathe neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)