What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about ‘sustainability’ as a concept? Do you picture a flourishing, green earth, bringing your own shopping bags, powering your home with solar and your car with electricity? Or do you think of the economical aspect of saving your foods as leftovers and turning off lights when you leave a room?
While we’re constantly being told the next best way of how to be green and sufficient, the funny thing about sustainability shifts is that we’re oftentimes looking to the past for inspiration just as much as we look towards future innovations. There are many dynamic ways that you can practise sustainability in your day-to-day life, from gardening to transport, and adapting our consumer habits.
Today, we’ll be sharing some of the simplest ways – both modern and traditional – that can help you live greener every day. From natural cleaning products, to your food, to how to plan an event, here’s how to make your life cleaner and greener over the long term.
1. Start tracking your green habits
The first step you should take on your sustainability journey is simply making sure you have a means of monitoring your progress. Habit tracking can be a great way to check in with yourself through all your green shifts and figure out what’s working and what could be going better – based on your ability to maintain the practice, and even on how the practice makes you feel.
If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to live a little greener, then you could invest in a 2025 personal planner for easy habit tracking all year long. Even some basic daily bullet journaling is enough to keep you focused and mindful during your sustainability mission.
And to make this foundational method even greener, we recommend investing in a planner or diary that’s been produced using FSC-certified paper.
2. Embrace wartime wisdom on zero waste
World War II isn’t as far back as we imagine it to be. In fact, chances are you had a grandparent or relative who lived through the war and have a myriad of stories about how they made ends meet. In fact, citizens of the Allied nations became so dedicated to frugal and practical living that “Waste not, want not” became the slogan of the 20th century’s wartime generation.
From making pickles and preserves with your fruits and vegetables to ensure pantries stayed full in winter to using vinegar or lemon juice to get rid of a stain, nature’s riches were not wasted during wartime eras. With everything from old solutions using household bicarbonate of soda and vinegar to depositing that authentic Christmas tree smell on a plastic tree, you can bring almost 100 years of tried-and-tested knowledge to the modern generation.
These same traditional food preservation and household cleaning methods can become great additions to your own efforts of transforming your home into a zero-waste household. So ask your relatives if they have any pearls of wartime wisdom for you to use today!
3. Invest in efficient home improvements
So you’ve swapped out all your household cleaners for homemade formulas – now what? Well how energy-efficient are your home appliances? If you think you could save some serious $$$ on your utility bills and cut your carbon emissions down substantially by swapping out your old ducted heating for a sleek split system, then start saving up for that home improvement project.
The same goes for any other outdated appliances, and even design elements in your home that are resulting in your blasting the heating and cooling – think exposed windows that let in a lot of solar heat or winter chill, or outdated insulation that’s not doing a great job of helping your home trap heat during cooler weather.
By investing in double glazed windows and solar panels, you reduce heat loss in winter and run partly off-grid. LED lights can help your electricity consumption, since they emit a softer glow and last much longer than traditional bulbs. And as mentioned, these simple home improvements can actually help the planet, as well as your wallet, and who doesn’t love that?
4. Create compost – worms work wonders
Now that we’ve highlighted great ways to cleanify and greenify inside the home, let’s focus on cultivating healthy soil and plants in your garden. And yes, we’re talking about composting!
Recycling your vegetable waste into garden soil can work wonders for all the plants propagating in your garden. By composting it down, and adding in some worms and other helpful bugs, you can really help your garden bloom.
Alongside boosting the health of your garden beds and veggie patches, composting regularly can also help your household stay on top of its own fruit and veg intake, or even be a foundational component of maintaining a sustainable lifestyle and nutrient-filled diet for you and your family. The more veggies you eat, the healthier your compost, and the more your backyard veggie patch can produce. What a positive feedback cycle!
5. Carpool or public transport
For us urban dwellers, sitting in traffic is becoming just as much a constant in life as death and taxes. Thankfully, those of us who do live in the suburbs or in city centres have one source of salvation from becoming bottled in on the highway: public transport.
Take the bus, train or tram for your daily commute if you’re looking for a simple way to live greener. While it might be a little extra prep, public transport saves you the frustration of a traffic jam, and can let you get ahead of the day.
Alternatively, if you have flat- or housemates that work in the same location, set up a system to carpool by taking each other’s cars whenever you can. With these more sustainable travel methods, you can drastically reduce your personal carbon footprint whilst still being able to enjoy a comfortable and manageable daily commute.
6. Buy locally
Another way to be more sustainable and helpful to our environment is to shop locally within the Toorak community. Not only does this help support your local producers, it reduces carbon footprint and waste by making sure that products don’t have to travel further than needed.
When you shop locally, whether for groceries or products, you’re less likely to deal with pollutants, whether directly through the consumption of plastic, or indirectly through air miles and other emissions from shipping.
7. Reduce, reuse, recycle
Last but certainly not least, the strongest way you can practise sustainability in your day-to-day life is by adopting this age-old recycling mantra in virtually everything you do.
Remember that the ‘reduce’ refers to ‘reduced consumption’, and ‘reuse’ to opting for multi-use over single use products, as well as repurposing products. Whether it’s through reusing your old shopping bags, adopting the principles of sustainable fashion, limiting resource consumption, or upcycling your previously loved items, less consumption helps in the end. And then there’s ‘recycling’ as we know it to be. Separating our trash into different recycling bins, and trying to repair, alter or modify items before you throw them away completely.
It can be all too tempting to buy that t-shirt on sale, but if you’re serious about living greener, it’s important to start restricting your personal consumption and waste now.
Transitioning to sustainable living always begins with getting back to basics and working at a grassroots level. We’ve shared 7 tips to help you live greener in your day-to-day life, without switching up your entire routine. Incorporate one or two until they become second nature, and work your way through the list. Soon you’ll be on your way to reducing your carbon footprint and making a positive change for the world. You might even inspire others in your household or company to follow your lead.
