What actions could you (in theory) undertake that would improve the 'sustainability' of your lifestyle? What might be preventing you from doing these?


There are many actions which I could take which would improve the sustainability of my lifestyle but it depends on whether I am willing to do these actions or am I actually bothered?. Improving the sustainability of my lifestyle would take a lot of time and effort from me to succeed in doing so it wouldn’t’t just be like carrying on normally. There are many different ways how I would go around improving the sustainability some quite simple and other more complicated. In order to try and think how I could make my lifestyle more sustainable I thought that I would need to find out what I do I which is sustainable and where am I wasting products or energy. To find this out over a 7 day period I decided to write down everything I used, wasted, recycled, reused and good deeds I did which will go towards making me more sustainable and helping the environment. I then put this into a table to show what I did use and waste:

From the table I can see that as a person I do waste a lot of packaging and waste a lot of energy just from being lazy and in some cases falling asleep. I do recycle and reuse some items such as bottles, cans, cardboard, paper, water bottles and bags but there are a lot more items which I could recycle or reuse if I could be bothered. Being a bit of an eco-warrior I did encourage other people to recycle their stuff instead of throwing it in the bin (after many threats!!!) which helps out and makes my flat and flatmates more sustainable. But other from those small ways of being sustainable there is not much past their which I have done or in some cases could have done. One way I think that I could be more sustainable as a person is by recycling more of the packaging I use instead of throwing it away into normal bins or look more into the packaging to find out if it is recyclable and also where can I recycle it. This then just cannot just count on me recycling it as a person because if some packaging was recyclable and I wanted to recycle it there would have to be the provision for me to recycle this item. Other ways I could be more sustainable is when I work and buy drinks and food I usually just leave the packaging in the van I am driving instead of putting it in a recycling bin which means it most properly gets thrown in a normal bin. This is just down to me being lazy and just wanting to get out of boring work and go home and sit down and chill :).

www.binworld.co.uk

Another way in which I could improve the sustainability of my lifestyle is to not use electrical appliances such as my TV, Xbox and laptop for prolonged periods of time when I am not doing much. Also not to fall asleep whilst watching TV or even not turning the TV on at all when I go to bed would stop me wasting energy when there is no need to use any at all!!. I also tend to leave my laptop on charge when I go out and when I go to lessons and other things as I don’t think about turning it off it doesn’t occur to me to do this. So if I was trying to make my lifestyle more sustainable I would always check that it was turned off after use or turned off when it doesn’t need to be on. I don’t tend to leave hot water running for long periods of time just every now and again I do sometimes although I shouldn’t be doing this at all and should look to stop this if improving the sustainability of my life.

Apart from these bad points I do something’s which are sustainable and are good to the environment all the time. Such as recycling all paper and magazines I buy during the week especially as I buy a paper every day and a magazine every week so to not recycle them would be like a crime!. Also I do tend to turn off lights for other people when they leave them on and always turning off lights after I left a room and making use of natural light when possible. Other sustainable things I do is not buying water bottles and just reusing them for when I am going to play football or when going to lectures so I don’t waste money as well so helps on two fronts J. I also have bought bags for life from Asda for when I go and do my shopping so I don’t grab loads and loads and loads and loads of plastic carrier bags which don’t get recycled and have 1 or 2 bags which I shove all my shopping in, this also makes my life easier at the same time

http://www.radiowaves.co.uk/media/resources/radiowaves_live/images/story/13431/recycle%20sign_t.jpg

So summarise what I could do as a person as a person to be more sustainable is to recycle more items, waste less energy, don’t make to much food (only on certain occasion’s) which is easier said than done.

It can be hard to make my lifestyle more sustainable because sometimes there will not be the provision to be sustainable and sometimes I will just be lazy and think I can’t be bothered this little bit won’t make a difference anyway. This is one constraint which stops me from doing anything extra which would make my life sustainable by not thinking about doing it and not thinking it will make any difference and not knowing if it can be recycled and not bothering to find out. This is just down to a lack of knowledge of what can be recycled and what cannot be recycled and also just down to me being plain lazy. Being lazy is properly what it mostly comes down to when looking at how sustainable my life is to be honest and not being bothered in some cases.

Other ways which could prevent me from doing this is also the lack of provision provided by the area where I live. Most councils have recycling teams which collect your recycling and then take it away and they also inform you of what bin to put the stuff you can recycle away in. This is all good and helpful but what if there are things which they don’t provide the provision for? What are you meant to do throw it away with normal rubbish or take it to a separate facility where you might have to pay for. If it were me I would throw it away with normal rubbish as I don’t have the time to do separate things like that which I am guessing the majority of the population do as well. As I am living in university halls there are 3 bins in which to put recyclable items into which can be ruined by people putting random rubbish in those bins and the signs on the bins aren’t very clear on what you can and can’t. We haven’t been told of what to do if we have a recyclable item but can’t put it into one of those bins, so in the end gets thrown in the normal bin. There are many other items and things that could be done to give us more knowledge of what we should do, what we can and can’t do but we haven’t been informed about any of this. As far as I can remember we never even got told we have to 100% recycle anything leaving it down to personal preference which means everything will be put in the bin. Its not anyone’s fault in a way because this generation is the one which is most critical in terms of protecting the environment and “global warming” (its in brackets because I don’t believe in it just making a point) but we are programmed to function in a wasteful way and will take a lot in order to make people change!!!!.