Sustainable consumption as a student
Sustainability, the green transition, CO2 neutral, zero waste, vegan lifestyle, ecology, recycling, environmental and climate friendliness – there are thousands of such words in our everyday life. Some people get happy from hearing these words, others get tired. You can get even more tired, when you try to do the right things but find out that this green world of even more complicated words like greenwashing and environmental certificates are incomprehensible. It is hard to know, if it is a good thing to buy organic, if it is better to buy Danish food, whether it is harmful for the environment to buy candles and soft drinks in plastic bottles, or if you should buy tomatoes that were grown in Spain. Furthermore, you must make up your mind, whether it is a good idea to buy the new, more practical and 100 % recyclable bioplastic drinking bottle. Are you a better person if you live 100 % vegan, or is that a trend that impairs your health?
I do not have an answer for you. Generally, the answer is not easy, and there is not just one answer for many questions.
Writer
Ann-Christin Bärbel Irmtraud Kessler studies an MSc in Environmental Engineering
”I want to tell you how to choose your battles and contribute to a greener life in your own way amd on a tight budget
Let us get started!
Before I come up with tips and tricks, I would like to start with an analogy. Please note that I am not a professional athlete, not even close to. But maybe that is exactly the reason why I can tell you, how one of my biggest mistakes within sports can help us all to improve our sustainable lifestyle.
I have made the same mistake many times in my life: To hedge my bets on all horses at the same time.
Imagine this situation: New Year is just around the corner, maybe it is right after New Year, you have just recovered from the worst hangover in the world. To top it all, you have eaten too much and too well during the Christmas days, and if you are completely honest with yourself, you have not returned to the healthy lifestyle after the Christmas holiday.
It is time to pull yourself together. A new start. Everything must get better. You feel like exercising our tired and heavy body, you want to eat salad, and maybe you can try to include some vegetarian or vegan food in your diet (please note that I am slightly rhetorical here). You begin with preparation of a plan. As of tomorrow, you start running, as the fitness centre is still closed due to corona. Maybe you can achieve 5K? You should not set the bar too high. You would make a healthy freshly squeezed juice for breakfast – it’s about time to make use of the juicer. It is probably a bit dusty. And there you stand in the morning.
You follow your healthy master plan and feel fantastic – on the first day. After a few days, a week or more, maybe when your everyday life is back on full speed – the old habits sneak back into your life.
Therefore, you may think that you will never be able to eat healthy or be active. It is too hard and does not fit into your life. You do neither have the time nor the motivation, it is all just hard and annoying. That is not your cup of tea. At least not right now. The project New Year is put on hold.
During my attempts to live healthier I made the mistake to do everything at the same time and ideally achieve quick results. I wanted a defined and strong body, to lose some kilos, eat more vegetables and less sweets, drink enough and just water. The same can happen when we set ourselves the goal to be more sustainable. It is great for the world, it is good for me, I just have to get started – and soon I may experience that it is too much, too expensive, too exhausting and too many compromises.
Now that you are aware of this trap, you can start your own research.
Ask yourself
- Why do you want to be more sustainable?
- What does sustainability mean to you?
- What do you know already, and when and how can you acquire more knowledge?
- What are you already doing to be more sustainable?
- What are your long-term goals, and how can you achieve them?
- Is there anything that you know you are very bad at in terms of being sustainable and why?
It looks like an assignment, but it may help to answer these questions, especially if you do not know where to start. Finally, I have some tips for you:
Minimization
Ask yourself if you will use the item, you want to buy. It is a personal decision, whether you think that the item will improve your life enough to justify the used resources. When you minimize your general consumption, it sometimes means that you must decide, if you are willing to pay more for a quality product that lasts longer versus a cheaper product, which you may need to purchase several times.
Recycling
If you cannot renounce anything, you should consider buying a recycled item. Recycling goes both ways, as you can also sell the things, you do not use anymore. The more frequent an object is recycled, the more frequent the use of new resources is avoided.
Reutilization
It does not cost anything but makes a difference to the environment if you become better at source separation. I know that it can be annoying, but it can – free of charge - increase the amount of waste that can be turned into new products. In Odense you can e.g. sort plastic from the residual waste and bring it to a recycling centre. Although incineration is also used for e.g. conversion of waste into electricity and heating, it is less resource demanding to reuse. Especially plastics packaging has a very short product life. Reuse can give it more lives. In general, source separated waste is more usable the better quality it has. Therefore, we should all get acquainted with our sorting schema and sort more carefully.
Eating
A very popular topic. Vegan, vegetarian, meet .. We take up that subject another day. I am aware that these suggestions sound very simple, maybe even a bit boring, and you probably do most of it already. But you can still consider whether you can become even better at it. I hope that you can unstick yourself from the stereotypes and find your own sweet spot on how to make the largest impact. Over time, you can pluck up courage to learn something new and be open to changes. It is my hope that you try and do not hold back due to the fitness mistakes.
Best regards, Anni