Many of us would love to “go green” and reduce the size of our carbon footprint, but that can be a challenge when you live in a big city, far away from open farmland and the bounties of nature.
Living a sustainable lifestyle in the middle of a metropolis can be a challenge, but there are plenty of pragmatic and actionable steps you can take to be more eco-friendly without quitting your day job to venture out into the wilds.
Here are just a few tips for helping you to live as sustainably as possible, no matter where you live!
The Concept of Sustainability: A Quick Look
At its core, a sustainable lifestyle is one that aims at reducing waste, maximizing available resources, and attempting to achieve a degree of self-reliance.
In a world as developed and interconnected as ours, complete self-sufficiency is very difficult to achieve, and short of an off-grid home with solar panels and power generators, most people will find themselves in some sort of urban or suburban setting, or at least relying on a central power grid with municipal water.
It’s important to remember that sustainability is a sliding scale, and we can only start from where we are at.
Taking small steps like buying reusable cloth grocery bags rather than relying on wasteful plastic bags can be a good start.
Your individual efforts may not change the world overnight, but systemic change has to begin at a personal level.
Energy Efficiency at Home
One of the easiest ways to live a more sustainable lifestyle is to moderate the cooling and heating of your home.
Setting the AC way down during summer pulls a lot of juice, and it is also costly to heat homes during winter, so aim for a tolerable middle ground, rather than always insisting on a climate-controlled paradise.
A bit of moderation with the thermostat will save you money, and help to reduce the drag on your local power grid.
Other obvious, yet still routinely overlooked steps include turning off lights before leaving a room, closing the door rather than leaving it open to let the hot or cold air out, and regularly cleaning or replacing your HVAC air filter.
Your home runs on electricity, air, water, and in many cases gas or propane as well, so attending to all of these power sources and ensuring that they are running smoothly will be beneficial for the home’s general safety and cleanliness, as well as helping you to save on your utility bills.
Water Conservation
If you live in a metro area, chances are your local water supply may have a heavy contaminant load. Where people congregate, so too does problematic water.
It’s a simple matter of more people consuming more food and creating more waste, which can lead to a lot of problems in cleaning up water, which we rely on in our septic and sewer systems.
Many city dwellers wisely opt to install water filters at home, whether a whole-house system installed in the basement, or a simple undersink reverse osmosis system to filter drinking water.
If your water is bad enough, you may consider installing both, as well as a refrigerator filter and shower filters.
The benefits of a home water filtration system extend beyond improving your water–they can also reduce your reliance on bottled water, thus helping take more plastic out of circulation.
Other ways to be water-wise include shortening shower times (especially if you live in a drought-affected area), and finding ways to reuse water, such as saving bath or cooking water for use in the garden.
Water that has been used for boiling pasta or vegetables is somewhat nutrient-enriched, and can be used to water houseplants or garden plants once cool.
Sustainable Transportation
Having your own car is a blast, but it often doesn’t make sense in a big city, where scarcity of parking, poor air quality, and an abundance of cheap or free public transportation incentivize ditching the keys.
If you are fortunate enough to have easy walking access to reliable public transit systems, then that is a great way to cut down on your carbon footprint, and ease the burden on city streets that are already overstuffed with cars.
If your access to public transit isn’t the best, consider investing in a good bicycle and using that to get around.
Not only is it an eco-friendly method of travel, and a great way to live a more sustainable lifestyle, it’s great exercise as well!
Waste Reduction
Modern products tend to come with a lot of superfluous plastic packaging, which will invariably end up in a landfill.
From there, it will slowly break down into tiny microplastics that eventually wash down to the ocean, and contaminate the bodies of fish, birds, and other ocean species.
The more we can buy sustainably packed products, eschewing plastics, the better for the planet, and our own long-term enjoyment of it as a species.
Urban Gardening and Green Spaces
It isn’t always easy to grow a garden in the middle of a city, but plenty of enterprising individuals have found ways to do it.
From rooftop gardens to custom shelving built into window frames, there are many ways to set up a small herb or vegetable garden, even in a high-rise apartment complex.
YouTube is full of small-space gardening suggestions, so take a gander at what some of your more enterprising city-dwelling compatriots have been up to.
Conscious Consumption
At the end of the day, no single person can save the planet alone, or even make an appreciable difference to its fate.
However, if people can individually and collectively think before they use, and consider before they purchase or throw away, then we can expect to see real, albeit slow, change to our ongoing interaction with the natural world.
Nothing is set in stone regarding the future of our planet–everything hinges upon the individual and collective decisions that we, as a species, make.
Conclusion
You can’t really “rough it” while living in a home or apartment building in a large city, but you can still live in a closer harmony with the natural world.
Taking care to limit your power usage, rely on sustainable means of transportation, avoid wasteful plastics and throwaway, single-use items can make a difference, however small.
Trying to live and work and act as a conscious consumer and planetary citizen may not save the world, but it’s a step in the right direction!