The Truly Inconvenient Truth
As parents, we have so much to worry about on a daily basis. We coordinate family schedules, pull together 21 different meals (and 1500 snacks) per week, and ensure the house stays, at minimum, hygienic. We transport kids to school, church, and extracurriculars. We sit in the longest of carpool lines. We try to maintain a yard. We entertain, serve, and love on our littles so much, that on many days, we can’t do much else.
So when it comes to making the best choices we can in order to reduce our families’ carbon footprints, it’s easy to understand how some of us drop the ball. Conservation takes strategic planning, deep thought, and that precious, precious resource– TIME.
Making it Easy
Given the resources to do so, most of us want to live greener, cleaner lifestyles that protect the world our kids will inherit. We just need a game plan that fits our already overwhelming lives. Make it easy, and we will do it!
While convenience and ease look different for each of us, there are plenty of ways to reduce environmental impacts. Some of these options are as easy as clicking a button! Even choices as simple as buying used items instead of new make a considerable dent in the amount of resources your family expends.
Check out my list below for some ideas that might work for you!
A Lazy Mom’s Guide to Reducing the Family Carbon Footprint
If You Must Buy, Buy Used!
Between fast fashion and planned obsolescence, people rack up outrageous amounts of stuff. Cut down on some of this junk by purchasing gently used or refurbished items instead of the hottest, newest trends.
There are tons of spots around town to green up your shopping experience. Consignment sales abound, and there are even a few boutique-style used clothing and accessory stores. These boutiques curate their collections, creating a browsing environment even the most discerning of fashionistas would love. Cheap Chick Trading Company (on Green Springs Highway in Homewood) has all sorts of trendy, gently used women’s and men’s fashions for the low low. Also, Once Upon a Child (on Lorna Road in Hoover) can fully outfit the teeniest of babes!
Moms already know that consignment shops are all the rage! We’ve written about it extensively here on BMC!
Switch to High Efficiency Appliances When Old Ones Break
If you’re a homeowner, and, even if you are not, you’re probably well aware that you need to purchase new appliances occasionally. You don’t need to go throwing out a perfectly good AC to increase home efficiency (unless you want to). What you can do is plan to buy higher efficiency models when the time comes to replace what you have.
If you really want to go the extra mile, particularly if you live in an older home, you can retrofit your house to be more energy efficient. This involves an energy audit, in which a professional comes to your home and examines ways your home could change to reduce energy loss.
In our energy audit this year, we found that a considerable amount of heating and air conditioning escaped through our attic. We added attic insulation, patched up air leaks, and then cut soaring energy costs in our formerly drafty 1970s-built house. Now that it’s done, we can sit just as comfortably in our climate controlled home, knowing that we’re using less energy than all the years before. One and done, there are no daily chores involved for this change!
Carpool, But Make it Fun
What’s your neighborhood’s walkability score? There are plenty of small neighborhoods in and around Birmingham with great walkability to stores, restaurants, and workplaces. If you live in one of these places (looking at you, Highland Park, Edgewood, and West Homewood), utilize those sidewalks!
We live in Hoover, which is decidedly not super walkable, so instead of walking places, we optimize our driving time. My favorite optimization scheme combines socializing with task completion. Carpool on a date with your BFF, and tack on a trip to the grocery store at the end! You cut carbon emissions in half for the grocery travel and you get to extend in-person friend time while doing something you both need to do anyway. Win-win!
Reduce Packaging and Wastes
We toss a ton of boxes and plastic every year. The trash that cradles the stuff we buy often has nearly as much heft as the item itself. Buying used over new can certainly help reduce this, but there are plenty of other easy ways to eliminate the packaging trash pile.
When purchasing multiple items at once online, for instance, many retailers offer an option to wait until all items are ready for delivery and get them in one swoop, rather than in several separate deliveries over the course of several days. That’s as simple as a button click.
Packing kids’ meals in bento-style lunch boxes or reusable silicone sandwich bags cuts down the lunchroom trash. Additionally, a little bit of meal planning goes a long way in keeping rotten lettuce boxes from taking up fridge space. Apps like eMeals will plan meals AND order your groceries for you, saving time, money, and waste, all while you plan the week from the comfort of your couch. What’s not to love about that level of convenience?
Eat Local, from the backyard!
If you still find food waste in your fridge at the week’s end, maybe you need a compost bin! Given the time and energy, there are all sorts of backyard-inspired ways to further reduce your environmental impact. Even without a backyard, you can try a worm bin, a container garden, or rent a plot in a community garden nearby.
Food requires a great deal of energy to get from seed to your plate. Food travels many miles, touches many hands, and sits on many shelves before making it to your home. Growing your own food eliminates the many, many middlemen in that process. Plus, you might be surprised at the impact a garden has on a kiddo!
My babies will eat vegetables we forage or grow without a fight. If I involve them in the process of growing food, the kids happily eat the fruits of their labor.
Shrink the Supply Chain with Local Farms
Gardening is, however, time consuming. If digging in the dirt isn’t possible (or desirable) for you, there are other local options with similar emission-reducing effects. Birmingham has many great farms and family-friendly farmers markets with ample produce to choose from. The Market at Pepper Place, now open ALMOST year-round, hosts hundreds of vendors on Saturdays. Some of my other favorites around town include Birdsong Farmers Market, East Lake Market, and the Alabama Farmers Market on Finley Avenue.
In addition to markets, many local farms also offer Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) box subscriptions. CSA boxes, paid for weekly or in larger sums, contain an array of seasonal produce based on farm bounties. The income that CSAs provide gives farmers a more reliable stream of income than market sales alone. Here, you’re typically getting food directly from the farm, thereby avoiding the market segment of the supply chain altogether.
Forge Your Own Way
Beyond my own household’s conservation plans, I like to pick friends’ brains for strategies they have in play. Through these conversations, I’ve picked up plenty of additional habits to work into our mix over time. Our strategies for a greener life have changed over the years based on both the knowledge we hold as well as our familial capacity in the moment.
Strategies for the Long Haul
My final bits of advice when it comes to crafting your own conservation path:
- Stay flexible and open to new ways of doing things. If something isn’t working, try something new! Listen to ideas from others, and don’t be scared to brainstorm with a friend about better, easier ways to reduce carbon footprints and resource consumption.
- Be mindful of your capacity to maintain a given practice. If you don’t have time to turn your compost every day for example, don’t stress yourself to the hilt trying to make it work. Check your area, because there may even be a pick up service ready to haul off your scrap veggies and compost it elsewhere. If something can be made easier for you, make it easier!
- And, finally, remind yourself why this effort is important. There are many, many reasons a person might want to protect the planet. Personally, I want to leave the world in the best possible shape I can for my kids. I cannot control what industries, governments, or other people do to the planet, but I can do my absolute best for myself and my own family. I will be able to tell my babies that I gave them all I could. Plus, there’s a solid financial return on better efficiency—and it never hurts to save a little!
My family and I may not be perfect environmental stewards, but we try our best with the resources we have. We are a work in progress, always.
After all, doing things imperfectly beats NOT doing things, 100% of the time!
