If this past year has taught me anything, it’s that I need to slow down. And slowing down can meaning many different things to many different people. My first interpretation of ‘slowing down‘ was to work less, and to relax more. But lately in the past 6 months or so, I’ve internalized it a little differently in the sense of slowing down my rate of consumption and contribution towards waste in the world. As a blogger who’s content mostly revolves around fashion, it can be hard to reduce your fashion waste since it’s literally my job to constantly share new trends and styles currently the market. Subscribers of my YouTube channel will know that I’ve been pivoting my regular hauls to be a bit more critical and to be more conscientious of the pieces that I keep in relation to their necessity in my closet (if I already have something similar, then straight back to the store it goes).

Here are some things and practices that I’ve taken to implementing into my everyday life to live more responsibly.

Making and drinking more homemade coffee.

I definitely still love all of my local cafes (should I create a Toronto café guide too?), but ever since our first lockdown back in March 2020, I’ve been spending less time out grabbing coffee with clients and friends, and making more coffee to drink at home. This way I’m not only able to save money (woohoo!), but to cut down on the waste involved in takeout—think cups and plastic lids. I know it’s not a big contribution, but if there’s one thing that I learned, it’s that every single act counts. So for each coffee that I’m drinking from home using our own mugs, it’s one less cup that has to end up in the landfill because of me.

Rejecting disposable cutlery when ordering takeout.

I don’t know when it became commonplace practice to automatically throw in plastic/disposable/single-use cutlery in take out orders, but I hate it. It’s probably because we never really order takeout to anywhere except for our house, or a friend’s so it never makes sense to use disposable cutlery, but somehow we’ve wound up with this huge stack in our kitchen drawers and it never gets used—and it’s never going to be simply thrown out because that would be an utter waste. So instead we’ve made it an active practice to let restaurants know when we’re placing an order for takeout to not give us any cutlery.

I know that the cutlery has already been produced and is there for someone to use, but the more of my own cutlery that I can use, the better it is for the environment overall. I also don’t want to train myself to be reliant on restaurants providing cutlery and to use it as fall back to not worry about having my own to use.

Thrifting instead of always purchasing brand new clothes.

I recently fell in love with thrifting, and I’ve always enjoyed it, but I’ve recently found a love for thrifting for clothes. Previously I had an aversion to purchasing clothes that had already been worn, and only allowed myself to thrift for home décor and furniture, but I’ve recently unearthed some serious gems that’s making me second guess my decision to not thrift for clothes. It’s unfortunate that just as I was getting into clothes thrifting that Toronto went into its second lockdown and I haven’t been able to set foot into a clothing retailer in months!

I recently found some online thrifting sites such as Goodfair, which already curate a collection of clothes for you to thrift easily online. Until the stores re-open, catch me poppin’ some tags online!

Using re-usable bags when grocery or regular shopping.

I’m done with plastic bags. I used to lull myself into a false sense of disbelief that it was okay to collect plastic bags from the grocery store because the weren’t really single use since we’d use them for our garbage cans, but my plastic bag collection has seriously outgrown the frequency of use and I just cant collect anymore of them! We probably through out our garbage at the earliest once a week, and if we were to collect plastic bags from every trip to the grocery store, we would outgrow our usage:collection ratio at a rate of 1:10. It just doesn’t make sense to collect them, and at that point it would make more sense to just throw them out completely then to create a never-ending collection of plastic bags.

To that noion, within the past year or two, we’ve begun to actively use reusable tote bags when grocery shopping, and also reminding ourselves to also use those bags when regular shopping as well. I’ve noticed many fashion retailers recently switched over to paper bags, which is great, but why continue to contribute to more waste when I have perfectly functional tote bags at home at my leisure to use instead of always getting new paper bags?

Switching to compostable poop bags for Kobe.

Like any other dog, Kobe poops a lot. We take him out for about 2 walks a day but he probably poops upwards of at least 3 times a day. Imagine having to use a brand new bag every single time to scoop up after him. That’s a lot of single-use plastic being thrown into the garbage. We recently began making a conscious effort to purchase compostable bags instead so as to further reduce plastic consumption in our lives and it’s been great. There isn’t much of an extra cost if you take your time to shop around and wait for sales, and at the end of the day you’re helping the environment out a bit!

I’m constantly looking for ways to live a more sustainable life, so let me know any recommendations that you might have in the comments down below. I know that the journey to true sustainability isn’t an overnight one, but rather one that involves a series of slow and small changes to your lifestyle, so I’m trying to keep this entire process as manageable as possible with little changes here and there!