3 Sustainable Habits to Take Into the New Year

I'm all about all about building eco habits into my routines that I already do so that it feels more effortless. For 2024, I picked three habits/systems that to focus on so that I can be more sustainable and if you are wanting to be more eco-conscious as well, you may want to try them too!

1. Use Up All Your Food

Last year, I learned a lot about food waste and I hope in 2024 to still work on a lot of habits that go along with that. The biggest priority I have is not letting food go bad or just in general being wasteful with it. A couple weeks ago, I did an 'inventory' of all the food my husband and I have to see what things are getting skipped over week after week (and honestly, month after month). Now I know some things we don't care for so we won't buy it going forward, but over the past few weeks, we've been incorporating all those things into recipes and meals so that they don't go to waste!

Another thing we started to do to limit waste is to plan out our meals and only buy things we know we will eat or that are for a specific purpose. Not only has the amount we spend on groceries gone down as a part of this, it's also helped us be more intentional and waste less food.

A final way you can achieve this goal is actually eating your leftovers! Schedule in a leftovers day, have them for lunches, or find new ways to use them (there are some really creative ways out there where you can 'upcycle' your leftovers into something you'd prefer.) I believe this area is something that will always be a work in progress, but being more intentional with food is a great way to be more eco.

2. Sort Your Trash: Recycle & Compost

I am very excited for 2024 because it is the first year that I will be composting! Even though I have an apartment, so I won't *actually* be composting all the way, I got an OXO Easy Clean Compost Bin, which you can store your food scraps in until you take it to an actual compost spot (& it is smell proof - thank goodness!). In Cedar City, we didn't have access to recycling or compost but thankfully now that we've moved its a lot more accessible! If you are a renter and feel like your options are limited, I wrote a blog a few months back about things you can do as a renter!

Another new type of recycling I started doing at the end of 2023 that I will be bringing into 2024 is textile recycling! The brand I have started doing it through is ForDays, which ships you bags that you can fill up with ANY textile waste, send it back to them, they sort it and recycle what they can, and then you get gift cards to their partner brands based on how much you sent! This is a great way to clean out your closet, discard scraps if you sew, and just feel a bit better about when you get rid of things.

3. Repair Everything

The final eco habit that I am focusing on in 2024 is making it a priority to try to mend & repair anything you can when it breaks. This one requires a bit of a mindset shift as you see things as less disposable. For example, I accidentally broke our broom. We haven't had this broom for too long so besides the result of my user error, it was still in really good condition. Our instinct was to get a new broom because it's not too expensive to replace. However, I decided to at least try and fix it because, worse case scenario, we were going to throw it out anyway. And guess what? It works great now, we saved the cost of buying another broom, and we saved one more thing from going to the landfill sooner than it needed to.

I've always been decent at prioritizing mending clothing, but I've realized that I need to take better care of other categories of items as well and let repair be my first instinct instead of the trash.

While you can totally go all out in your efforts to be a better tenant of our planet earth, there are so many small habits you can slowly add into your life that will still make you more eco-friendly, and that will still make a positive difference. I hope these three ideas inspire you think about what you can do and to take action this year because change only happens if we make it happen.