6 Small And Easy Steps For A Better World

Yeah we know it all, we don’t threat our planet really good and we need to do something to keep our planet alive. But how can we, or better can “I” do it? What sense does it make, if I personally take efforts to make it a greener planet again when nobody else does? If I change my life and nobody else does, this does not make any change. So here are some totally simple steps to make a direct change to you, which don’t hurt and are really easy to realize.

1 Change your search engine to Ecosia

Ecosia is a Berlin-based startup with a growing search engine website. Ecosia works just like Google does and delivers optimized search engine results from the Bing/Yahoo network. With placed ads and affiliate links the company earns money. Now comes the green part: 80% of their profit is invested in planting trees around the world. There are many already deforested areas where Ecosia plants trees again. This not only has positive environmental effects and helps against the climate change, it also helps to support the local economics and life standard of the people there. I know what you are already thinking is, Google has the better results. Well, Google delivers incredible good search engine results but for the most of the time Ecosia does it as well. Ecosia has a Google button where you can quickly lookup also on Google if the search engine results are not satisfying. From my experience I can say, for at least 95% of my searches Ecosia does the job.

Compared to Google I have the same amount of ads, maybe even a bit less. This helps Ecosia to spend at the moment 50k till 100k euros of treeplanting money every month. Until now, Ecosia planted over 7 million trees and their goal is it to plant over a billion. So I highly recommend you to use Ecosia. Not only Ecosia will plant trees, the green website will always remind you of this blog and caring about the environment.

2 Use renewable energies

That is a very simple tip, but surprisingly few people are using it. Change your household power to renewable energies if your country allows that. Here in Germany we have a free market on power and there is a lot of competition. You can choose between many companies and options which suits you best. This is a one-time investment which mainly needs your time to find out which one is best for you. We even have comparison websites, which do the hard job – so you can be done within 10 minutes to make a permanent change. When I speak with friends about that I hear often that renewable energy is too expensive for them, but this is basically not really true. It is true that you have to pay a little more than on a conventional plan, but we are talking at maybe 5 € per month maximum. On the production site renewable energies are even cheaper than the conventional usually uranium-based power plant energy. Nobody can estimate the costs yet for closing down the power plants, nor anybody can estimate the costs for all the radioactive trash. Just think of Fukushima or Tschernobyl. The dangers in using conventional energy is so big, if you are able to switch your plan there is no real excuse to use it. If you didn’t change your power plan to renewables yet, please do so.

3 Bring your own bag to the grocery store

Another very simple thing is to move back in history. It has been not a long time ago, speaking of maybe 20 years back where a new industry established: Plastic bags in grocery stores. It is convenient and extra compact and also much cheaper than the cotton bags you can buy in the store. Over the years I saw that those have been more and more replaced by the plastic ones. Plastic bags are not very durable and cause a serious damage to our environment. Just buy yourself a few reusable bags and bring them to your shopping. Over the time it is not only cheaper you also decrease your amount of waste (and save money again).

4 Buy unwrapped fruits

Buy unwrapped fruits. Same as plastic bags. Why do you need a plastic wrapping for your fruit which mostly have their own packaging (e.g. oranges, bananas, apples, lemon,..). There is no need for it, it is just to make It more appealing for you (print advertising on it) or makes you to buy more than you wanted to buy. Not only about fruits: The best product is not the one with the best and most beauty packaging. Think of that the next time you enter a supermarket or grocery store.

5 Don’t buy plastic bottles

As I already wrote before the use of plastic is one of the main reasons to environmental damages. All our oceans are already full of plastic and you literally cannot eat a fish anymore without eating micro-particles of plastic. You also drink them when drinking out of a plastic bottle (except when you drink of rare special hard plastic bottles). It’s unclear which effects micro plastics will bring to our health and the environment yet, but it’s clear that it can’t be healthy. Just don’t only think of drinking here. Avoid buying things in plastic bottles and packaging as much as you can. Usually there are always differently packed products. Don’t buy plastic wrapped noodles, take the one from Barilla for example – paperwrapped and delicious. Oils are oftens also available in glass bottles. Here in Germany you can buy cleaning products from the brand “Frosch” – they re-use old plastics for their packaging and the products are not even more expensive than the “normal ones”.

6 Don’t drink coffee to go

I drink a lot of coffee, and probably drank hundreds of coffee on the go over the years. But here is the point, you throw away your cup after you use it. Solely in Germany there are 320000 thrown away coffee to go cups per HOUR! So if you want to have your next coffee to go, just order it as coffee to sit. It’s just 10 minutes of your life. You say you have no time? You’re lying to yourself. Having no time does not exist, we all have the exact same 24 hours per day, we all have enough time. Saying you don’t have time for a coffee to sit is basically saying “for me it is not worth the time to sit down” or “something else is more important”. If really need your coffee in hectic on the go, just bring you own (reusable) cup. It’s easy and sometimes you even get your coffee cheaper.

Bonus-Step

Forward this blog link to five other people, so they can also make an impact! If those five people also follow this 6+1 steps, we can make a big impact with this dead-simple changes.

I hope you can apply these six super easy steps to your life or at least some of them. If you have any issues with these steps, I am happy to discuss with you. Just comment below!

Cheers,

Marc