Relatable Things You Can Do to Keep the Environment Safe

Environmental problems are described at a scale that makes any individual response look pointless, which is a good way to talk somebody out of doing anything. The measures below are the opposite kind: small, cheap, and worth something mainly because they can be repeated without effort.

Plant a tree where you have room for one

A single tree in a garden shades the ground, holds soil against erosion, and over decades takes up a useful quantity of carbon. It also does something the carbon accounting misses: it feeds insects, which feed birds. A native species does far more of that than an ornamental one.

Take shorter showers, and catch rainwater

Heated water is the expensive part, so a shorter shower saves energy as much as water. A butt on a downpipe fills itself and covers most of what a garden needs through a dry spell, which is exactly when mains supply is under pressure.

Save towards generating your own

Solar panels are not an impulse purchase, but they are a thing that can be saved towards, and the arithmetic has moved a long way in a decade.

Change to LED bulbs

LED bulbs draw a fraction of the power of the filament bulbs they replaced and last years rather than months, which removes both the electricity and most of the waste. They also run cool, which matters in a room that is being cooled.

Dispose of what they replace properly

The bulbs coming out are the problem, particularly the compact fluorescents, which contain a small amount of mercury and belong at a recycling point rather than in a bin. The same applies to batteries and to anything with a plug on it.

Turn things off when you leave the room

Lights, screens and chargers left running overnight draw power for nobody. None of it is a large number on its own, which is why it is worth making automatic rather than deciding about.

Eat less meat, starting with a week

Rearing ruminants produces methane, and the processing, packaging and transport add to it, so meat carries a heavier climate cost per calorie than almost anything else on a plate. A week is a useful unit because it is long enough to change what gets bought and short enough to commit to.

Finish your food

Food left on a plate has already cost everything that produced it, and then costs again in disposal: by wasting food you send it to rot without oxygen, which releases methane rather than the carbon dioxide it would give off on a compost heap. Ordering less in a restaurant and taking the rest home is the whole of the method.

Be careful with oil, paint and solvents

Spilled oil spreads across water as a film that cuts off the oxygen exchange underneath it, and it reaches watercourses through drains and groundwater as readily as directly. Anything of that kind goes to a household waste site, never down a drain.

Stop littering

Litter is the commonest form of land pollution and the one entirely within the control of the person producing it. Carrying it until a bin turns up is the whole of the method.

The part that actually matters

None of these count for much once. They count when they stop being decisions and become the way a household runs, which is the only reason to prefer the small measures over the impressive ones.