Your Eco-Friendly Style
Published January 30th, 2008
Your personal style should reflect your values and tastes. If you’d like to take a more active role in protecting the environment, there are ways to incorporate caring for the earth into the way you present yourself and your home. Many of us participate in municipal recycling programs like blue boxes, or composting, but what if you took in even further, and used your discretionary income for things that you need or want but were eco-friendly?
Here are just a few suggestions for areas of your life where you could have room to express your environmentally friendly style:
At work
Instead of getting one of another billion paper cups of coffee in the morning, you could pick out a travel mug. They are becoming more and more popular, widely available, and now come in all shapes, sizes, and colours. If you enjoy a certain brand name of coffee shop, they will often have travel mugs with their logo on them. I haven’t heard of a shop yet that won’t fill your empty, clean, travel mug with whatever beverage you like. Also, you can even get mugs that are made of recycled material, and recyclable themselves! If you wanted to take it one step further, there is also a wider selection of reusable food storage containers for your lunch or even just snacks. You can get these containers in many sizes, makes, and price ranges. By not sending as many single-serving packages, zipper bags, and plastic wrap to the landfill, we are helping mother earth, and surely our pocketbook.
At home
Plants are a great way to decorate your home without buying more consumer waste that will end up at a landfill. There are so many types of plants and trees, that you could definitely find some that suit you. Personally, I like big broad-leafed plants that remind me of the tropics–and ones that can survive not being watered very often! If you get tired of your plants you can give them away, or if they don’t make it, they can always be composted. Another wonderful benefit of having plants in your home is that they naturally purify and help to improve the quality of the air you breathe.
Consider giving older furniture or accessories a facelift instead of buying new ones. If you have really good quality stuff that you really don’t need to get rid of, but want to change up the style, consider sanding and staining the wood a different colour, or just buying new covers for your throw pillows, or even re-covering a good upholstered chair or sofa. Some of these ideas will save you money, and some won’t, but you can get a totally different look without having to get rid of things that are still usable.
Your clothes
If you would like stylish clothes, or just different ones without the retail price tag, consider going to consignment or second hand stores. This may require some patience, but would be worth it because you could give some great pieces a new home at a fraction of the cost! Some famous people have even been known to rent designer dresses and jewelry for special events instead of buying it.
If you like to buy new clothes, there are still many opportunities to help the environment. You can buy clothes that are partially made of recycled materials. I got some great pants at an outdoor store that looked and felt like linen pants, but were made of 50% recycled pop bottles! I only paid $30 for them, which isn’t bad for pants, and have received many compliments.
Gift giving
Reusable shopping bags are very popular now (in Canada at least). Someone passed this good idea on to me: As part of a gift, buy a sturdy reusable shopping bag and use it as a gift bag! They can keep the bag and they get the gift inside–genius. I have also received gifts in beautiful recycled biscuit tins or boxes that can be reused, all you need to add is a nice piece of ribbon.
I talked about a few non-material gift giving ideas in The Spirit of Giving, but here are a couple of my current favourites: Giving or making a loan in someone’s name at www.kiva.org , helps to make a person’s business dream come true with only a small donation. The best part is that it’s a gift that keeps on giving: Once they have paid back the loan (and they pretty much always do), you get the credits back to help someone else. You can also give gifts of certain experiences to people, like a concert, or a picnic, or helping them conquer a fear they’ve always had.
The possibilities are endless of expressing your own personal style to yourself and those around you, while helping the earth. I hope that this article has given you a couple of ideas to help you leave your own unique eco-friendly mark on the world.
