After the first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970, climate activists worked hard to have the entire month of April recognized as Earth month. It’s tradition for environmentalists to spend the month promoting awareness days, spreading resources, and educating communities on ways to give back. As always, this April, I hope to do the same.
Making sustainable lifestyle changes can be overwhelming if you try to take on too much at once. Like many people, I thought that I had to turn my life upside down, going from zero to 100 in order to make a difference. But sustainability doesn’t need to be overcomplicated, all-consuming, or expensive; the movement is about showing up as your honest, imperfect self, and doing what you can.
So, no, I’m not here to tell you that you need to go vegan or sell your car in order to save the planet. Think much smaller: we’re all aware of the three R’s — reduce, reuse, and recycle — but how often do we actually follow them?
By 2026, a lot of people are probably frequent recyclers, but these steps are best to be followed in the order that they’re listed, meaning that recycling is actually a last resort. Reducing and reusing are both easy and effective, yet often overlooked.
Reducing is really as simple as it sounds: making a conscious effort to buy less stuff. In the past year, Americans generated an average of 5.7 pounds of waste per day. This comes from food, plastic materials, disposed personal items, and much more. Consuming fewer products not only limits potential waste, but it also helps to lower the demand for manufactured items, creating an eco-friendly feedback loop.
“Project pan” is the recent viral TikTok trend that challenges people to refrain from replacing toiletries and beauty products until they’re empty. This forces people to use all of their existing products, reducing the number of packaged items they’ll buy throughout the year. Along with its environmental impacts, this mission also helps people discover which products are worth future investment, while saving money on unnecessary restocks.
This challenge also teaches people to become mindful shoppers, which is an amazing skill to develop. When you’re browsing for new clothes or home goods, think about their potential lifespan. Will this item last you years, or will you be sick of it in a few months? Don’t get me wrong, shopping sprees are fun — they’re even more fun when you pick out items that you’ll use for a long time.
Reusing is another practice that’s simple to integrate into your lifestyle. Swapping plastic goods with their reusable substitutes — coffee cups, shopping bags, and water bottles — is an impactful strategy. But another common way to reuse is by increasing the longevity of your already-owned items.
Secondhand shopping provides an effective and fun way to ensure that clothes and other personal items don’t end up in landfills. Instead of ordering from fast fashion corporations and large manufacturers, thrifting offers a way to satisfy your retail therapy without the high production emissions. Supporting local thrift stores increases the lifespan of clothing items. And if enough people do it regularly, it presents the potential to decrease the demand for brand-new products. The same idea applies vice versa: before you dump your unused items in the trash, consider donating them to give them a second chance at life.
Fortunately, it’s also just as feasible to thrift virtually, especially when you’re hunting for specific items. Sites like Facebook Marketplace, eBay, and Depop make it super easy to search and find exact matches.
Depop is a second-hand clothing platform whose primary audience is Gen Z, meaning there’s no shortage of quality or trendy pieces. Purchasing mainstream-brand clothes on Depop is much more eco-friendly than buying them brand new, and it’s usually for a fraction of the price. In fact, Depop is currently running a sale for select states that offers $1.99 shipping on orders under 10 pounds (nearly all clothing items are). If you live in Connecticut, New Jersey, or New York, you can take advantage of this sale until May 7.
The key to sustainability is the motivation to try. If your heart is in it, you will progress at your own pace. These actions may seem small, but that’s the point! Sustainability should be accessible to all, but it shouldn’t be a means for competition or comparison.
The TikTok creator, @trailmixliz, recently went viral for sharing the “vegan but bacon” principle. She calls to those who want to go vegan but have one food that they can’t part with. She encourages them to do exactly that: implement practices of veganism while still eating their favorite food. Her post was powerful, and reminds us all that being unable to fully commit to something doesn’t mean you have to miss out on doing it altogether.
I’m still not here to tell anyone to go vegan, but this mindset can be applied to so much more of the sustainability movement (and life in general). Making a sustainable choice only once a week is more impactful than never doing it at all. We don’t need to commit to perfection or make extreme goals that won’t be feasible. Whatever we can do is better than nothing at all, so we should strive to act, not to excel.