TL;DR: there is a huge climate crisis ongoing, we have up to 2030 to correct the trajectory or it will be really bad. As an Italian expat in London and trying to get better at this, I want to share what worked for me.

This blog post is meant to be, first and foremost, a list of suggestions that you can read and “pick and choose” to be more proactive in this climate crisis.

If you want to skip the first section and just skim the lists, it’s totally fine. And no, of course, they are not only for people living in London (but some will be more doable).

I just hope they will help you or inspire you to at least try a few. We can all do our part 💪❤️🌍

A few words, first 🖐

Here’s the deal: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations’ group formed by the top scientists in the world has been quite clear that if the Earth warms up of 1.5 ºC in the next 10–20 years, it’s going to be bad, real bad (you can also read about it in this article from the Guardian, or this from the NYTimes).

It goes without saying, it’s important to shift our behaviours towards more sustainable approaches. While I believe strongly that most of the responsibilities lie in governments and businesses taking actions, what I can do is apply a few ideas in my personal life. And I feel that London is a prime ground to become more environment-friendly, thanks to the multitude of opportunities and the great tech scene (meaning that some apps are “more usable” here).

This enabled me to do small, every-day life changes that are more impactful in the long term — constant tweaks to the rails that will allow this train to travel faster and longer, to use a metaphor (…yeah, I suck at those).

For the services I use the most, I may add a “friend/referral link” in addition to the standard link to the article — if you feel like you want to try them out and indirectly thank me for writing this, it would be cool if you could use those.

Apps 📲

In case you didn’t know, 1/3 of all food produced is wasted — and, “when wasted, food has a harmful effect on the environment — it’s responsible for 8% of the global greenhouse gas emissions” (according to their website). This app allows you to buy cheaply the food that may end up being wasted from businesses around you. It’s a great app and I use it from time to time. It’s the best feeling to buy food cheaply in London AND know that you have done something good.

This other app is taking a neighbourhood approach solution to the food waste problem listed above. It provides an easy way to give away food that you may not consume in time, and know what is available around you (among privates).

CoGo — Connecting Good

While this app is currently changing a bit, its core functionality is quite interesting: it allows you to easily see which business around you are committed to “good causes”. Which is a really important part of trying to be more environment-friendly: you need to research and look into what you currently use, and see if there are better alternatives.

Others

I’ve avoided listing here more generic apps (like Amazon) and other services that are not mobile-focused, but I will talk about them later on. Also, on the App Store there’s a more comprehensive list — but I haven’t tried those other apps.

House related 🏡

Foods & Drinks

Ok, so… here’s the deal about eating: avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth. But I’m not going to say “let’s just go full vegan” because I like eating everything. That said, me and my SO have been reducing our meat consumption to once a week (and we barely consume any diary). I think that even that’s a great starting point — heck, if you read the article linked above you could also just start by cutting down to just avoid beef and it would be a good change.

One service has been really useful in this shift for us, and it’s called Allplants. The gist is that you select several fully-vegan dishes, and they send them to your house. You put them in the freezer, and cooking them is either less than 15 mins in the microwave or 40–50 in a standard oven. Also, it’s fully sustainably packaged! You even send the container back, and they will reuse them. It feels like cheating to someone as bad as cooking as me. It’s a bit pricey (~5£ per portion, roughly) but we love it. (referral link)

Ah, also, I almost forgot: you should try to avoid takeout food as it creates a lot of trash (even the UN says so). Or, if you do, try to check if the restaurant is using eco-friendly packages: in Deliveroo’s app, there’s an extra UI element indicating if they do.

On the topic of drinks, let’s start by talking a second about the “zero-waste” concept: as I mentioned briefly above, one way of reducing your impact is to produce less waste (where waste=things you put in the non-recyclable bin). This can be done usually by choosing options with little to less packaging, or reusable/recyclable ones.

When it comes to tea, I’ve found that the best option is to buy loose tea leaves in tin cans — and then go to places where you can just refill said tin (if you feel fancy, you can do this with Fortnum & Mason’s tea btw). Or, an alternative which is all sustainably packaged is Teapigs.

For coffee, similar things could be said — but I’ve found that you can recycle even the Nespresso capsules! You just need to bring them to one of the stores, they have dedicated areas and they will take care of them. Yes, it’s a bit more effort — but since I already had a Nespresso machine when I embarked on this journey this was the optimal approach for me (at least for now).

Kitchen

For the other areas of the house, the easiest and (probably) most impactful thing to do is to look around and switch the tools you use from being single-use/plastic/single-use-plastic to more sustainable alternatives.

A really simple example is napkins: for a long time, I just used paper towels. Then I decided to switch to simple cloth napkins and it’s way less wasteful.

Similarly, you can replace your kitchen sponges, brushes and others — down below, in the Amazon list item at the Shopping section, you will find a link to a list I’ve made of things you can just buy off from Amazon to do just that.

One other small-big change you could introduce is to stop buying plastic bottles by taking with you reusable ones, like the 24Bottles ones (there are plenty of refill points in London… and there’s even an app for it). And, similarly, you could stop using single-use cups from all the various Costa, Nero Cafe, Pret, etc in favour of a Keepcup. You can walk in any coffee shop in London and tell them that you want your latte to go in your Keepcup… some places will even give you small discounts!

Bathroom

In the bathroom, there are mainly two things I’ve replaced for more sustainable alternatives:

Toilet rolls : I now use WhoGivesACrap to buy them (along with paper towels). Which, aside from being an awesome company (everything sustainably made, without trees and 50% of profits donated to help build toilets) also has the best packaging & design ever. (referral link)

: I now use WhoGivesACrap to buy them (along with paper towels). Which, aside from being an awesome company (everything sustainably made, without trees and 50% of profits donated to help build toilets) also has the best packaging & design ever. (referral link) Soaps: moving away from liquid soap in those plastic + metal form factor is one of the changes I was most sceptical about, but that it’s turning out ok. To do it, I have been relying on a great fully sustainable company called Soulsoap (which is still quite “green” but worth trying out).

Washing stuff

So, you know when people talk about plastics going to the ocean? Usually, what they don’t know is that most are microplastics released from clothing made with plastic fibres. To help with that, you could use something like the Guppyfriend Washing Bag — the only minor inconvenience is that you should only use it with liquid detergents.

Similarly to the approach taken for soap, you could also consider using the EcoEgg. I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks like a great solution — the only problem is that it seems that you can’t use these two things together, which is a bit of a shame (but hey, maybe I’m wrong — if that’s the case, let me know!).

Smart house

So, since I’m a software engineer I have to mention this. As you may imagine, one easy way to consume less is literally to just consume less gas & electricity. While turning off the lights and the wall plugs when you are not using them is quite effective, you can easily improve this by using smart wall plugs and schedule them to, for example, switch off during night time (you won’t be playing your PS4 when sleeping) or when you are working or travelling.

An extra step in this direction is also to use something like the Nest Thermostat, which will tailor your house heating to match only when you need it. Only nitpick: disable the device movement detection in favour of just your phone’s location. I have a cat and the Nest would just think I was home constantly 🤦‍♂️

Shopping🛍

IRL Shopping

When it comes to go and buy things “in the real world”, there are just two things I want to point out here:

Bring your bags . There is no reason why you can’t always have at least one plastic bag folded in your backpack or purse that you can use in any occasion. If you feel fancy, you could go for a tote/cloth bag, but usually, they are less capacious.

. There is no reason why you can’t always have at least one plastic bag folded in your backpack or purse that you can use in any occasion. If you feel fancy, you could go for a tote/cloth bag, but usually, they are less capacious. Try to go and buy from zero-waste shops. For example there is one in Peckham called Gather where you can bring your glass jars, fill them and pay by weight.

Clothing

When it comes to clothing, I can safely say that second-hand is one of the few areas where you can easily do most of your shopping. I honestly feel that going to a second-hand shop and finding one piece of clothing that you love is an “achievement unlocked” of being a Londoner. There are many around the city, like Traid or Crisis and many more — where you can (and should!) also bring your old/unused stuff!

When instead you are considering buying new items of clothing, I would again advise researching what the brand is doing to be more sustainable/environmental. A couple of quick great examples are Patagonia and Weekday but there are many more — luckily it seems that more and more companies are moving in this direction.

I use Farmdrop for buying all the “consumables”. I’m quite bullish about it and here are some reasons why I think it is great:

it’s an online ethical supermarket (most of the products are locally sourced)

the quality of the meat/fruit/veggies is so much higher than going to the supermarket, but the prices are not super high

they bring your order to your door with electrical vans

because they are bringing it directly, there is little to no packaging

on the website they have whole sections for package-free options and sustainably products

I’ve been using it for over 2 years now and I’m still super confident in choosing them over similar alternatives. (referral link)

Amazon

Ok, I felt that I had to provide this “quick & easy” section: you can be more sustainable even when using Amazon. There are plenty of products on the platform with sustainable packaging, and environmental-friendly cultures — I’ve created a small list of a few everyday items to help you out.

Miscellaneous🗃

A. If you want to go more hard-core on becoming “zero-waste”, you could take inspiration from these influencers (both have TED talks which I suggest checking out):

* Lauren Singer (trashisfortossers)

* Bea Johnson (zerowastehome)

B. Living in London means having access to a great public transportation system: so take full advantage of the TFL, and just use your contactless (that way you can even avoid needing another physical card). No need for a car — for particular necessities you could also rely on the broad range of Uber-like services.

C. Carbon-offsetting: one topic that sometimes comes up when talking about sustainability is the idea of still doing what you are doing, but basically “paying off” the CO2 you produce. I think it’s a great “easy” way to do something, but I still haven’t found my ideal solution — here are a few alternatives I’ve found:

* Offset Earth

* MyTrees

* Clim8

* TeamTrees

D. In case you have kids or relatives with kids, one cool idea is to buy them sustainably-made / plastic-free toys. I only knew about Le Toy Van (we bought more than once from them, and the kids always loved those) but there is also another interesting company you can check out:

* Le Toy Van

* Oli&Carol

E. In the realm of the web, a super easy option to be more sustainable is to use Ecosia as a search engine instead of Google; as they say on their website “We use the profit we make from your searches to plant trees where they are needed most”.

F. In the realm of female personal hygiene, I’m sure there are plenty of products and solutions more environment-friendly. But the only one of which I know people in my inner circle are using happily is Mooncup.

G. There are a lot of good and interesting videos on YouTube:

* Plastic Pollution: How Humans are Turning the World into Plastic

* Levi “Save the World” Hildebrand; I’ve only found out recently about this youtube channel but I find it quite similar in spirit to my approach. Highly recommended!

H. In case you need more resources/articles/conversation starters about climate change and how the current hyper-plastic-world is ruining the world, here are some random links:

* Yes, climate change is intensifying Australia’s fires

* In this episode of “Sex, Explained” by Vox on Netflix, about fertility, they mention how plastic is likely related to the lower average sperm counts in males (around 44 Mils vs 90+ Mils of 2 generations ago)

* This non-profit org called Possible is the “good cop” to Extinction Rebellion’s “bad cop” approach. On their website, they provide a ton of resources about how to talk about the climate crisis.

Conclusions

Here’s the thing: by 2030 I’ll be heading towards my 40s. I would like to be a dad by then — but with the current situation, I honestly feel that I just can’t. Unless things get better, until I feel that a change is happening, I cannot imagine facing my children when they will ask “…and what did you do about it?”.

I would not want you to try all the things above all together — pick one, maybe two, and slowly change your mindset to be more aware of this problem, and of all the things you CAN do to fix it. Then add another one. And talk to someone about it.

Because, as Greta Thunberg said in her speech at the Climate March in Sept 2018: