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You care about the environment. You take your reusable coffee cup for a refill instead of getting disposable ones each time. You shun single-use carrier bags for a cotton tote. You’re a diligent recycler. But are the small things you do in your everyday life to be environmentally friendly really that helpful? And is there anything else you should be doing?

Measuring the overall environmental impact of the small changes we make to be planet-friendly is more difficult than you might think. A cotton bag won’t end up clogging a seabird’s intestines, but does it take more carbon to produce? Switching to soya milk might reduce emissions from dairy, but are we chopping down the rainforests to grow it too? And is plastic always evil?


Here’s the truth behind some of the small efforts we as individuals can make to have a positive impact.

Should you switch plastic bags for a reusable tote?

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This one is trickier than you might think. We’ve all seen plastic carrier bags littering the street or ending up in rivers and oceans. Waste plastic is largely responsible for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which threatens marine life. But while it’s true you probably won’t see a fancy canvas tote bag caught in a tree or wrapped around a turtle’s neck, there are other factors to consider.

The main one is what it takes to produce the alternative. A cotton bag is much more resource-intensive than a plastic carrier bag, which means it requires more energy to make and results in more emissions in the first place. Is this balanced out by the fact that you reuse it multiple times? That depends.


One way of measuring environmental impact over time is called “life cycle assessment”, which assesses the impact of a product over its full life (but does not consider the litter issue). A 2011 life cycle assessment report from the UK Environment Agency found that you would have to use a cotton bag 131 times to make its “global warming potential” less than that of using disposable carrier bags – and that’s presuming you never reused the carrier bags. For comparison, you’d have to use a bag for life-style plastic bag just four times.

Simon Aumônier, a partner at environmental consultancy Environmental Resources Management (ERM) says the impact varies from bag to bag. “Those cotton tote bags are not all the same,” he says. “They can be of different weights, they can have cotton from different sources.” You also have to take into account the impact of transporting heavier cotton bags and washing them when they get dirty.

Crucially, comparing a cotton tote to carrier bags depends a lot on how much you reuse the carrier bag. Do you throw it away after one use, or do you reuse it? Use it twice and you’re getting double the function out of the bag. Aumônier gives the example of reusing a plastic carrier bag as a bin bag. If you then switch to cotton bags – and end up buying disposable bin bags as a result – then you really haven’t changed anything.

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If you use a cotton bag, the key is to reuse it as many times as possible. “You maximise its lifetime, you minimise its impact of production on a use by use basis,” he says. “The danger would be that people don’t bother about that – they buy another cotton bag because the other one was getting a bit dirty, or because there’s a new logo to show off. That way you appear to be doing something that’s environmentally sound, but actually you’re consuming as many or more environmental resources than you would if you were using a disposable bag.”


Should you use a reusable coffee cup?

This one’s slightly easier. Although reusable cups also take more resources to make than their disposable alternatives, given their durability you’re likely to use them for a long time before replacing, which effectively spreads this cost over many uses (provided you don’t lose or break them). It would be more difficult to find the balance if disposable cups were recyclable, but we know that most are not – or at least are not recycled in practice. This means they end up in landfill and no energy is recovered from them.

Again, different materials have different environmental costs associated with them during production and manufacture. “All of the materials will have a different impact in terms of the sourcing and processing of that material,” Aumônier says. The overall impact also depends on whether the end product is recyclable once you’re done with it.

But whichever you use, the key to reducing your environmental impact is again reusing the same cup as many times as possible. Washing also adds an impact, so make sure you wash efficiently – don’t just wash your reusable cup on its own, do a full load of dishes at once.

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What’s the deal with home recycling?

Closed Loop Recycling plant in Dagenham, London Dan Kitwood / Getty Images

Yes, you should recycle. You may have seen stories about UK plastics being sent abroad for recycling and instead ending up in landfill, but while this is obviously worth investigating, there’s not much you can do about that as an individual. It’s best, then, to assume that your recycling will be recycled.

Katy Wheeler, a sociology lecturer at the University of Essex who has conducted research into recycling in the UK, says most confusion arises over plastics. How do you know if that plastic packaging you’re throwing out is recyclable or not? This is complicated by the fact that facilities vary around the country, so while one region might be able to recycle various types of plastic, another may only collect plastic bottles (recyclenow.com has a handy postcode checker so you can see what is recyclable where you live in the UK).

If you’re not sure if something can be recycled, should you put it in? Again, it depends. One consideration, Wheeler says, is how recycling is conducted in your area. In some places, people are asked to sort their recycling into different types to be collected kerbside – paper, glass, plastics, et cetera. In others, local authorities offer “commingled” recycling, which is when you put all recyclables in the same bag or box. These are then sorted elsewhere at a materials recovery facility. “The degree to which that technology can recognise different forms of plastic varies, so if you do put the wrong sort of plastic into these material recovery facilities, it is possible that you could contaminate that particular load of recycling,” Wheeler says. It may then get diverted back, either for an additional sort, which requires extra labour, or to wherever else waste from that facility is going, such as to landfill or an incinerator.

Similarly, if you put dirty items into your recycling, you risk contamination. If you have a dirty bean tin, for example, and you put it in commingled recycling with some paper, the bean juice could damage that paper in a way that makes it unrecyclable. Wheeler says it’s best to stay on the safe side and wash your recycling, particularly if you’re mixing your recyclables in one box – “not only because it might damage the process moving forward but also because most material recovery facilities will use some form of human labour to start with that initial sort of the recycling”. And no one wants to touch your mouldy bean juice.

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Although recycling is important, Wheeler says we should also be focusing higher up the chain, by trying to reduce the amount of waste we produce in the first place. Think first about reducing and reusing, and then recycling.

Should we all just go plastic-free?

Plastic pollution threatens marine life piccaya / iStock

There’s a bit of a trend on social media at the moment of people going “plastic free”, trying to avoid using products that are made of plastic or wrapped in plastic packaging. But plastic isn’t always bad. After all, there’s a reason we use it for so many things – it’s strong, flexible, lightweight, and often recyclable – and if you’re replacing plastic with something else, then you again have to weigh up the various impacts of producing the different materials.

Erik van Sebille, an oceanographer and climate scientist at Utrecht University, has seen firsthand the impact of plastic waste entering the oceans. But, he says, you can’t look at one environmental impact in isolation. “The plastic problem can’t be seen by itself,” he says. “There’s always going to be a trade-off between plastic and carbon dioxide emissions, and it could very well be that if you don’t use plastic any more, then actually somewhere down the line that means there’s going to be more carbon dioxide being emitted.” Given climate change is the biggest threat to our oceans, that’s an important consideration.

Take the example of the shrink-wrapped cucumber, the eponymous example in the 2012 book Why Shrink-Wrap a Cucumber?, by Stephen Aldridge and Laurel Miller. Packaging a fruit in single-use plastic may seem environmentally sinful, but that plastic coating can mean the fresh produce lasts three times as long – meaning less waste and fewer deliveries, and therefore less emissions.

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Ultimately, van Sebille says, the problem with plastics in the oceans is less about plastic itself and more about waste management. “It’s not so much about reducing the plastic you use, it’s about making sure it doesn’t get into the environment,” he says. That can include picking up plastic litter if you see it lying around; one very effective way of stopping plastic from getting into the ocean is to do a beach clean. Some research even suggests that taking part in a beach clean can improve your own mental wellbeing, he adds – so what are you waiting for?

Should you switch from dairy milk to soya milk?

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The food we buy and eat can also have different environmental impacts. Plant-based alternatives to milk are increasingly popular and represent a pretty easy lifestyle switch. But are they that much better for the environment?

In short: yes. Dairy cattle take up a lot of space, use a lot of water and resources, and produce emissions that contribute to climate change. “It definitely contributes to lowering greenhouse gas emissions,” says Annika Carlsson Kanyama, who works in sustainability studies at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. She also suggests switching to non-dairy cheese, as cheese uses a lot of milk to produce.

These days, most supermarkets offer a range of milk alternatives, such as soya and almond milk drinks, but also oat, rice, hemp and other options. So does it matter which you pick? As ever, they all have different impacts on the environment. Almonds, for example, use a lot of water, while soy farming has contributed to deforestation of the Amazon, resulting in biodiversity loss and harmful emissions (although a lot of this soya is grown for animal fodder). “The main issue with soya is whether it’s grown on land that was recently forested, for example in Brazil,” Carlsson Kanyama says. “If it’s grown on such land, there can be huge emissions of carbon dioxide, because a lot of carbon in the soil is oxidised.” If you buy soya milk, Carlsson Kanyama suggests checking where it comes from.

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Hanna Tuomisto, an associate professor in sustainable food systems at the University of Helsinki, says that another thing to consider is the distance that ingredients and products have to travel to reach you, as transport also contributes to emissions. “In Europe, I would really recommend using oat milk as an alternative,” she says.

So should you just go vegetarian or vegan?

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Again, the simple answer is yes – and vegan if possible. “It saves energy, it saves greenhouse gas emissions, it saves land, water, it saves the use of antibiotics – there are really a lot of good things about going vegetarian or vegan,” Carlsson Kanyama says.

A study published in the journal Science this year found that a plant-based diet has much less of an environmental impact than one that contains meat or dairy. “A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use,” lead author Joseph Poore, from the University of Oxford, told the Guardian.

Tuomisto says that you can still be mindful about where your food is coming from. Soybeans, which are mainly grown in the US, aren’t the only vegetarian or vegan alternative – there are lots of pulses and legumes grown in Europe that can be incorporated into a plant-based diet.

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If cutting out meat and dairy completely seems like too much of a lifestyle change, Carlsson Kanyama suggests going “flexitarian”, or cutting down on your meat and dairy consumption rather than eliminating it completely. “Going vegan or vegetarian today is not such a huge step as it has been before, but also I think being a flexitarian is a very responsible way of handling your food habits,” she says.

She also eats some fish and fish products as, depending on the type of fish and how it’s caught, it can have a low environmental impact. “When fish are abundant and it’s easy to catch them, you don’t need to use a lot of fuel – it’s low-emitting,” she explains. “Fish is different from meat in that fish are very efficient feed converters. You don’t need many kilos of feed to get one kilo of fish.”

And again, reducing waste is a major thing that individuals can do to reduce their environmental impact. “Reducing food waste is actually one of the biggest things you can do for the environment, because about a third of the food that people buy is wasted,” Tuomisto says. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation reports that 1.3 billion tonnes of food produced for human consumption is wasted each year. Producing food that isn’t even used is clearly a drain on the environment. To help address this problem, you can be organised about your shopping list and only pick up what you need. Don’t buy a big bag of produce if you’re only going to eat some of it, and cook produce before it goes past its best so that you can still use it.

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