What are your barriers to sustainable living? What would it take for you to ^get there^?

[greenspaceplace]

Inspired by yet another message from David Attenborough.

● Car - I can't afford one, DH gets to work in a company van (up to 10 men at a time) but he works all over so the emissions are still probably very high.
● Bicycle - Storage and cost was a problem before I moved out of my flat
● Public transport - great where I live and cheap.
○ Plastic packaging - I cant afford butcher, fruit and veg shop, zero waste shops are too much
● Grow fruit and veg (loads of community gardens and allotments to pick from, now I have a garden I have space, it was a barrier living in a flat), my grandparents had fruit trees so I got fruit from them
●Buy mostly second hand (easy its cheaper)
●Save water (easy with small children sharing a bath, use the bath water in the garden etc
● Passing on used clothes/ toys- Charity shops collect round here but you need to have more than 20 black bags worth. So it's easy when we have a massive sort through.
○Buying things that last- Tricky for us, we buy about 3 pairs of rubbish s hool shoes per child per year. I can't afford the upfront cost of a better pair and to be honest I thought £20 was expensive for school shoes
○Recycling- we didn't have Recycling bins in our flat, I've recently moved and have normal and Recycling bin. The council took all of the big recycling bins when they gave residents Recycling bins but people in flats didn't get one.
●Electric and gas usage, even before the cost of living we live in terrace and a flat so it was easy enough t o keep the house warm with little heating. We didn't have central heating in our flat and used to only use hot water bottles and blankets to stay warm when we first moved out. It was scary when we had a newborn and it was freezing though. I used to make a den in the kids bunk bed and sleep in bottom bunk altogether when it was really cold. We didn't have heating in there for 7 years! Now we have heating after we moved it's difficult to not use it, but we only have it on about half hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. old habits and all. We were ready for the Cost of living crisis at least.

I can't think of any more right now, but the main barrier for me is plastic packaging.
If supermarkets gave the option I would buy without.
If the local bakery self bread fir less than £6 a loaf I'd come in every day.
I used to go to the butcher and fruit and veg shop but when I moved (5 min walk from an aldi and lidl) I stopped going, the cost and convenience of a supermarket has to win.
I'm a sahm so I have time to mess about with charity shops, a vegetable garden etc.

I want to know what everyone else's barriers are, in a perfect world I'd live in the shire and my food would come from next door.

Haven’t been abroad in 15 years though I f that helps my eco footprint, and only drive locally so get the train further afield.

Honestly? The only real barrier for me is lack of inclination. I have no inclination whatsoever to change anything about my lifestyle that makes it comfortable for me.

I have had no children and I hardly ever fly - both out of choice, with no thought to their environmental impact. But I’ve already likely done more than the big families without trying by not putting more humans on earth.

Where the fuck do I start?

EVERYTHING about modern day capitalist society is UNSUSTAINABLE.

Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional.

The lists of minor measures everyone's taking are laudable and encouraging but unless we basically scrap all aspects of society as we know it, we are not going to live sustainably.

I am not saying we should do - but you have to be realistic.

I am sick of the word sustainable being used to mean the exact opposite of what it actually means as well.

I would need more money. Everything "ethical" or "green" comes at a premium.

I agree. The industrial revolution has happened. We're not going to go back to horse and cart and living off the land.

Oh don’t be so sanctimonious. I have no plans to live “sustainably”. I will live my life as I see fit and I’m not curtailing it.

No space for a heat pump and roof faces the wrong way for solar panels.

For plastic it’s actually living in a small household - I sometimes order a veg box to get it plastic free but even if I just order the bits we want instead of a set box, meeting the minimum spend is always too much food. And my bread always turns out rubbish ☹️

me too to be honest, I understand people need to drive for work but my mil is a cleaner and she has to get the bus to clients houses (way far away from her area)

Milk man and pop man would be nice but they don't deliver to our area as there are too many unsatisfied customers (milk gets nicked).

To be fair the people at the community garden are all the hippy dippy types. We pass clothes and food around, a couple of people make jam and that means 15 people are eating jam from their neighbours, picked fruit from their neighbourhood.
a community garden further afield has a bee hive now and the locals are learning how to bee keep.
someone at the allotment got chickens and now people's heads are turned.

it's not fast but it is snowballing and (anecdotal evidence but still) our local allotment has around 50 plots, they filled about 30 in the last few years. Lots of kids onsite now. That's how it happens, people make small changes that become habit and help others along the way.

I hope we can do it, says i, sat on my sofa in my house on my phone. I do hope we can though.

So you literally want to live, unsustainably? Is that right?

As I said, laudable, and I do what I can too (although mostly stuff like repairing things, having lots of old stuff, not having a new bathroom just cos mine is old fashioned and buying second hand I have always done), but not in any way sustainable.

I started using a milkman to avoid plastic waste, but the milk was going off within a couple of days, sometimes it was off when it arrived so I stopped and reverted to supermarket milk. Your MIL is lucky that she has access to decent public transport but its non existant here so most people drive. I have no choice but to drive a big diesel vehicle as i need it for the business.

There is so so much the govt could do to green the UK and its economy but they only care about lining their own pockets. Until a responsible govt gets in (if that ever happens) most people will carry on as they are.

The main “barrier” if you can call it that is that I like my life as it is, I don’t want to give up the less environmentally friendly parts of it and I’ve no incentive to invest money to make them more environmentally friendly. I chose not to have children, largely in part so that I wouldn’t have the problem of worrying about their future. I sort of think it’s for people who have skin in the game and want their children to have a decent future to give up more to make that happen.

There are a lot of aspects of my life which are actually reasonably low impact just because they are, probably far more so than those who have chosen to live in big houses, have several children, keep dogs, and drive the majority of their journeys. I’m happy to just consider those not applying to me my doing my bit.

I would happily pay someone to come to my house, tell me where all of the general draughts are, agree a price and pay them to fix them. That tradesperson doesn’t seem to exist.

@greenspaceplace plastic is a waste and only can be down cycled.

Actually many plastics can be fully recycled. PET which is used in plastic bottles is actually relatively simple to recycle as with polystyrene. Soft plastics are a little harder but various forms of pyrolysis are being deployed to recycle them back to feedstock monomers.

Sustainable living is futile in my opinion, unless everyone does it and the companies stop making shit we don’t need then you’re kidding yourself.

The plastic items have already been made, the planes are still flying, the roads are still jam packed, SHEIN, Primark and Poundland are still stocked full of useless tat that will still be bought, we’re drinking milk and eating meat like there’s no tomorrow, every appliance and device I own needs power.

I don’t use a private jet, I have 1 car and I’m still using up the 1000pc box of plastic straws I’ve had for the past 5 years.

We are all living unsustainably, and will most likely continue to until we kill our race off.

Public transport is where I struggle. I'd like to use the car less for longer journeys but buses are infrequent, often late or cancelled without notice. It's also dirty, overcrowded and expensive. When I make use of the incredible public transport in other countries it makes me wonder how we've got it so badly wrong.

I don't know, we won't give up without a fight.
I mean look at what we've accomplished.
The human races problem is that we have too comfortable lives (sorry, I know not everyone but we do on this phone or computer have great lives) that's a pretty impressive problem to have, we made so much stuff to make life incredibly easy and pleasurable that it's going to kill us (and is already killing other species and people) its mental. you couldn't make it up

I send tweets to all the hypocritical supermarkets that stock items that are over-packed as heck. It annoys me so much. The likes of Waitrose and Marks drone on about sustainability yet they double and triple package things using the most packaging possible.

👎🏻I drive a diesel biggish car
👎🏻I fly way too much. My husband has lifetime BA gold membership he has flown so much. His carbon footprint must be huge.
👍🏻recycling
🫳🏼public transport
👍🏻cycling and walking
🫳🏼House and general energy usage
👍🏻buying second hand/re-purposing etc

👍🏻Try and buy local food

I suspect I'm very 'average' in my approach to these things. When you look at what China, India, USA, Russia chuck out I wonder why I bother sometimes.

At least I try not to be a hypocrite about things. I know people who are very keen to be seen to be green but their behaviour contradicts their desired image.

Celebs, politicians and the Royals are often awful for this.

Transport is responsible for less than 2 percent of worldwide carbon emissions.

You could stop every single ICE vehicle tomorrow and it would make diddly squat difference to the environment.

People cause pollution. Reduce the population and you reduce the pollution. It really is that simple.

If you actually care about the environment (and most people don't, even the previous posters are deluding themselves) you would stop doing the one thing which is killing this planet.

STOP. HAVING. CHILDREN.

If you have children, you have no voice when it comes to climate change. There is NOTHING you can do to mitigate the damage you have caused to the planet through your utterly selfish decision to have children.

The argument that "we need children to look after us in our old age and to pay taxes" is just fucking stupid. Society doesn't need either of those things.

How ridiculous and ironic is it to educate children to be good little climate warriors when it's their literal existence that is the cause of the problem in the first place.

We need a carefully managed worldwide depopulation. There should be financial incentives for childless people, and massive tax hikes for those who choose to damage the planet by having them. Villages cleared first, no children to replace the adults, then towns, then cities and eventually whole countries and states.

The immediate goal should be a fifty percent worldwide reduction in the number of children.

But none of you have the stomach for that, so instead you just fiddle about with ULEZ, and recycling your yoghurt pots. It gives you something to do, keeps you distracted, so you can congratulate yourselves for being such good little Green Soldiers.

We've been able to keep our transport costs right down by living fairly centrally in a small city, so we walk or cycle almost everywhere - most years I travel further by bike than by car (and we do have a car). However the house was expensive, and we are privileged to be able to live here. Many people don't have that choice.

Also, we're currently healthy. At one point DH had to drive to work as he wasn't well enough to cycle. Thankfully he's now much better, but I have friends with blue badges who work, and for whom there's no alternative to using a car.

(Grabs popcorn, waits for replies).

A lot of progress has been made, and we shouldn't discount that. The need to combat climate change has rocketed in public awareness worldwide over the last few years. Politicians openly acknowledge the need to do something- all they need to do now is actually do something 🙄 On a national level, I thought the massive uptick in the election of Green councillors in the local elections was significant. But there is a massive amount more to do, in the face of malicious counter briefing, as demonstrated on this thread 🙄

The received wisdom that living sustainably will mean a drop in living standards is an example of this. I would rather live in a well insulated house than a draughty one that costs £££ to heat. I would rather have cheap electricity from wind and solar than expensive electricity from coal and gas. I would rather charge an electric car than pay a fortune filling up with diesel. I would rather live in a green, leafy, low traffic neighbourhood than by the side of a bleak 4 lane highway. I would rather travel by clean, cheap public transport than spend hours sitting in traffic jams in my car. All these would be both improvements to one's quality of life AND examples of living sustainably.

I have been interested in this for more than a decade. I barely fly. I was using refill lentils before it was trendy.

I am now completely and utterly disengaged. I actually feel like doing the opposite now. It feels like an attack on the ordinary poor person whilst the rich jet around. The push for net zero means fuel poverty. My barely used old car is banned from the cit centre yes the move to electric doesn’t stack up. Everything is made very hard and the costs prohibitive

i feel it’s turned to another way to control the masses.

so I am giving up. I feel like rebelling.

if I felt like everyone shared the pain and it wasn’t nonsensical in many ways I might change my mind.