Two weeks of sustainable living – Student edition
My name is Callum Roberts and I am third year Creative and Professional Writing with History student at the University of Worcester.
Over the next two weeks, I am going to make an effort to live as sustainably as I can, and I will be keeping track of my progress in a short series of articles chronicling how I have got on.
As students, living sustainably can prove hard to do. We’re often border-line broke and balancing our course, social life and usually part-time work can prove to be a nightmare, leaving barely enough time to think about how we can reduce our impact on the environment. When people say ‘living sustainably’ people often think of transitioning to a fully sustainable lifestyle, complete with a personal allotment. Whilst as students this isn’t always practical, we can take more measures than you’d think to reduce our impact on the environment.
A brief summary of the things I will do:
- Turning lights and chargers off when done with them. This is a ‘routine’ one.
- Not leaving TVs and gaming consoles on standby. Another ‘routine’ one.
- Using reusable bags or a backpack as opposed to disposable plastic ones.
- Walking whenever possible instead of using vehicle transport. Bit of a cheat here as I don’t use a car but it means I do have to limit my use of public transport.
- Cutting down on buying bottled water AND using any existing bottles as reusable water bottles.
- Purchasing food that uses minimal packaging or packaging that is readily recyclable.
- Finding uses for things I would otherwise bin.
A lot of these line up with the 10 Golden Rules of Living Sustainably
Some of these will be easy and others will take up more time but all in all, I am feeling confident that I can make my day-to-day life a little bit more friendly on the environment.
Wish me luck!
Callum
