I’ll be honest…I’m not entirely sure how to write about clean living. It’s something I can talk about with friends and family until I’m blue in the face, but I never really thought about sharing it on the blog until a bunch of you requested it after I shared my laundry stripping story!
But, there’s no better place to start than the beginning!
So, how and when did I begin this journey?
I think my unofficial sustainable journey began at least a decade ago, quite a while before it was trendy to do so, but my intentional journey to both a more sustainable and cleaner lifestyle began about a year ago.
The Early Years
The very first thing I remember doing was buying reusable shopping bags. Not only were they pretty to look at, but I was tired of plastic bags taking up space in my home and my trash. I had grown up reusing them as trash bags in the bathroom, but how many plastic bags do you really need for that???
Next, I started unintentionally buying reusable straws (though the majority of them were still technically made of plastic). My freshman year of college (maybe my senior year of high school?) I got weirdly obsessed with tumblers. Anytime I saw a pretty one I didn’t own yet, I just had to have it (especially if it was a Lilly Pulitzer one!) and they almost always came with a matching straw. I used them any time I went out and wanted to bring a drink from home, and I tried to remember to bring one with me any time I stopped by a Dunkin Donuts for a basic iced coffee…though I’ll be honest and say that I very rarely remembered to do this.
Around the same time I went through my tumbler obsession, I started making a conscious effort to not use single use plastic bottles. After reading an article about the amount of single use water bottles people consume daily and seeing a graphic about how many times we could circle the earth with all the discarded water bottles, I knew that I needed to do my small part to reduce the human impact on the planet. This was made easier for me when I realized the college I was attending had filtered water stations throughout campus to fill reusable bottles that also told you how many single use bottles that station had saved.
The Intentional Journey
About two years ago someone I followed on Instagram started to get reallyyyy into clean living and essential oils. I had grown up being taught about the benefits of aromatherapy and was used to using lavender to help unwind, but other than that I really didn’t know much about any of it. I thought all oils were created equal and that they were only ever used to make your house smell nice. I also naively thought that the things I put on my body (shampoo, lotion, perfume, deodorant, etc) must all be fine to use. Surely companies wouldn’t be selling things to me that were harmful, right?
As this person continued on their journey, I thought they were a little loopy with their obsession with essential oils. They touted all these miraculous things that essential oils were supposedly responsible for, and I just wasn’t buying it. It honestly seemed like a total scam.
But, sprinkled into the obsessive essential oil posts, this person also talked about some terrifying things. They talked about the need to thoroughly wash all your produce because of residual pesticides left on them and the detrimental effects common household cleaning products can have on the endocrine system. I had heard about the need to wash produce before, but it had never really clicked. And when it came to the whole endocrine system being affected thing…that was news to me!
But I wasn’t just going to take their word for it. I spent months researching any and everything I could find, and it was terrifying! There are so many things that are actually harmful to both us and the environment! I was overwhelmed at first, but thanks to a conveniently timed challenge by REI I knew that I could make small changes one at a time rather than trying to do everything at once. After all, progress is better than nothing.
REI started a program at the beginning of 2020 called the Opt to Act Plan. The program is a series of 52 challenges, one for every week of the year, that are aimed at encouraging people to make small changes in their lives to reduce their own impact on the environment. It included things like signing up to stop junk mail from being delivered to your home, reducing food waste for a week, and keeping reusable shopping bags in your car so it’s harder to forget to take them with you. There were quite a few things on the plan that I was already doing, but even more that I had never thought of!
So, 2020 was officially dubbed the year to make not just my own individual choices, but my entire household more sustainable. Mark and I committed to buying organic products whenever possible, I started using shampoo bars instead of bottled shampoo, and I began my own journey with essential oils (which I’ll get into more in a later post). And that was just the beginning!
We’re not perfect, we definitely still have a long way to go, but I’m so incredibly proud of the progress we’ve made this past year!
This post is already pretty long and a little dry, so I won’t keep going. But before I start bombing you all with specific ways you can make small changes in your lives, I wanted to give you some insight into how my own journey started.
Like I mentioned in the beginning of this post, I’m still a super newbie when it comes to actually writing about this stuff which means I don’t have too much of a plan yet. So, if there is anything specific you want to learn about (organic foods, water bottle challenges, essential oils + holistic health, science-y stuff, etc) let me know in the comments! I truly love learning and talking about all this stuff, so whatever you guys want I’m down to share and discuss!
Brand Spotlight
The image at the top of this post features some of my favorite brands doing their part to help the planet! (This is not sponsored.)
Tote and cropped sweatshirt: One Ocean One Love
Leggings: Girlfriend Collective
Shoes: Rothys
Bracelet: 4Ocean