Ten Sustainable Living Actions
Developed in conjunction with The Natural Strategies Group, this Guide is designed to help Wyndham residents take action to live more sustainably at home and in the community. The Guide is packed with information about how small, easy changes can have positive impacts on the environment and your health and well being - and save you money too!
So go on, Challenge yourself to take up a new sustainable action today! Find out just how easy it is to work towards creating a sustainable future for ourselves and our children and our children's children ..........
Community
It is all too easy to feel that the world's problems are so big that you cannot make a difference. It's crucial that we have a sense of working together on this most important challenge - to live sustainably. We need to nurture and deepen our relationships with others and fire up our compassion toward those in need - the young and future generations of living creatures on this planet. Through these relationships, we will learn together, act together and kick environmental goals together. The sense of common purpose and achievement we will gain will provide essential fuel for the journey. So how can we nuture our compassion and engagement so as to contribute?
Food
Our food and drink choices influence the methods used to produce our food and drink, and the quality of that food and drink. So what can we do to help encourage more sustainable production, manufacturing and distribution of healthy food and drink?
Garden
Our gardens can bring us closer to understanding the ecosystems that underpin life on this planet and how to live in harmony with the earth. By creating a beautiful, efficient and productive garden in your home, you can learn the rhythms of nature and our humble role in it. So how can we let our green thumbs play and align our gardens to the sustainable path?
Goods
Decisions about the things we buy can move us toward, or away from, being sustainable. Thinking about things like the amount of resources used, how efficient the goods are and their lifecycle can help us make more environmentally friendly purchases. How can we reconfigure our retail filters to include our environmental responsibilities?
House
Our home and garden can be a bottomless pit of resource consuming ecological inefficiency - or a healthy Eden of self-sufficiency. So how do we manage that part of our ecological footprint we most control, our home, and set it on a sustainable path?
Recreation
Recreation is how we relax, reward and inspire ourselves. Careful choices about travel, luxury holidays and recreational toys can ensure we play sustainably too. With a bit of extra thought, we can make sure our recreational choices don't cost the earth!
Services
The majority of the services we receive from our governments, health care providers, banks, etc are configured for financial efficiency (saving money or making it). As such, the inclusion of sustainability obligations or awareness of the ecological footprint of the services they provide is a rare feature for Australia's service providers. How do we shift this?
Transport
Most of us still use the car as our primary mode of transport, and one-quarter of all car journeys are less than 3km. This mode of transport has a very significant environmental cost and impacts negatively on our health and wellbeing. To ride a bike the same distance uses up less than one fiftieth of the energy required to drive. Explore sustainable transport options.
Waste
The existence of waste is an indicator of inefficiency in the human economy. We extract from nature to create billions of tonnes of things which we use once then bury or pump out to sea - and pay money for each of these stages! As individuals we can learn to avoid, reduce, reuse and recycle, with the journey ending with zero waste... nature's finest.
Work
While most of us have less control over our workplaces than we do over our homes, our commitment to reducing the damage to the environment cannot stop when we get to work. Everyday at work we make many decisions about water, waste and energy. Therefore, the workplace provides us with a great opportunity to become an agent of change toward sustainability and lead (or support) the greening of our work cultures and the means of production.