Emily Crowley: Here are the small changes I made to live more sustainably for one month

Dramatics and sarcasm aside, being more environmentally conscious has only had positive impacts on my lifestyle, with colleagues saying that they were going to get on top of recycling

Mon, 06 May, 2024 - 07:42

Emily Crowley

Two years ago, fizzing with excitement and giddiness, my friends and I hopped into a taxi bound for Cork city centre to join the Jazz Fest shenanigans.

Our driver asked where we were from. I told him I was from Kenmare, my pals were visiting from Dublin.

“Kenmare?” he immediately retorted, “Is that one of those seaside towns where people claim the water levels are rising every year?”

According to him, there was much warmer weather recorded in the 1960s — so why were people panicking about climate change now?

And so ensued a debate between four girls in their mid-20s, dressed to the nines and fuelled with lady petrol (prosecco), and a middle-aged man, who — it would seem — spends a bit too much time reading Facebook comments.

CLIMATE & SUSTAINABILITY HUB

We got out of the taxi in the city as much quieter, much more deflated women than when we got in. Why? Because we were now about to begin our night riddled with climate anxiety, not to mention the intense rage that now consumed us at how stubborn climate change deniers are in trying to “prove their point”.

The worry and concern people my age (and other ages for that matter) have around global warming is justified, and we don’t have to argue our emotions on it

With that being said, and with May being Sustainability Month here at the Irish Examiner, I set myself a challenge to make little tweaks in my day-to-day life that might — just MIGHT — make a smidge of a difference to our tired little planet.

The first/easiest thing to sort in my household was, of course, our rubbish. Recycling is most definitely not our forte at Casa Crowley. I would even go as far as saying there are some family members who would throw me on the fire if I stayed still for long enough. So that needed to change. 

I grabbed some recycling bags and gave the family a rundown of what was to go in what bin. Within a few days, I could see them reading the back of packs to see if it was a recyclable material and, by then end of the first week, you couldn’t swing a cat in our kitchen for fear of knocking over yoghurt pots which were rinsed and draining by the sink. 

Emily ditched the supermarket packs of meat in favour of cuts from my local butcher — most meat there is reared, slaughtered, hung, and prepared a few miles from her home.

Next up for tweaking was my diet. How could I make small swaps to reduce my carbon footprint there? In a bid to lessen food miles, I tried to buy as close to home as I possibly could.

Luckily, there are some fine producers and suppliers in the area so some of the swaps I made weren’t hard. I ditched the supermarket packs of meat in favour of cuts from my local butcher — most meat there is reared, slaughtered, hung, and prepared a few miles from my home.

Fish came by the way of Star Seafoods. In terms of my treats, I went into local chocolatier Benoit Lorge for some locally produced chocolate bars (I know what you’re thinking, it’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it).

Eggs came from Beara Eggs in West Cork. Bread from Harrington’s bakery. Where I could, I bought vegetables that, at the very least, had “Origin: Ireland” on the packaging. However, if and when a local grower had a shelf in one of the shops, they got preference.

My diet was never going to be totally local, but these slight adjustments stack up. What’s more, supporting local SMEs made it more worthwhile. Plus it was all delicious

It was time to look at the greatest climate offenders in my life: Shopping and travel. 

I made myself a promise to try not to buy any fast-fashion items for a month, and – apart from a plain white shirt that I needed to pick up – I succeeded. It can be very easy nowadays to give into the “SALE!” promo emails that land in your inbox all too regularly, or to just pick something because you “deserve a little treat”.

I often found myself asking: “Do I really NEED this?” when admiring something on the rails or online, and each time I found myself saying: “Not really, no”.

Next time you feel you “need” something new for a certain occasion, have a think about the following options:

Charity shop/Depop;
Ask a friend;
A dress rental service;
Have something in your own wardrobe altered or tailored.

I have to concede on the travel aspect; I was less than perfect in that regard.  Having recently moved out of Cork and back to the aforementioned Kenmare, it is almost essential that I have my car to get to places. I can’t help it, and there’s no way around it.

Next time you 'need' something you see on sale, ask yourself if you could get it from a charity shop or a dress rental service.

However, being conscious of its use — plus the extortionate price of fuel these days — I made myself a promise: If I needed to go somewhere that was in walking distance (luckily, I am quite close to the town), I could not use my car. Rain, hail, or sunshine, I stuck to that plan. I now have shoulders like Dwayne Johnson from carrying shopping bag loads back from town. 

I also promised myself that if I needed to go on a longer journey, that I would get a few things done on the trip. For example, a friend of mine was having a baby shower in North Roscommon — was I going to miss out on the occasion to celebrate her and her baby? Of course not, but what I did do was spend the day there and, on the journey back down, I stopped off at a friend’s place for the night to catch up with her.

I got the most value I possibly could out of those emissions — and sometimes you just have to value time with friends and family over the CO2.

I was feeling extremely virtuous about all the planet nursing I was doing when I hit a major bump in the road. 

For months, I had promised my friends in London that I would visit them, but had never followed through. That was until one night when I was bored and saw a good deal on a flight to Stansted, which I booked without a second thought. 

No sooner had the confirmation page appeared that the existential dread began: “Uh oh, I’m supposed to be a sustainable queen this month, and now I’ve committed one of the biggest environmental sins!” 

Fear not, reader, for I — being holier than thou — quickly hopped onto sustainabletravelinternational.org. There, you can input the details of your flight and it will tell you how much carbon your journey will produce, as well as how much it would cost to offset.

You pay the fee, which is donated back to verified climate projects. These include wind farms, biodiversity reserves, and deforestation projects. For my trip from Cork to London, I paid €2.85 to offset 0.18MT of CO2 emissions — so all was not lost.

Dramatics and sarcasm aside, being more environmentally conscious has only had positive impacts on my lifestyle. Even chatting to people in the office about the assignment I set myself, some colleagues have mentioned that they were going to get on top of their recycling at home a bit more.

So, next time you find yourself standing over the sink rinsing out a plastic food container and despairing: “What even is the point when entire nations are destroying the planet anyway?”, just know that your small gesture can have a massive knock-on effect on two or three other people.  And hopefully, together, we can help put a plaster on this glorious world we live in.

Oh, and if that taxi driver happens to be reading, know this: If you scrunch up that tinfoil hat of yours into a small ball, you can actually recycle that.