Hello again, peeps! My second attempt to write the blogpost while on a flight has finally succeeded. I’ve been traveling like crazy and kinda trying the “live in the moment” thingy where you don’t share every nitty gritty details of what you’re doing every other minute on social media. And I must admit, it has really worked out well for me! Sometimes I feel guilty of my weekend hiatus on social media because I have a “blogger” tag on my name, but my common sense gets the better of me and puts the phone back in my pocket where it rightfully belongs. Don’t take me wrong, I still like sharing my travels on my blog, but the need to have a social media presence is kinda taking over the need to be “actually present” in a place. Well I hear about importance of the latter in almost every other yoga class of mine, so it was high time that I actually follow it! Let’s see how far I can hold 🙂
In other news, the World Environment Day was this week and I had shared some tips to reduce plastic waste on my insta-stories. I had a feeling that putting it down on the blog with some shopping links would be more useful, so this blog is going to talk about some of the things that I learnt in the past year about this topic and would hopefully be helpful to anyone who is looking to make some positive change in their life for the planet.
Reducing plastic waste –
Well I think anyone with any kind of social media presence would’ve seen a multitude of pictures of sea animals with plastic/trash stuck to their various body parts being shared all over the place. Yes everyone reads it, but how many of us actually work towards making a change? Sadly, very few. It actually just takes a few conscious changes in your everyday life which doesn’t require a lot of effort. Some of them are –
- Carrying your own bags to the grocery store
- Carrying mesh/cloth bags for veggies and fruits to store them in the fridge instead of putting them in the plastic bags that the store provides.
- Picking silverware in the place of plastic cutlery in the workplace when you’re given an option
- Picking reusable ceramic cups for coffee instead of plastic/compostable cups every morning
- Carrying your own water bottle when you go on trips instead of getting bottled water. I generally refill my 1L bottle in restaurants when I stop for a meal if I’m on the go
- Making sure you throw your used plastic containers/cups/bottles in appropriate recycle section of the trash and not in landfill
Here are some shopping links to things that have come in handy for me –
Mesh bags to store veggies – here
Organic food wraps – here
Stainless steel water bottle – here
Reusable coffee mug – here
Compost bin – here
Compostable liner for compost bin – here
Reducing “your” share of waste –
Let’s talk about reducing “any” kind of waste that you produce on a day to day basis. If you spend sometime and take a look at the amount of waste a human being produces in a day, it’s kind of alarming. I’ve read a lot of articles about people storing the waste they produce in a month in a mason jar and been like “Are you kidding me?” Because my mason jar will be full in a day or two, just with the banana peels and green tea packets that I consume. That’s when I realized that I should start composting food waste. All you need is a compost bin and a place to drop it off every weekend. Once that was done, the rest of the waste is mostly paper/tissue/cardboard boxes (thanks to amazon!). So we started using cloth towels like we used to in India instead of the paper towels whenever possible. In addition to that, if you are like me and order a bunch of stuff on amazon, you actually have an option of “grouping all the items to minimum number of packages” before you checkout, so look for that option next time. Hope these tips come in handy for you the next time you travel. DM on my insta handle @trendytraveltales or comment here if you have any questions!
Summer Lookbook –
SB and I spent the first weekend of May in Austin with our girlfriends and had a great time. We both wore very summery clothes coz it was 80+ Deg in Austin and the main theme of our outfits were “comfort over everything else” as always. All our outfits are more than a year old, so hope this inspires you to shop inside your closet! Sharing SB’s outfit in this post, mine will follow soon 🙂
All right, that’s it for now 😛 , hope you guys enjoyed reading this post. There is more coming up very soonn, so stay tuned and enjoy the summer!! ❤ ❤
Until next time,
Mal
Trendy Travel Tales 