How do we square convenience with taking care of the environment?
It’s a very good question: how do we square convenience with taking care of the environment? The short answer is: we often can’t. Twenty years ago how many of us were recycling? How many of us even gave the climate crisis a second thought? We didn’t think about it because no one had challenged us on it – and it probably wasn’t convenient or easy to do either.
Without that challenge or someone else making it easy for us, taking care of the environment is often not convenient. It requires thought. It requires effort. It requires each of us to consciously put that empty 2 litre fizzy drinks bottle into the recycling bin. It means we keep our food waste out of our general waste bins and in our brown waste bins. It requires making a different choice than the one we normally make.
So squaring convenience with taking care of the environment also means we have to change our mindset and put our own personal convenience on the back burner sometimes. If you Google this question, the overwhelming message is that our love of convenience is killing the planet. Killing the plant isn’t very convenient for anyone either. And so maybe this is where we start to work out that the answer to this question is: we can’t square convenience with the environment – and that’s OK.
On the other hand, lots of things are being done to help taking care of the environment feel more convenient. You can see it across our shopping habits, that features in a range of different convenient environmental choices given to us by businesses hoping to both encourage greener living and thrive because of it. This includes the kind of fashion we might buy, to the cars we drive; from the packaging food and other goods now comes in to the range of choice we now have, including vegan as well as vegetarian options; from having to buy shopping bags to bring our groceries home in, to encourage us to reuse the ones we used last time; to recycling bins at home and increasingly in our town and city centres.
Without many of us even noticing, taking care of the environment HAS got more convenient in public spaces at least and in the kinds of buying decisions we can make, almost without thinking. In our homes though, we still have to think and behave consciously and differently to sort our rubbish into what can be recycled or reused and what can’t. Fortunately local councils have also recognised there’s lots to do in the public/private arena and provide householders with bins or bags, containers or other receptacles to make sorting our rubbish so much easier. Throw in your friendly neighbourhood environmentally-focused bin washing company, (that’s us, Bin Cleaned) and suddenly having different bins, that get cleaned regularly, feels a whole lot more convenient – and you’re helping take care of your local environment as well.
