Buy Less Stuff

Everything you buy requires energy and resources to produce and deliver to you. One of the quickest ways to make an impact is to reduce your consumption. The most sustainable product is the one you don’t buy. With every purchase you make, consider if you really need it. Buy things that you really need, and buy good quality that will last a long time. Repair your stuff to make it last longer.

We need to shift our consumer culture view to have different values. With the discovery of oil and innovations, we have been able to produce many products cheaply. We have gotten used to being able to buy a lot of products and developed our consumerist culture. Another issue is our capitalistic economy. The incentive of people and companies is to make profit. You need to sell stuff to make a profit. We report daily on the health of our economy with Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which measures how much stuff we produce. We need to value living with less.

Try to avoid looking at advertising. The advertising industry is good at making you feel that you want something. If you are not exposed to this advertising, you will not have those feelings to buy things you don’t necessarily need.