Small changes, great impacts

Let me take you back to my first blog post, Changing the world one shampoo bar at a time. This quote perfectly describes how I thought of sustainability as of 2 weeks ago.

“Had someone asked me last week if I recycled in our house, the answer was always 'no'. Not for any reason other than a lack of will to place a separate can in my kitchen for recyclable materials.”

I just want to let everyone know; we now have a recycling bin sitting pretty on our fireplace. It hasn’t been as hard as we would have thought. It wasn’t a major behavior change since we already took our cardboard to the recycling station down the street. Now we have added plastic, cans, and bottles as well. A little bit more in our trip, but it hasn’t added any unnecessary stress to our lives.

So my past two weeks have been filled with shocking research and targeted advertising. I bring up targeted advertising because I believe it has played an exponential role in my increase of sustainable products.

You see, I identify as a shopaholic. Online shopping is my weakness. (But I’ll talk more about this in an upcoming post Budgeting is hard.)

Anyways, I started my path toward a sustainable lifestyle with an order consisting of bar shampoo and conditioner. This started a trend of sustainable soaps on my Facebook advertisements. Being the avid shopper, I am, I of course clicked link after link. After doing some research on the products and comparing prices between bath and body works and Blueland soap tablets, I found the two to be very comparable.

So anyways, we needed more cleaning supplies. I had been meaning to add it to the grocery list for weeks. I dove right in. I ordered The Clean Essentials Kit. This comes with a bathroom cleaner, glass cleaner, all-purpose cleaner, and hand soap. I’ll talk more about my experience with the products and how they work in another post. But I thought it was worth a mention as one of the major behavior changes happening in this house.

Now is when the targeted advertising really started hitting hard. Toothpaste. Have you ever thought about your toothpaste tubes? Where do they go? Why do we use them? How many of these things do we go through in a year? Well neither had I. Then Facebook went ahead and targeted me with an advertisement for Bite, a sustainable toothpaste company.

This is when my fiancé gave the ultimate quote. “I love you. I support you and what you want to do. But this is starting to feel kinda hippy.”

It’s exactly how I feel! I never in one million years would have thought I would care this much about the waste I am creating. But I’m not joking, after I start comparing prices and finding that for the same price, maybe a tad more, maybe a tad less, I can get a product that is a little better for the environment, it seems like a no brainer. Why wouldn’t I substitute one product for another to do a little good in the world. I keep coming back to the fact that I was always going to order cleaning supplies, soap, toothpaste, shampoo and conditioner. These items were going to make it onto my grocery list, no matter what. Changing a product to change the world, seems like the easiest behavior change I will ever make.

After looking into this toothpaste company, I sat and thought, we are down to our last tube of toothpaste. Now, we buy our toothpaste in bulk, so if I was going to make a change, it needed to be this month. I went for it. I ordered our first 4-month supply and said, “what’s there to lose”. Again, I plan to talk more about our experiences with the product and what it’s about in a later post.

So, you’re probably thinking, wow, all Facebook has to do is throw an add on her newsfeed and that lucky business is getting a sale. No. Well, maybe. But no. The next targeted advertisement was for sustainable laundry detergent. Detergent that doesn’t come in a plastic tub or bottle, instead is neatly packaged in something that looks like a dryer sheet. Now I didn’t buy this. Not to say I didn’t want to, but we just didn’t need laundry detergent at the moment.

The point I’m trying to make, is that without these advertisements targeted to my newsfeed, I would have started with one behavior change and left it at that. Instead, my interest was sparked by a variety of sustainable products. I feel that there is a possibility more people might use these products if they were marketed in a way where you didn’t have to already know about sustainable products to be targeted for sustainable products. We could create real behavior change by providing visual and verbal prompts to individuals when they need to buy products. If I walk into the store and see a large sign with the benefits of tablet cleaning supplies next to the bottles of bleach, it may spark my interest.

*I just want to end this post by saying, I’m not turning into a hippy. We are never going to live a no waste lifestyle. I don’t plan to make behavior changes that will greatly impact the way we live our life. However, I do believe that small changes can have a great impact. If we all can find one or two areas of our life where we are willing to make changes, the world may just last a little longer*