Are You Living Sustainably This Summer?

Sustainable living treads lightly on natural resources and follows a rethink, reuse, repurpose mantra to minimize waste. Big and small wallet-friendly tips can help you save money and befriend our planet this summer, says Dr. Wynne Armand, a primary care physician at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital, and associate director of the Mass General Center for the Environment and Health. Here are five great tips to get you started.

1. Embrace the 5 Rs: Refuse, reduce, reuse, repurpose, and only then recycle is a well-laid out sustainability strategy promoted online by the Cincinnati Recycling and Reuse Hub. Do you really want or need a shiny new object? Where can you share tasks or tools? What could you swap, give away, or buy used? How could you slim down your recycling stream?

Give yourself permission to start here: Nobody is perfect. We all have preferences and sustainability blind spots, fumbles, and “sorry, just no” feelings. Start where you are and add on when you can.

Excerpted from Harvard Health Publishing

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