Climate change affects our entire globe, but your purchasing habits can help combat it. Many individuals, businesses, and governments have begun to promote social responsibility activities such as reducing carbon footprints, expanding green technology such as solar, and promoting eco-friendly goods and services. Businesses all across the world are now choosing to manufacture and stock sustainable items, as many conscious buyers are now evaluating a product’s environmental impact before its price.

Shopping for sustainability can be difficult, especially with so many products claiming to be natural, environmentally friendly, or devoid of something. It might be difficult to choose which brands or corporations to trust and which items are ecologically friendly.

Going green with your purchases, on the other hand, can be difficult if you don’t know where to begin. Fortunately, shopping for environmentally friendly products is simpler than you might think, and these nine green buying suggestions will teach you how:

1. Shop at Eco-Friendly Stores

It all starts with buying from retailers that actually care about the environment. To determine if you’re looking at a company that walks the walk with its green efforts, you should check the company’s website.

To find the best eco-friendly products, we recommend checking the “about us” and “media room” pages to learn about its devotion to eco-friendly initiatives. You can also read a company’s reviews to learn what other customers are saying about their products before you start shopping with them.

Some of the best eco-friendly brands and environmentally-friendly stores include:

• Patagonia
• Seventh Generation
• Thrive Market
• Dr. Bronner’s
• Lush Cosmetics
• EcoRoots
• Pela
• Made Trade
• EarthHero
• Package Free

These shops and eco-friendly websites stock a plethora of environmentally friendly products, and you can get almost anything you want from these stores, from biodegradable phone cases and cruelty-free beauty products to backpacks made of recycled billboards and refillable soap dispensers. Even if you love the convenience of online shopping, many eco-friendly online stores employ sustainable packaging so you can continue your sustainable shopping on the internet.

2. Buy Local

If possible, always shop environmentally friendly by purchasing your products from local companies and stores. Shopping local means you’re buying items that were manufactured in your immediate area, which is an easy way to increase your eco-conscious shopping.

The logic is simple: When you ship products over long distances, the airplanes, trucks, and cars used in that transportation emit greenhouse gases that contribute to air and land pollution. In other words, an apple grown 30 miles away is usually far more eco-friendly than one that traveled 3,000 miles to reach your grocery store. If the products were locally harvested or made, the environmental impact is usually lower.

3. Buy in Season

Every season features a wide range of fruits, vegetables, and other produce that naturally grows during that time. For instance, berries in the U.S. are usually plentiful in June, while apples and acorn squash are abundant in September and October. Buying “in season” means that you get the best possible product, with the least environmental impact.

However, your average grocery store seems to have everything on its shelves all year long. No matter what you need or when you need it, you can quickly rush to the store and buy it. While this is definitely convenient, it is definitely not eco-friendly.

Buying in-season supports local farming while ensuring that you get the freshest fruits and vegetables. To get the freshest in-season produce, visit your local farmer’s market, or participate in a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. A CSA connects local producers to the consumers in their immediate area, and you buy shares on a farm and receive weekly harvests in return.

4. Reduce Your Online Order Deliveries to Once a Week

Many people love online shopping because it’s convenient. Many leading eco-friendly stores even sell their products online. However, shopping from an online retailer might be doing more harm than good to the environment because many retailers use shipping and packaging options that can harm the environment.

Read Also: What Are Examples of Green Products?

To be as eco-friendly as possible with your online shopping, you can reduce your orders to once a week and purchase in bulk. Making multiple small purchases means more shipments to your home in several boxes, but a larger single order can lessen the impact on the environment by consolidating the packaging and limiting the number of trips involved in delivering your products.

You can still buy eco-friendly products online, but when you take the extra step to consider the impact of shipping your goods, you’ll do even more to support environmentally friendly shopping.

5. Purchased Recycled Items

When shopping online, look for retailers selling used, reused, and upcycled goods instead of brand-new ones. The best sustainable products are often more durable as well, and many used products look as good as new while also being cheaper than something “new-in-box”. Buying pre-owned items can save you money and reduce the waste and energy consumption involved in producing new items as well.

6. Avoid Impulse Buying

Impulse buying is a threat to eco-friendly shopping. It can easily lead to buying products that you do not need, which means they might end up in your local landfill quicker than you thought.

Advertisers use a variety of marketing tricks to trigger over-spending. If you’ve ever bought anything off a social media platform, website ad, or television commercial, you know they work very well! And many know the feeling of leaving a grocery store with a lot more than what was originally on your shopping list.

However, before buying anything, you should slow down, take a moment, and ask yourself a few questions:

• Do you really need this?
• Do you already have something similar at home?
• What advantage will this new product give you over the older one you already have?
• Can you wait to buy this at a later date?

Keeping the earth and your budget in mind at all times is a great way to reduce your impulse buying.

7. Bring Your Bag

Millions of single-use plastic bags are dumped in landfills each year, and many find their way into oceans and other natural resources. To be a more eco-friendly shopper, you should always bring your own bags and shop plastic-free. If those bags are reusable shopping bags, that’s even better! Many stores will even reward shoppers who bring their own eco-friendly shopping bags with discounts or other incentives.

It’s important to realize that not all reusable bags are eco-friendly. The manufacturing of cotton and hemp tote bags can still significantly impact the environment because the cultivation of those materials can require a lot of water and chemicals.

Instead, you can double down on being eco-friendly by using bags made from recycled packaging. Polyester or polypropylene production needs fewer resources than other materials, and can even help reclaim items from landfills.

8. Avoid Pre-Washed Groceries

Pre-washed produce like salad mixes or bags of lettuce might seem convenient, but they are not very eco-friendly. Not only does the increase in convenience cost more, but they can also hurt the environment because the packaging used for the various components of that salad often can’t be recycled.

Instead, you can shop sustainably by buying regular produce that’s in season from a local farm, and washing it thoroughly at home. Sure, it might take a little more time, but you’re also helping the environment.

9. Choose Organic and Natural Products

Buying organic and natural products helps everyone because it encourages companies to create, stock, and sell more eco-friendly products. This includes organic foods as well as toiletries and cleaners made from natural materials, using sustainable processes and resources instead of strong industrial chemicals. The best products that meet these criteria are EPA Safer Choice Certified, which means they’re free of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), dyes, and bleaches.

It’s simple supply and demand in action. When your shopping cart is full of environmentally friendly items, you’re telling companies that you value the health of the planet, and you appreciate that they want to lessen their impact on the environment too.

Eco-friendly shopping doesn’t mean that you have to stop shopping. You can save money and save the planet at the same time! It just means that you need to be a little more careful about what you are buying, especially in terms of how it’s made and how it impacts the planet. Eco-friendly shopping encourages us to support ethical and sustainable consumption and the companies that support that goal.

What are The Common Characteristics of Sustainable Products?

The ability to maintain a specific rate or level is a simple definition of sustainability. To be sustainable, a product must be produced and/or used in a way that does not cause harm or destruction. A product is unlikely to be deemed sustainable if its manufacturing needs nonrenewable resources, harms the environment, or causes harm to persons or society.

A product is usually considered sustainable if it:

• Doesn’t deplete natural, nonrenewable resources: A sustainable product is made from renewable resources; in other words, resources that can’t be fully depleted.
• Doesn’t directly harm the environment: The production, distribution, and/or consumption of the product uses as little energy as possible, and minimizes and responsibly disposes of waste. Almost no action is completely free from environmental impact, so most environmentally conscious companies strive to minimize negative impact.
• Wasn’t made in a socially irresponsible way (for example, using forced or child labor or causing health or safety concerns): A socially sustainable business is one that practices fair and equal hiring, hiring a diverse range of people and ensuring they have a voice in the organization. Socially sustainable businesses also care about the health, wellbeing, and success of their employees — as well as the residents of the cities and countries in which they operate.

A more complex aspect of sustainability is economic sustainability, which can refer to how a business operates. Economically sustainable businesses allow other businesses to compete and flourish. Broader economic sustainability allows a country’s growth to remain consistent for many years, rather than accelerating and declining in volatile or destructive patterns.

Some companies optimize their processes and resources for sustainability, while others improve sustainability through actions; some companies strive for both.

Through process and resource optimization, some companies choose vendors, materials, production methods, and hiring options, and make other business decisions specifically because they lend themselves to sustainability. This often requires extensive due diligence and may result in higher initial production costs.

Companies may also strive to improve their sustainability through actions that are separate from the manufacture of their product or the delivery of their service. For example, Water Watch Company provides clean water to an individual in need for a lifetime with each purchase; to date, they’ve donated more than 120 million gallons of clean water.

Other industries take action to offset an otherwise unsustainable model. For example, some airlines participate in carbon offset programs that plant trees or take other actions to help compensate for the negative environmental impact of travel.

First, check the label. Often, labels on a product will convey how the product is made and what it’s environmental impact might be. For example, you can look for labels that indicate that the product:

• Was made from recycled materials;
• Was made using renewable resources;
• Is 100% biodegradable, or;
• Was manufactured using ethically sourced labor.

You may also see marks of approval from formal standards and organizations, like the EPA or the World Fair Trade Organization. Several organizations around the world identify, analyze, and label the relative sustainability of different products. For example,

• The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) provides standard reporting guidelines that organizations can voluntarily follow. The guidelines outline economic, environmental, and social impact for individual products and the organization overall.
• The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) provides international standards for environmental impact.
• Many countries have national standards for sustainability that local companies may be legally required to follow.
• You can also check CSRHub.com, a private database that ranks corporate sustainability and social goals.

Other factors that help determine a product’s sustainability are more difficult to measure. For example, is this product potentially contributing to the development of a pseudo-monopoly? Was this product developed by the hands of a mistreated workforce?

You’ll need to research the company to know for sure since you won’t find that information on a label. So, it’s a good time to check the GRI, UNEP, or CSRHub sites.