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Small Steps that Have a Big Impact on Sustainability

The small habits that shape our every day can drive much-needed progress towards sustainability in the long run, from your commute to how you save your money.

Person planting a tree

Sustainability is a marathon, not a sprint. While it’s critical to make the big leaps – the societal investments needed to decarbonize transportation, energy, industrial production, and more, we often forget the cumulative impact that individual changes can make.

Small Actions, Big Impact

Everyday choices matter. It’s in these daily actions where we all can contribute and create positive sustainability habits that not only help the planet, but our wallets too. Here are three ways everyday actions can make a difference:

  1. Swap single-use plastic water bottles for reusable water bottles: This simple swap allows a household to save an estimated 103.3 kilograms of carbon-dioxide from entering the atmosphere each year. That’s close to 1% of the entire annual carbon footprint for an average American – a significant difference from just one small change.
  2. Fill up on veggies: Another simple swap is through our eating habits. Food production is a major contributor of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a food system study in the journal Science and a 2023 UCLA study found that swapping a standard American diet for meatless alternatives just once a week, can reduce overall food-related carbon emissions by as much as 11.4%. Meatless Mondays, anyone?
  3. Take a work from home day: Adopting (or maintaining) a hybrid job by working two days a week from home, can reduce overall greenhouse-gas emissions by 11% versus full-time in-person work, according to a joint study by Microsoft and Cornell University. Double that to four remote days per week, and emissions could decrease 29%. And it isn’t just your local commute that can have an impact! Swapping just four New York to Los Angeles business trips for virtual meetings each year could save roughly 2.2 metric tons of carbon emissions from air travel alone. That’s equivalent to more than one-seventh the annual carbon footprint for an average American.

The biggest takeaway is these small, simple shifts in habits, whether it be going meatless for one day a week, eliminating one-time use plastics, or adjusting your commute, can drive meaningful reductions in our individual contributions towards sustainability. And when done together, we can exponentially build on the impact made towards a brighter future.

Good for the Planet… and Your Wallet

Plenty of sustainable measures benefit not only the environment, but also our lifestyles. Again, consider a few examples. EVs typically emit some 80% lower CO2-equivalent emissions per year than their gasoline counterparts, even after accounting for electricity sources nationwide. But they also have markedly lower maintenance costs, not to mention cheaper costs to per mile to fuel.

In the same way, products like Forbright Bank’s high-yield savings account, Growth Savings, which supports responsible lending to fund sustainable projects, also deliver much higher interest rates compared to traditional savings accounts.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Consider the following win-win scenarios:

  • Surveys have long shown, for example, that people who travel to work on foot, bicycles, or trains exhibit significantly higher commuting satisfaction than those who drive personal vehicles or take subways or buses. That generally aligns with environmental impact: Two of the three low-satisfaction modes (with subways being the exception) also have higher carbon footprints.
  • Rooftop solar panels don’t just form a source of low-emissions power. They can also reduce electricity bills, create resilience against intermittencies, and raise property values at the same time.

While we all understand the dire need to address climate change as a whole, it’s important to recognize that individual contributions can hold a lot of value, from purchasing an electric vehicle to opening a savings account.

And by making these small incremental changes, it allows us to make our impact grow incrementally over time, while also creating habits that help our wallets, too.

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