5 ways to reduce your carbon footprint this month

Climate change advice often arrives as a wall of bullet points — turn off the lights, recycle more, eat less meat — with no sense of which changes actually move the needle. So this list is narrower on purpose: five habits, each backed by real data on how much carbon they actually save, ordered roughly by how much difference they make for the effort involved.

1. Buy secondhand before buying new

This is the highest-leverage habit on the list, because almost everything we buy carries most of its emissions in manufacturing, not in use. A sustainability analysis by Reperch estimated that a secondhand sofa carries a footprint of roughly 10 kg CO₂e, compared to around 100 kg CO₂e for a new one — a 90% reduction, since the embodied energy of manufacturing, shipping, and the raw materials has already been "spent" once. Separate lifecycle research on reused furniture found similarly steep reductions, in the 80–97% range depending on the item.

Clothing shows the same pattern at a smaller scale. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation found that keeping a garment in use for just nine extra months cuts its lifetime footprint by 20–30%, and one estimate puts the saving from buying a pre-owned winter coat instead of a new one at about 3.7 kg CO₂ — roughly the emissions of a 15 km drive. None of this requires buying less; it just means checking Munara (or any secondhand source) before checking a retailer's "new arrivals" page.

2. Swap a handful of disposables for reusables

Single-use items are a small line item individually but a large one in aggregate, and a few swaps cover most of the ground: a refillable water bottle, cloth shopping bags kept in the car or by the door, and a razor with replaceable blades instead of disposable ones.

Interestingly, Portugal is a genuine European success story here rather than a cautionary tale. Eurostat's 2023 figures show Portuguese households used just 14 lightweight plastic carrier bags per person that year — one of the lowest rates in the EU, and already comfortably under the bloc's 2025 target of 40 bags per person. The EU average was 65. That drop traces back largely to the plastic bag tax introduced in 2015, which is a useful reminder that policy and habit reinforce each other: once carrying a tote bag becomes normal, it stays normal.

3. Plan meals around what you already have

Food waste is a bigger climate issue than most people assume. Eurostat estimates the EU generates around 130 kg of food waste per person per year, and households are responsible for the largest share of it — about 69 kg per person, or 53% of the total. Globally, food loss and waste is responsible for roughly 8–10% of all greenhouse gas emissions, more than the entire aviation industry.

The fix is unglamorous but effective: shop with a list built around meals you've actually planned, keep older items at the front of the fridge so they get used first, and treat leftovers as the start of tomorrow's meal rather than something to reheat out of obligation. A short Sunday planning session — even fifteen minutes — heads off most of the impulse decisions that lead to food going bad unused.

4. Default to walking, cycling, or public transport for short trips

Transport is consistently one of the largest sources of household emissions, and the trips with the worst emissions-per-kilometre are the short ones — cold engines are inefficient, and a 2 km drive rarely gets a car up to its most efficient operating temperature. For anything under 3 km, walking or cycling usually costs only a few extra minutes, and Lisbon in particular has expanded its dedicated bike lane network substantially in recent years, making short cross-town trips more realistic by bike than they were even five years ago.

5. Donate instead of discarding

Before anything goes in the bin, it's worth asking three quick questions: could someone else use this as-is? Could it be fixed with minimal effort? Could it be sold or given away rather than binned? If the answer to any of those is yes, it's a candidate for Munara rather than the trash.

This matters more in Portugal than the headline recycling statistics suggest. The country's municipal recycling rate was 30% in 2022 — well below the EU-27 average of 49% — and the national selective collection rate was 23% in 2024, according to the European Environment Agency. Portugal has committed to reaching 55% recycling by 2025 and 60% by 2030, but donation sidesteps the recycling system's limitations entirely: an item that's reused doesn't need to be sorted, processed, or recycled at all, because it never became waste in the first place. Furniture, working electronics, clothing, and books are the categories most likely to find a second owner quickly.

Where this actually gets you

None of these five changes requires a lifestyle overhaul, and they compound: buying secondhand and donating what you no longer need work on the same principle from opposite ends, while cutting food waste and swapping disposables save money as reliably as they save emissions. Pick one to start with this week — the secondhand-first habit is the easiest place to see an immediate difference — and add the others as they become routine.

---

Have a sustainability habit that's worked for you? Join the Munara community forum and share it — small, tested habits are usually more useful to other people than big, abstract advice.