How to Live an Eco Friendly Life

Rebecca Braden: Vanessa Farquharson is just your average girl except she keeps a blog, has written a book and has inspired tons of followers after spending a year making her life more eco friendly.

Hi I’m Rebecca Braden and welcome to Watchmojo.com and today we’re speaking with Farquharson to get some do’s and don’ts on how to make your life more green.

What would you say is the biggest mistake that most people make in terms of green living?

Vanessa Farquharson: What bothers me I guess is when people kind of just want to pay their way to green, you know. They want to buy some solar panels and buy a hybrid car. Throwing money at the green movement won’t necessarily work because I think it’s more of an over all mentality that you have to have. They’re just consuming less.

Rebecca Braden: Is there anything we’ll be surprised to learn that is not eco friendly?

Vanessa Farquharson: Well there's allot of products that claim to be natural that better full of fragrances, para bends and preservatives and stuff. Unfortunately, you have to just do your research and read every single ingredient list, you know. All this stuff like at Starbucks or whatever they have these healthy looking salads. Then you read the ingredients like propylene glycol which is I think is some derivative anti freeze and its like.

Rebecca Braden: What was the problem that you encounter that you didn’t foresee?

Vanessa Farquharson: You often have to choose between like an imported organic product or a local non-organic product. The rule that my nutritionist friend had is like, first is local organic, second is local, third is organic.

Rebecca Braden: What would you say is the trick to making this changes and sticking with them?

Vanessa Farquharson: Find your own, maybe your niece or just something that you really care about most. I mean some people just don’t care so much about conserving water and they let the tap run. That maybe you care allot about waste reduction in garbage and I know a personally that’s kind of my situation, like I just hate creating garbage, I hate buying things with lots of packaging. There’s allot of blogs out there where people are trying to just not buy any plastic, like not consume any plastic or whatsoever.

It’s just going to be you could think of something that you really care about for whatever reason and just focus on that but let yourself have a few sins every now and then.

Rebecca Braden: Do you think everyone can live an eco friendly life style?

Vanessa Farquharson: I do think that everyone can step outside of there comfort zone more than they do you know. I really never thought I’d be the type of person to unplug my fridge one day but I did and I was so surprised to how easy it was. I'm surprising myself at how much happier I am, having done all this things that I never thought I would. So I just hope more people take that leap.