From re-usable coffee cups to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, it seems we are finally waking up to the need to use our money wisely to protect the future of the planet. We’re recognizing that by matching up small gestures to big policy that we might actually achieve this goal. 

Yet it’s so hard to make changes when your monthly budget is crying out for help. Sure, giving up Starbucks will help your pocket and the planet. But isn’t that sort of grand gesture a bit like dramatically announcing you’ll never eat sugar again? In other words, it’s not sustainable.

So how can we smarten up our spending habits in a way that will still work for us – and the planet – in a decade’s time?

There are a lot of awesome sustainability bloggers out there, and one hot tip we’ve gleaned from them is to focus on one area of your spending at a time. Pick clothes or food or travel – but don’t try to fix everything at once. Focusing on, say, clothes only will allow you to focus all your research energies to find out what you be “buy-cotting” or boycotting. Are you buying from companies who treat their makers well? Do they have a policy to cut down on waste? Do they use sustainable fibres in their garments? Can you buy second hand instead of new (hi Vinted and eBay).

Moving on to food, if you really get to grips with the way the industry works, you’ll find that a lot of the food waste in the UK is incurred before the items even leave the farm they were grown on, let alone the amount we throw into our bins at home each week due to bad planning and impulsive buys. That’s where the new generation of veg box schemes like Oddbox come in: they buy wonky produce that wouldn’t make the supermarket grade, and sell them direct to you by means of a bullet-proof ethical business model (minimum waste; donating to food charities etc).

So much for our spending budget. What about savings? On a bigger scale, how can we invest our spare cash sustainably?

We’ve talked before about the importance of getting to grips with how your pension fund or investment portfolio really works, but more and more people are factoring in ethical concerns when they do this. UBS and other leading banks report that although only 39% of investors do it the sustainable way, that figure is set to rise, and for three good reasons.

1)    It’s a myth that you lose profit when you invest sustainably

2)    The sustainable investing trend is led by young people 

3)    This kind of saving and the companies you’ll be investing in are future-proof.

Nutty climate change deniers aside, we all know that the planet can’t go on as it is now: the mindless consumerism that only hastens the passage of a cheap plastic product to landfill is, well, not sustainable. The energy sector, the food markets… everyone is listening to ingenious new ideas to safeguard the ecosystem’s longevity. And they’re putting their money where their mouths are.

And you can do the same! Now is the time to switch any investments you have to areas that reflect your values. You’ll rest easier at night knowing your money isn’t funding something harmful – and your bottom line will thank you too.