I’m not perfect. I still buy things I don’t need sometimes. Last month I bought a ceramic bowl at Stockmann because it was pretty and on sale and I already own eleven bowls. Eleven.
But here’s what I’ve learned after five years of trying to live more sustainably: perfection is the enemy of progress. The people who quietly reduce their waste by 60% and stick with it are not the ones posting zero-waste hauls on social media. They’re the ones who made a handful of boring, practical changes and then just… kept doing them.
That’s this post. Twelve things I’ve changed at home that actually made a measurable difference to our waste, our energy use, and our spending. No guilt trips. No expensive eco-boutique shopping lists. Just real stuff that works in a real Helsinki apartment shared by two adults and one very opinionated cat.
The Honest Starting Point
Five years ago, our apartment ran on convenience. Cling film. Paper towels by the roll. Fast fashion bought online and returned half the time (the environmental cost of those returns — I didn’t even think about it). Cleaning products in plastic bottles that I replaced monthly. Food that went bad in the fridge because I shopped without a plan.
We weren’t wasteful on purpose. We just hadn’t examined any of it.
The shift started when I took the Sitra Lifestyle Test — it’s a free online tool from the Finnish Innovation Fund that calculates your personal carbon footprint based on your housing, travel, food, and consumption habits. My result was sobering. I was well above the Finnish average, and Finland’s average is already high by global standards. It didn’t make me feel guilty exactly. More like awake.
I didn’t overhaul everything at once. That never works. I picked one thing at a time, got used to it, and moved on. Here’s the order, roughly, over two years.
1. The LED Swap
Starting with the easiest one. We replaced every bulb in the apartment with LED. All seventeen of them. Total cost: about €45 from K-Citymarket. The difference on our electricity bill was immediate and measurable — roughly €8–10 less per month.
In Finland, where we light our homes heavily from September through March because the alternative is sitting in darkness at 3 pm, lighting is a significant portion of household energy use. LEDs use up to 80% less energy than incandescent bulbs and last years. I replaced ours in autumn 2021 and haven’t changed a single one since.
This is the kind of change that requires zero effort after the initial swap. You literally forget you did it. That’s the best kind of sustainability.
2. The Cleaning Product Purge
I used to have an army of cleaning products under the kitchen sink. A different spray for the bathroom, the kitchen, the mirrors, the floors, the stove. Each in its own plastic bottle. Each replaced every month or two.
Now I have three things:
White vinegar. I buy a 5-liter jug from the grocery store for about €4. I dilute it 1:1 with water in a reusable glass spray bottle, add a few drops of tea tree oil. This cleans mirrors, countertops, bathroom tiles, the stovetop, and the inside of the fridge. It works. It genuinely, properly works.
Baking soda. For anything that needs scrubbing — the oven, the sink, stubborn stains on cutting boards. A 1 kg bag costs €2 and lasts about four months.
A plant-based dish soap. I buy Ecover or Bio-Luvil in the largest bottle available and use it for dishes, hand-washing delicates, and as a general surfactant when vinegar alone isn’t cutting it.
That’s it. Three products. Our cleaning costs went from maybe €15–20 a month to about €3. And the amount of plastic bottles we throw away dropped to nearly zero from this category.
Do I sometimes miss the satisfying neon-blue spray of a branded bathroom cleaner? Slightly. Does it matter? Not even a little.
3. The Food Waste Reckoning
This was the one that stung the most because it was the most visible. I was throwing away food. Real, paid-for food. Vegetables that went soft in the crisper. Leftovers that sat in the fridge for five days until they became unrecognizable. Half-used jars of things that migrated to the back of the shelf and expired silently.
The fixes were embarrassingly simple:
I started meal planning. Just for weeknight dinners, nothing elaborate. Sunday evening, I decide five dinners, write the ingredients, and shop on Monday. We go to the store once during the week for fresh top-ups. No more “I’ll figure it out later” that leads to impulse buying and waste.
I reorganized the fridge. Things that need to be used first go at eye level. The crisper drawers have labels (yes, really — a strip of masking tape that says “use first” on one and “fresh” on the other). The freezer has a list taped to the door of what’s inside, so I stop buying chicken thighs when there are already three bags frozen.
Leftovers get eaten. This sounds obvious. But what helped was reframing leftovers as the next day’s lunch rather than a sad second dinner. Tuesday’s roasted vegetable pasta becomes Wednesday’s lunch box. No extra cooking required.
Our food waste dropped by what I’d estimate is 70%. Our grocery bill dropped by about €50–60 a month. For two people, that’s significant.
4. Secondhand First
This took the longest to become habit. I grew up with the mindset that new is better — new is clean, complete, yours. Secondhand meant compromise.
It took a few really excellent secondhand finds to change my mind.
My Artek Stool 60 from Tori.fi — €120 instead of €300 new. My wool coat from UFF (a Finnish secondhand chain) — a nearly unworn Max Mara for €35. A set of Iittala Teema plates from Kierrätyskeskus, Helsinki’s recycling center, for €12. You can read more about how I balance secondhand and new pieces in my design investment guide.
Now, before I buy anything for the home — furniture, kitchenware, textiles, books — I check Tori.fi and Kierrätyskeskus first. Not always. Not religiously. But often enough that it’s become a reflex.
The Kierrätyskeskus shops in Helsinki are genuinely wonderful. The one in Kyläsaari is the largest — a warehouse of donated goods, sorted and priced reasonably. I go about once a month. Sometimes I find nothing. Sometimes I find a handblown glass vase for €5 that turns out to be from the 1960s and is one of the most beautiful things in my apartment.
The environmental math is obvious: extending the life of an existing object has a far lower footprint than manufacturing a new one and shipping it from a factory somewhere. But the personal math matters too. I save hundreds of euros a year buying secondhand, and the quality of what I find is often better than what I’d buy new at the same price point.
5. Repairing Things (Korjauskultuuri)
There’s a Finnish word for this culture of repair: korjauskultuuri. It’s not exactly mainstream anymore — we’ve drifted toward disposability like everywhere else — but it exists, and it’s worth reviving.
In the past two years, I’ve had repaired instead of replaced:
- A winter coat with a broken zipper — €25 at a repair shop in Kallio
- A kitchen chair with a wobbly leg — fixed by my partner with wood glue and clamps, €0
- My favorite leather boots with worn soles — resoled at Vallilan Suutari for €45
- A ceramic lamp base that cracked — glued with kintsugi-style gold repair (a weekend project, and now it’s more beautiful than before)
- An old wool blanket with moth holes — darned with visible mending, which actually looks wonderful
Each of these items would have been replaced for €100–400 new. The repairs cost a fraction and kept functional, often beloved objects in use.
Helsinki has a growing network of repair cafés too — Korjaamo events where volunteers help you fix everything from electronics to clothing, for free. Check the Fixer community pages for schedules. I’ve taken a toaster and a jacket zipper to these and walked out with both working.
6. Energy Consciousness (Without Suffering)
Finland runs largely on district heating for apartments, which means I can’t control the heat source — but I can control how efficiently my apartment retains it.
Draft-proofing. Our old apartment had drafty windows. Self-adhesive foam tape from Biltema (€4 per roll) around the window frames made a noticeable difference in how warm the rooms stayed. In our current apartment, the windows are newer, but I still added tape around the front door seal.
Thermostat awareness. Dropping the indoor temperature by even 1°C saves roughly 5% on heating energy. We keep our apartment at 20°C instead of the 22–23°C many Finnish homes default to. I wear wool socks and a cashmere jumper indoors from October to April. It’s fine. It’s actually lovely.
Electricity timing. Finland has time-of-use electricity pricing. I run the dishwasher and washing machine at night when rates are lower. The machines are on timers — set them before bed, they run at 2 am. Lower cost, lower grid strain.
Appliance use. The oven is the most energy-hungry appliance. I batch-bake — if I’m heating the oven for dinner, I also bake bread or prep something for tomorrow. The kettle only gets filled with the amount of water I actually need (I was shocked to learn how much energy goes into boiling a full kettle when you only need one cup). The laptop charges fully and then gets unplugged rather than staying connected all day.
None of this feels like deprivation. It’s just awareness. And our energy costs have dropped by roughly 15% year-on-year since I started paying attention.
7. Reusable Swaps That Actually Stuck
I tried many. Some stuck. Some didn’t. Here’s the honest breakdown.
Stuck:
- Beeswax wraps instead of cling film. Took two weeks to get used to. Now cling film feels wrong.
- Cloth napkins instead of paper. We have a set of twelve linen napkins. They go in the regular laundry. Simple.
- Reusable produce bags for the grocery store. Mesh bags from IKEA, €3 for a pack of five.
- A safety razor. Higher upfront cost (about €30 for a Mühle), but the blades are pennies each and it gives a better shave.
- Cotton rounds replaced by washable ones. My partner sewed a set from old flannel. Cost: €0.
Didn’t stick:
- Shampoo bars. I tried four brands. My hair looked greasy for weeks. I went back to liquid shampoo in a large refillable bottle.
- Menstrual cup. Perfectly fine product, just wasn’t for me personally. I switched to organic cotton instead, which felt like a reasonable middle ground.
- Making my own oat milk. It was gloopy and sad. I buy Oatly in the Tetra Pak and recycle the carton. Forgive me.
The things that stuck are the ones that were either equally convenient or only marginally less convenient than the disposable version. Anything that required significant extra effort or produced a worse result — I dropped it. And I don’t feel bad about that. Sustainability has to fit your actual life, or it won’t last.
8. The Wardrobe Slowdown
This deserves its own post (and will probably get one), but the short version: I stopped buying clothes frequently and started buying fewer, better pieces.
My wardrobe now follows a rough capsule approach — about 35 pieces per season that all work together. I buy maybe 6–8 new items per year, mostly to replace worn-out basics. Everything else comes from secondhand shops or clothing swaps with friends.
The key insight was tracking my cost-per-wear. That €15 H&M top I wore three times before it pilled? €5 per wear. The €120 merino wool jumper from Arela that I’ve worn probably 200 times over four years? €0.60 per wear. The math speaks for itself.
9. The Kitchen Approach
Beyond reducing food waste, a few kitchen-specific changes:
Composting. Helsinki provides free bio-waste bins for apartment buildings. We compost everything organic — vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, eggshells, paper towels. If you’re starting from scratch, I’ve written a whole beginner’s guide to composting covering the first year.
Bulk buying staples. Rice, oats, pasta, flour, lentils — I buy these in the largest available packages. Less packaging per gram, lower cost per gram. They go into glass jars on the kitchen shelf. Practical and pretty.
Seasonal, local-ish eating. I’m not militant about this. But I’ve shifted toward eating more root vegetables in winter (because that’s what grows here), buying Finnish berries frozen in bulk at the end of summer, and choosing Finnish or Baltic products when possible. The Hakaniemi market hall is wonderful for this — the vendors can tell you exactly which farm grew the potatoes.
10. Buying Less, Period
The most sustainable product is the one you don’t buy.
I know. Boring. Not Instagram-friendly. But the single most impactful change I’ve made is simply buying less stuff. Fewer home accessories. Fewer kitchen gadgets. Fewer “just because” purchases.
I use a 48-hour rule for non-essential purchases. If I see something I want — online or in a store — I wait 48 hours. If I still want it after two days, and I can articulate why I need it (not just want it), I consider buying it. About 70% of the time, the urge has passed.
This has saved me hundreds, maybe thousands of euros. And my apartment is calmer for it. Less clutter, less cleaning, less guilt. More space, both physical and mental.
If you’re looking for ways to refresh your kitchen without buying a lot of new stuff, I wrote about budget-friendly approaches here — it’s mostly about working with what you already have.
11. Water Awareness
Helsinki has some of the best tap water in the world — it comes from Päijänne, one of Finland’s cleanest lakes, through a 120-km tunnel. We don’t buy bottled water. Ever. There’s no need.
Beyond that: shorter showers (I aim for under 5 minutes on a normal day — my partner is still working on this), a low-flow showerhead that cost €20 and reduces water use by about 40% without feeling noticeably different, and running the dishwasher only when it’s full.
Small things. But water heating is a significant energy cost, so less hot water means a lower electricity bill too.
12. Talking About It (Without Being Annoying)
The last thing I want to be is the friend who lectures everyone about their choices at dinner. Nobody wants to hear “actually, that plastic straw…” while they’re eating.
But I’ve found that living this way quietly influences people around me. Friends notice the beeswax wraps and ask about them. My mother saw the glass spray bottle and now makes her own vinegar cleaner. My partner, who was initially skeptical, now checks Tori.fi before buying anything new without me prompting him.
Leading by example works better than any argument. And sharing what I’ve learned — here, in conversations, in normal life — feels useful without being preachy. That’s the balance I try to strike.
What It All Adds Up To
I re-took the Sitra Lifestyle Test last month. My footprint has dropped by about 30% from where it was five years ago. That’s not enough — I know that. The structural changes our society needs go far beyond individual action. But individual action still counts. It builds habits. It shifts demand. It changes what feels normal.
And practically? We save an estimated €150–200 per month compared to how we used to live. More than €2,000 a year. That money goes into an actual savings fund, into experiences (travel, concerts, dinners with friends), and into the occasional design piece that we’ll keep for decades rather than replace in two years.
The November darkness is settling in outside my window as I write this. The candles are lit — beeswax, naturally. The apartment is warm at 20°C. The cat is asleep on the secondhand Artek stool. Tomorrow’s dinner is planned, the ingredients already in the fridge.
It’s not a perfect life. But it’s a considered one. And that shift — from automatic consumption to conscious choice — is the most sustainable change of all.
