3 Easy Tips for Being Eco-Friendly Overlanders

Hello Adventure Seeker!
Eco-Friendly Jeepers, eco-friendly overlanders. Is such a thing possible? It isn’t you might say. Maybe your right and it isn’t. Our ecological footprint might be bigger than yours. But it also might be smaller. Some say electrical cars are the best, the opponents say that the electricity for those cars doesn’t come out of the blue. As there are two sides to this topic, both of them with good arguments, I like to think of it as problem “not solved”.
So as long as there is no right or wrong, only personal opinions, nobody can point fingers at anyone else. Except for those who only go by foot or only ride their bike. I draw my hat here. Alex and I, we are just not like that. We love our overlanding trips, we love our Jeeps.

Why Change Anything?

Because everyone can make his or her contribution to a better environment. We are all responsible for mother earth, we are responsible for her past, her present and her future. If you believe in global warming or not, climate change is occuring. It’s getting more extreme every year and nature seems to be striking back.

It’s our responsibility to make a change. Everyone of us can contribute without having to give up anything, in his or her best possible way. Even the smallest changes count! So let’s get started.

Eco-Friendly Overlanders

I don’t want to compare our lifestyle to anyone elses, I’m not judging and I don’t like to be judged. No patronizing here. We love overlanding, we love jeeping, we love offroading. That’s our hobby, our passion and it’s how we love spending most of our spare time. Still, we can make a difference. We can be ignorant, leaving our trash in nature or we can be more responsible and contribute to a better environment. Even though we drive a Jeep. I like to show you how we engage ourselves and give you some inspiration.

We are far from perfect, but we try our best and improve every day, finding new ways and possibilities. Focus and progress, not perfection.

1. Reduce Plastic

Assumption: Reducing Plastic is one of the easiest ways to live a more eco-friendly lifestyle. Actually it should be, right?

Fact: Many stores wrap everything in plastic. In Switzerland it is required to differ the organic stuff from the non-organic. So they wrap the organic food in plastic. I believe this is only a small step backwards, soon they will mark the organic food without plastic. For example I’ve seen some mangoes with a stamp on the “natural wrapping”, also known as peel.

So here’s our top ten of how we reduce plastic.

The Vegan Overlanders 10 Easy Tips to Reduce Plastic:

1. Use reusable bags instead of plastic bags.
2. Instead of Shampoo and Soap Bottles, use Soap Bars or DIY Products. Another bonus is the DIY products don’t contain toxic ingredients like SLS, just to name one of the many.
3. Prepare your tea, coffee and water in thermos bottles instead of buying plastic bottles.
4. Prepare your meal and take it with you to work. There’s a lot of plastic packaging in fast food. And homemade is healthier and I would say tastes better 😉
5. Find alternatives to washing detergent in bottles like the eco-egg or washing powder in a cardboard box.
6. Instead of buying toothpaste, make your own DIY toothpaste or -powder.
7. Use wax food wraps instead of plastic wraps.
8. Make your own DIY Home Cleanser with ingredients you know.
9. Choose a healthy alternative to store bought deodorants, for example a simple DIY Deodorant.
10. Go to a store that sells unpacked food with your own jars and reusable bags and fill them up!

I will get into details on how to reduce plastic with some easy tips in one of the next posts. Stay tuned!

2. Go Vegan

Assumption: “I could never give up meat” or “I can’t imagine my breakfast without milk” or “no more Swiss Cheese Fondue, are you crazy??”. Don’t think about what you would have to give up while going vegan, think about all the good things there are to gain!

Fact: If Alex can go vegan, I would dare to say everybody can. It’s never too late to change, it’s never too late to become healthy or healthier. Of course everyone will die some time, but I surely want to die with a sane mind and a healthy body. If you don’t want to commit to a vegan lifestyle cold turkey, why not try one vegan day a week? The animals and your health will thank you!

10 of the Many Benefits to Gain on a Vegan Diet:

1. Become a healthier you.
2. Lower your cholesterol level to a minimum.
3. Getting rid of Rosacea and other skin issues. I’ve written a whole blog post about how I got rid of Rosacea here.
4. Reduce the risk of diseases such as diabetes, obesity, strokes, osteoporosis, coronar diseases and even cancer. As many studies say, you can even reverse such diseases! If that’s no motivation, I don’t know what is. There are a lot of really good books based on solid studies out there. I’m naming only two here (see Affiliate Links below): “The China Study” by T. Collin Campbell, Thomas M. Campbell II and “How not to Die” by Dr. Michael Greger.
5. Lose weight and keep your weight with no effort, no diet, no restraints.
6. Get more energy by eating the right food. You’ll even get more protein intake 😉 There’s a bunch of well known athletes who switched to a vegan diet to become even better.
7. Contribute to a healthier planet.
8. Reduce your carbon footprint.
9. Save Money. Yes, that is possible! Don’t switch to a vegan junk food diet, switch to fresh veggies and fruits and legumes. I seriously save a lot of money since I don’t buy cheese and meat anymore.
10. Last but not least: Save the animals. If you love animals, don’t eat them.

3. Reduce Consumption and Minimalize

Assumption: I need all these things to be happy.

Fact: What you want and what you need are two different things. We don’t NEED things. The only thing we really need is the air we breath. The rest is a nice to have and we can work on stuff like a healthy relationship, healthy body and mind etc. But everything else is really only luxury. Alex and I found out one day, that we had an emotional attachement to objects. And we didn’t want that anymore. We wanted to create more space for the things that really matter to us.

Not only things, but there’s also people with a negative impact on our lifes. We don’t need them anymore either. Surround yourself with the people you like and who have a positive impact on your life.

The Vegan Overlanders 6 Ultimate Tips to Minimalize:

1. Sell or give away things you didn’t need the last year or two. If you didn’t need it until now, you probably never will.
2. We buy what we need, and only the amount we need. So whenever you go shopping, ask yourself “Do I want it or do I need it?”. This simple question saves us a lot of money for sure. If you don’t need it, don’t buy it.
3. Whenever you buy food, cook with the food you bought until everything is used up. Especially the fresh food. Get creative and work with the ingredients you have. For example we often freeze bananas if they are too ripe and make some nice-cream later.
4. We are not really into clothing and shopping for clothes, so it’s easy for us to buy clothes only when we need some.
5. As for food, buy only as much as you need, so you don’t produce waste.
6. Surround yourself with people who have a positive impact on your life. Don’t waste your precious time and energy on negative people.

Affiliate Links to the Products Mentioned in This Blog:

• “The China Study” by T. Collin Campbell, Thomas M. Campbell II (amazon.com): https://amzn.to/2GWFEoC
• “How not to Die” by Dr. Michael Greger (amazon.com): https://amzn.to/2HNaphS