Building Sustainable Shopping Habits: A Guide

Sustainable shopping can sometimes feel like it’s only for the wealthy. It can be expensive, time-consuming, and super inconvenient to live your life sustainably. Glou Beauty is here to help by sharing our top four easiest sustainable shopping habits that can improve your shopping experience while reducing your environmental footprint.

1. Shop and rehome unwanted products on Glou Beauty Marketplace

Glou is on a mission to get you the beauty products you love while greatly reducing waste. Our main driver is sustainability and helping consumers shop guilt-free. Let’s say I bought a blush that I loved in store but didn’t look great in natural light. Taking it back to the store would mean that blush would be thrown away. So instead, I sanitize the blush and list it on Glou for someone else to purchase! Glou’s step-by-step guide makes it super easy to list unloved makeup and skincare goodies for someone else to find. Glou also accepts brand-new products.

Before running to Sephora to pick up a new product, check Glou’s marketplace to see if your favorites are on sale. By shopping second-hand, you can save money and reduce your environmental footprint! 2. Place fewer, larger online orders

Placing frequent, single-item online orders is way less sustainable than shopping in person. Not only do we create more packaging waste when we make smaller, more frequent orders, but we also increase the amount of carbon emissions required for delivery.

However, larger, less frequent online orders are actually more sustainable than shopping in person. According to ThredUp’s Fashion Footprint Calculator, “Shopping online has, on average, a 60 percent lower carbon impact than shopping in-store… Nearly 85 percent of in-store’s impact comes from driving there.” In light of this fact, major online retailers like Amazon give customers an option to set a fixed day for all of their deliveries. This helps reduce packaging waste and carbon emissions.

3. Consider using services like Wren or Shop Pay to help offset carbon emissions and reduce your carbon footprint

Shop Pay is a hybrid payment and shipment tracking service that vows to reduce and offset the carbon emissions of every order placed using the service. It’s a division of Shopify, which is a popular order management service for independent businesses. In Shopify’s outline of their carbon offset plan they write, “To be clear, offsets are not a replacement for taking actions to reduce our carbon footprint—they are a last resort to compensate for emissions we can’t currently avoid.” No solution is perfect, but trying to make an impact wherever we can adds up to meaningful progress.

Wren is a service that helps you offset your entire carbon footprint, not just that of your online orders. When you sign up, you’re asked a series of questions that help Wren calculate your carbon footprint. Wren then gives you information about where and how you can reduce your carbon footprint. That said, Wren costs around $21 per month in addition to any donations you make through the app. Essentially, you pay for the convenience of having information about your carbon footprint and sustainability curated for you.

4. Seek out brands that make sustainability their focus

Supporting sustainable brands really is an easy way to build sustainability into your daily life. Fortunately, we have a shopping guide just for you! Check out this article to learn more about the sustainable brands we’re watching in 2023. If you must buy first hand, no judgement. Sometimes it’s necessary. But it’s important to know where your money goes after you’ve got the product in your hand. Brands like Caudalie and Glow Recipe are transparent when it comes to their sustainability achievements and goals.

Why We Care

Whether you’re new to sustainability or an expert, adopting easy sustainable habits can make a big impact on climate change. Glou wants to make sustainable shopping accessible to everyone by connecting shoppers with easy-to-adopt sustainable habits. By shopping and rehoming your makeup and skincare products on Glou Beauty Marketplace, placing fewer, larger online orders, using carbon offset services like Wren and Shop Pay, and supporting sustainable brands, we can all reduce our environmental footprint while improving our shopping experience.