Most people have good intentions and want to reduce their environmental impact. But beyond recycling and shopping organic, it’s hard to know what to do to make a meaningful difference during the climate crisis.
That’s where artificial intelligence can come in. While it’s important to remember that AI itself is a culprit and contributor — consuming more energy than a Google search and extra water to cool data centers — these tools can also help educate and inspire behavioral change, if used appropriately.
Chatbots like ChatGPT are more personal and interactive than a Google search, especially if you’re logged in and it has access to your history, or you’ve trained it with previous conversations.
Use ChatGPT to inspire a zero-waste lifestyle
There are a few ways you can use AI to guide you in reducing waste. I tested out three:
- Research: Ask questions and become educated about environmentally friendly households.
- Advice: Share consumption, usage and household habits.
- A plan: Ask it to create a plan for your household.
What you ask about AI will depend on where you want to reduce waste — food, deliveries, financial, plastic, tech, etc. If you want to reduce eating out, you could feed ChatGPT an Excel spreadsheet of your last 90 days of grocery and restaurant charges to see where you could save, or upload a photo of your fridge to create a weekly menu that minimizes food waste and reuses your leftovers.
If you’re unsure where to start, do some reflection of your goals first.
Become an eco-friendly household with AI
Here’s how to turn ChatGPT into your family’s environmental “coach.”
Ask questions and educate yourself
You can go straight to ChatGPT and learn about waste reduction strategies. Ask questions such as:
- What is an environmentally friendly household?
- How do I know if we waste too much?
- How can we balance replacing household items with sustainable options vs. waiting until they’re broken?
- What is the usual electricity bill and water bill for a family of three in NYC?
- What are some lesser-known tips to switch to an environmentally friendly lifestyle?
You’ll get answers like: Tracking your waste (garbage output, recycling and composting), figuring out whether your water usage and energy bills are higher than similar households, seeing if you “over-rely” on takeout or regularly throw out spoiled food, avoiding impulse buying and staying away from single-use plastics or paper towels.
What’s cool about chatbots is you’ll get ideas mid-conversation. For example, we often have to throw out cooked rice or leftover burger buns. Instead of buying brioche buns because we’re craving homemade burgers, I could ask ChatGPT for recipe ideas, so they don’t go to waste.
Yum!
Share your household habits
Next, share your family’s household habits relating to consumption, cooking, trash/recycling, plastic usage, products and areas for improvements.
This is an example prompt: “Here’s some information about us. We’re a household of two. We cook 80% of our meals at home but do enjoy eating out a couple times per week. We walk to Whole Foods most days to get items fresh for dinner, rather than meal plan. We live in a pre-war building that often has plumbing issues, so we buy 1 gallon of bottled water every day. We use the Yuka app to check the health product quality of the items we buy. We’re not big consumers but we do use Amazon Prime regularly for convenience because we don’t have a car.”
It came back to me with three ideas (that I already knew): Get a high-quality water filter, bring reusable bags to the grocery store and reduce my Amazon orders.
You often have to push ChatGPT for less generic answers. You might find one gem in there, like some hacks for keeping vegetables fresh or reusing scraps.
Our two biggest problems are buying single-use plastic and shopping on Amazon a few times a month, so that’ll be the focus of our household plan.
This exercise of chatting with AI will give you ideas, too. For example, putting all Amazon orders in a cart and ordering once a month, or bringing reusable bags to Whole Foods.
Make a plan for your household
You could ask it to create a three-month plan and focus on some big wins or ask it to come up with a list of 30 ways to reduce waste over 30 days.
You’ll have to pick the ones that are applicable to you and tell ChatGPT to generate new ideas. For example, we already use bar soap instead of a plastic soap container.
Pick the hacks that apply to your household, then feed it back into ChatGPT. Tell it “these are the ones I like” to come up with more ideas.
Keep pushing it until you have 30 solid strategies to test in your home.
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