Ep. 51: Sustainable Living in the Suburbs — Challenges and Opportunities

Sarah Robertson-Barnes (00:01.154)
Can you be sustainable in the suburbs? Well, yes and no. The suburbs were designed around cars, convenience, and consumption, not sustainability. But what if they can also be reimagined as some of the most important places for climate action and community resilience to happen? Welcome to Sustainable in the Suburbs, a podcast for the eco-curious who want to live a greener life and are looking for a place to start. I’m your host, Sarah Robertson Barnes.

A soccer mom with a station wagon and a passion for sustainable living. Each week I’ll bring you practical tips and honest conversations to help you waste less, save money, and make small, doable shifts that actually fit your real life. Because sustainable living doesn’t have to be perfect to matter, and you don’t have to do it all to make a difference. Hello and welcome back to Sustainable in the Suburbs, the podcast where we start where we are, use what we have, and live a little greener, one small shift at a time. My name is Sarah.

And I’m happy to be spending a little time with you today. Before we get into today’s episode, just a quick reminder that this show is now bi-weekly with new episodes out every other Tuesday. So please make sure that you’re following the show wherever you’re listening today so that you don’t miss an episode. And if you’ve been enjoying the podcast, one of the best ways to support it is to leave a rating and a review, share an episode on social media, or click the support the show link in the show notes.

You’ll also find links there to the blog, episode transcripts, my newsletter, and everything else. And if we’re not already connected on social media, you can find me at Sarah Robertson Barnes. Okay, so if you live in the suburbs and care about sustainability, you probably already know what this feels like. You bring your reusable bags, compost your food scraps, shop secondhand, reduce food waste, and care deeply about climate action.

while still living in a place where getting almost anywhere requires a car and where consumption and convenience are built right into the way daily life works. So that’s where I want to start today. Because so much of sustainable living content still focuses on what we do inside our own homes. What we buy, what we waste, what we eat, how we move through the world, how we raise our kids, what we normalize in our families, all of that matters. And that’s where this bigger question comes in.

Sarah Robertson-Barnes (02:23.62)
Because our choices are shaped by the places we live. They are shaped by towns designed for cars instead of walkability, by a lack of public transit or bike lanes, by what kinds of stores we have access to, and by what our municipalities prioritized. Were our communities built for connection or just for consumption? So today I want to talk about sustainability as something bigger than what we buy.

And instead, what becomes possible when we think about the suburbs as places where climate action can happen, where community resilience can grow, and where ordinary people who already care can help shape what comes next.

This is why my answer to the question, can you be sustainable in the suburbs, is both yes and no. Yes, you can make sustainable choices here, and many of us already are. You can compost and thrift and bring your own containers, use your buy nothing group, be reducing your food waste, and do all kinds of meaningful things in your own home. And also, we are living in communities that were for the most part designed around something different: car dependency.

Many suburban communities were built with the exclusive expectation that people would be driving. Driving is the default. It’s the way people are expected to move through daily life. You drive to school, to the grocery store, to the park, to the community center, to your kids’ practice, their friend’s house, to an appointment across town. You’re driving. And sometimes the distance is not even that far. It’s the road design or the lack of sidewalks or the lack of safe bike lanes or transit that technically exists but doesn’t come often enough.

Or go where you need it to go. So the car becomes the thing that makes daily life work. And that has a real impact on how sustainable living feels in practice. Because when a place is built around driving, it shapes what choices are available to people. It shapes how easy it is to walk, whether biking feels safe or not, whether kids can go places on their own, whether transit is a realistic option, and how much land is used for parking.

Sarah Robertson-Barnes (04:30.128)
Instead of housing and gardens and trees and gathering spaces or leaving it as wildlife habitat. It also shapes who gets included. If a community only really works for people who drive, that affects kids, seniors, disabled folks, people who cannot afford a car, people who do not want to drive everywhere, and people who simply want other options. That’s only one piece of it. Suburban life is also built around private space.

Individual homes, individual lawns, individual driveways, individual backyards, which can reinforce feeling isolated and of course lead to NIMBYism. But when so much of life is organized around private spaces, it can be harder to build the shared spaces and casual connections that make communities feel connected. Then you add in plazas, big box stores, constant Amazon deliveries, on-demand everything, packed family schedules, and

culture of convenience where buying more, upgrading more, renovating more, keeping up with the Joneses can become very normal very quickly. And so this is where my yes and no answer starts to make more sense. Yes, you can absolutely live more sustainably in the suburbs and the built environment around you may also make that more difficult than it should be. When we talk about sustainable living, we’re often talking about personal choices

And I talk about those choices all the time on the show. What we buy, what we waste, how we eat, how we move through the worlds, what we normalize, and all of that matters. But those choices happen inside systems and inside built environments and routines and schedules, communities, and the limits that we have on our time, our money, safety, infrastructure, and municipal decisions. And once we understand that these communities were designed this way, then we can start asking.

What else could they become?

Sarah Robertson-Barnes (06:29.635)
In discussions about sustainability online, the suburbs often get talked about as though they are all the same. Same houses, same lawns, same politics, same demographics, same values, same relationship to consumption. And that is just not true. The suburbs are not a monolith. So I live in the greater Toronto area where every suburb is different, and even within those suburbs, different neighborhoods can be completely different from each other.

Yes, there is sprawl, but they aren’t all McMansions on giant lifeless lawns. We have communities built around ravines and forests and wetlands and small lakes and conservation areas. We have older neighborhoods with newer subdivisions, apartments and condos. We have places with more mature tree cover and places where the opportunities for native gardens are ripe. We have neighborhoods with different kinds of housing, different levels of transit access.

Different walkability, different barriers, and different opportunities. And we also have incredibly diverse and multicultural communities, which I think is one of the greatest strengths of living in a place like the GTA. There are so many opportunities to participate in each other’s communities and learn from each other. Cultural events, food festivals, markets, community celebrations, religious and seasonal festivals, local gardening projects, different groups, mutual aid, neighborhood events.

These are all opportunities to not just observe, but to participate and connect with each other. And that matters for sustainability because there is so much knowledge already there. There are cultural practices around using what you already have, sharing resources, wasting less, cooking from scratch, preserving food, repairing, living in relationship with the land and the seasons, caring for our elders.

And for our children and thinking about community beyond just your own household. A lot of these things cannot be packaged as sustainable living, but they really are at the heart of it. And I think that’s why it is such a mistake to count the suburbs out of the climate conversation. We are not one thing. We are not one demographic or one lifestyle or income level or set of values. And it’s where most of us live. We are also the people who work in schools.

Sarah Robertson-Barnes (08:53.225)
And hospitals and small businesses and corporations and local government, provincial government, the federal government, nonprofits, and conservation authorities. We are parents and neighbors and volunteers and voters. And we are people who care about our kids’ schools and the local parks and what happens to the green spaces around us. And all of these people can be influenced. There are already people doing this work.

Both formally and informally in all kinds of ways. There are people planting community gardens, pollinator gardens, sharing tools, organizing cleanups, protecting green spaces, showing up at town council, running community groups, passing things along, teaching kids, starting conversations, and making lower waste habits more normalized and visible. And that’s what we should be paying attention to.

Because suburban sustainability is not just one household trying to buy the right things or make the right swaps. It’s also what happens when people bring what they know and what they value and what they already practice into community. And once we look at it that way, sustainability becomes much bigger than just buying greener stuff.

Sarah Robertson-Barnes (10:08.016)
So much of quote unquote sustainable living is now marketed back to us as something that we can buy. And this is where we need to be careful because greener products, better swaps, bigger upgrades, refill systems, solar panels, EVs, beautiful pantries, all with the matching jars can start to become the main image of sustainable living. And again, these things matter and they can make a real difference. But when sustainability is presented mostly as shopping or an aesthetic,

I think it leaves too many people out. And it also misses so much of what actually shapes our daily lives. Most of the time, sustainable living is much more ordinary than that. It’s in what we eat and what we waste, what we choose to repair or borrow, what we share with each other, what we grow, how we move through our communities, and how we show up for each other. And that matters because access looks different for everyone. What’s doable is going to depend on your budget.

And your time and your housing and your access to transportation, your schedule, and what’s actually available where you live. And of course, what works in one household will not work in another. So sustainability is not just what we buy, it’s also about what we normalize. And there are so many ways to participate. Some of the most meaningful things we can do are completely free. Some are small and expensive changes that can save money over time.

And some are bigger investments that happen slowly and they make sense when they’re available to us. So I’d like to start talking about some free things you can do because those are often the ones that get overlooked. I wanted to start with the free things we can do to live more sustainably because they’re often treated like the small stuff. But some of the most meaningful things we can do are completely free. And most of it just starts with paying attention. So what do we already have?

What are we buying again and again? What food needs to be eaten first? What could I borrow or repair or share or just skip altogether? So that looks like things like using the public library is a phenomenal free resource in your community. Joining a buy nothing group or starting one if you don’t already have one, walking or cycling where you can. Carpooling for errands with a friend is actually really fun. You can pick up litter.

Sarah Robertson-Barnes (12:35.728)
You can meal plan in your own house to reduce food waste and reuse packaging, compost if you can, or join a local group about an issue that matters to you. Free does not mean insignificant. It often means accessible and repeatable and the kind of thing that becomes community culture. And in the suburbs where we often feel very isolated, that really matters because once more people start borrowing before buying.

or offering things out for free before throwing them away, talking with each other about food waste and caring about green space, just paying attention to local decisions, then sustainability starts to move beyond just one household. It becomes something we practice in community.

Some changes we make to live more sustainably do cost a little bit of money, but they are still rooted in the same idea, paying attention to what we keep buying and what keeps getting thrown away, and what small systems would make this lower waste choice easier to keep doing. And when I say cost a little or relatively inexpensive, everyone’s budget is different. So what could feel like a small purchase for one household may not for another, but this is often where saving money and reducing waste overlap.

So a lot of it comes down to looking at the things you’re buying over and over again and asking, is there another way to do this? Is there something reusable or secondhand or shared that could take its place? So for us, that has looked like investing up front in some key reusables like our lunch containers and the glass reusable food storage that we use in our fridge and freezer here at home. buying clothes and sports gear secondhand first.

I learned how to do some simple mending techniques, which had a couple of little things I had to buy to start doing that. starting a veggie garden. So that can be some upfront cost. And then of course it once you get into it, you can start sharing seeds and seedlings, what have you, using food rescue apps to supplement your groceries. we found some canning equipment secondhand and so on. So they are small changes, but they do create systems.

Sarah Robertson-Barnes (14:47.822)
And once the system is in place, you’re not constantly restocking the disposable version, the paper towels or the Ziploc bags, the new clothes for every season, whatever the thing in your house that keeps getting used up and replaced. This is where something like a clothing swap can really work well. It’s practical because people get things they need without buying new, but it also builds a culture of sharing within your own circle. So you can go back and check out episode 36.

For tips on how to host a clothing swap. And I will put that in the show notes for you too. The point is, it’s not just buying a bunch of eco products, it’s about making the lower waste choice easy to keep doing. So sometimes a small upfront cost helps you stop making that same purchase over and over again. And that’s the eco-frugal piece: less waste, less spending, fewer things coming into the house, and a little less mental load around constantly replacing things.

And honestly, opting out of these things can sometimes be hard because it’s what everybody does around you. And when I start chatting with other folks about how we don’t use paper towels or, that’s my beeswax wrap. Yeah, we don’t use saran wrap. It’s interesting the responses that you get from people, but for the most part, I find that folks are really interested. So that’s neat. Keep an eye out for opportunities to do that.

There are also the larger changes, the things that cost more and take more planning or happen slowly over time. And these are often things that many of us maybe picture when we hear sustainable living in the suburbs, solar panels on the house, an electric vehicle in the driveway, heat pumps, big home energy upgrades. But these things can be very expensive and out of reach. And to be quite honest, they are for us right now. We do not have solar panels.

We do not have a heat pump yet. We do not have an EV. But we have done other things over time. We’ve replaced all the windows and insulation in our 80s house. We’ve installed a smart thermostat. We’ve built the raised bed gardens in the backyard, got a rain barrel, and we’re slowly removing parts of the lawn and replacing them with native plants that make sense for us and for the space. But these things take time and money.

Sarah Robertson-Barnes (17:10.005)
And if you can do them, you should, but they’re not the only way to make meaningful change. So when we look at all of those pieces together, suburban sustainability is not one thing. It’s what happens inside our homes and then in our yards and in our neighborhoods. And those choices start to connect with other people. That’s when it becomes more about our individual households. It becomes about community resilience.

Community resilience can sound big, but it actually starts very small. It really is the old cliche of knocking on your neighbor’s door to borrow a cup of sugar. Because sustainability is also about relationships and neighborhoods and local systems. It has to move beyond our individual households and into our communities. Living in the suburbs can often feel isolating, and the design can definitely make that feel true.

Private homes, private yards, people moving from one place to the next in private cars. You get the picture. But we also have real networks here. Our schools and sports teams, public libraries and parks, and neighborhood groups and community gardens, buy nothing groups, our faith communities and cultural communities, conservation groups, local business associations, and other kids’ activities that we always seem to be going to.

These are places where people already connect and those networks can become part of climate resilience. This might look like sharing tools instead of everyone buying the same thing. We don’t all need to have a lawnmower and a ladder and a drill. We could be swapping clothing or sporting equipment. So I think I’ve told the story before of how my kids soccer club just has a big shoe rack inside the sports dome, and you can just put your old soccer boots on it and take a pair that fits your kid free.

No questions asked. And that keeps that in use and out of the landfill and helps somebody out. We should be checking on our neighbors, supporting local farms if we can, preserving our green space, growing and sharing food, planting native species in our gardens, building community gardens, and sharing our extra garden produce with each other, and even organizing around our schools. It can also

Sarah Robertson-Barnes (19:29.782)
look like making our low-waist habits visible and ordinary. Because when people see you with your reusable containers or your beeswax wrap and your cloth napkin, when they see you borrowing instead of buying, wearing things that have been visibly mended, showing up when a local issue matters, it just becomes part of the culture around you. A lot of this might never get labeled as climate action. It might just look like being a good neighbor or saving money, helping someone out.

Joining that group chat, going to a clothing swap, or posting, hey, does anyone want these tomato plants before I compost them? But these things matter because they build relationships and trust and they make it easier for people to rely on each other a little more. So, like I keep saying, suburban sustainability is not only what happens inside your home, it’s what happens between homes. It’s what we share and what we repair and what we grow, what we protect.

What makes it easier for each other and then we can show up for each other. If you want a village, you have to be a villager. We have to work together, like really work together. And that means we have to talk about local politics.

If we care about sustainability, and we do, we have to care about the systems shaping our local communities. When we talk about climate action, I think a lot of us, our brains just jump straight to the federal level or maybe the provincial and state level, because that is where the big policy conversations seem to happen. And obviously these levels of governments matter and can have a massive impact. But if we’re talking about the policies that affect much of our daily lives,

So much of that happens at the municipal level. Your town or city has the biggest say in the things you use and move through every day. The sidewalks, the bike lanes, the roads, the tree canopy, the parks, the stormwater systems, your local waste diversion, recycling garbage compost, your community centers, your public library, what things get zoned, the development decisions, paving over.

Sarah Robertson-Barnes (21:39.77)
Every farm, it feels like. The they approve that. what about safe routes to school for kids, the transit options, the water and wastewater systems? Those things may not sound exciting, but they do shape what sustainable living looks like in real life. Whether you can walk or bike somewhere safely, whether there’s shade on your street which helps to cool our homes, whether wetland is protected or paved over, if your community has green space.

Or wildlife corridors or waste diversion systems that actually make sense. So when we talk about reimagining the suburbs, local politics has to be part of that conversation. And I know that can sound intimidating, but remember your local politicians not only work for you, they are your neighbors. They live in the community, they use those same roads and parks and services and public spaces.

And at this level, you can often make your voice actually heard. You can go in and meet with them. That could also mean just showing up at a town council meeting on your own or with a few friends or with that local group that you’ve joined. It might mean joining an organization that’s already doing the work or signing that petition. Write them emails. Call their office directly. I’ve started doing that with my member of parliament. I call the office once a week.

Organizing through a school community or through your child sports team or just connecting with people who care about the same issue, there’s power in numbers. And this is where the change can become really visible. So here in my town, local residents, including my bird group, lobbied council for years to protect two wetland grain spaces. And this is why we can all enjoy the Arboretum and the David Tomlinson Nature Reserve now.

It’s also why the wildlife whose habitat was preserved can continue to live here too. That’s the kind of thing I mean when I say suburban climate action has to be bigger than what we buy. It has to also be about what we protect and what we’re willing to show up for. The way the suburbs are are not fixed. People made decisions that shape them this way. People are still making decisions that shape them now, and people can help shape what comes next.

Sarah Robertson-Barnes (24:01.55)
So this brings us back to the bigger question of reimagining the suburbs and what kind of community do we want to build together? So suburbs are not static. They are evolving places, growing, shaped by people and decisions and habits and policies and cultures. And they have been shaped by sprawl and car dependency and consumption, and a lot of decisions that many of us would probably make differently now, or at least question more carefully.

They’re also full of possibility. I often think about when I’m sitting in my backyard, all the fences that separate our little rectangles. What if we took those all down? And we build raised beds and long tables. Maybe that’s a little too utopian of a daydream, but there is possibility because when we talk about climate action in the suburbs, we are talking about the places where so many of us live.

And the people who live here are central to the conversation because we are the ones living within these systems every day. We are the ones driving on the roads and trying to use the sidewalks and noticing when trees are coming down and where the bike lanes are disappearing and where the farm is turning into a subdivision, where the waste systems work and where they do not. And so I really do think that a better vision is achievable. More trees, more shade.

More safe walking and bike routes, more gardens, more shared resources, more locally grown food, more wildlife habitat, more care, more connection, and more people showing up for each other. None of it is impossible, but it will take investing in each other. It will take getting involved in local politics and community groups and asking people to pay attention, talking to each other and showing up when something matters.

It will take moving each other and caring about what happens beyond our own front doors. And because so many of us live here and work here, we raise our families here, we vote here, we can build community here. And what happens in suburban communities matters enormously. What you do matters. And when you build with other people, we can really begin to change things. And that is so hopeful to me because there are so many places to begin.

Sarah Robertson-Barnes (26:26.232)
And we get to be a part of what comes next.

Sarah Robertson-Barnes (26:31.224)
So for this week’s one small shift, choose one free action that connects your household to your community. So that could mean joining or posting in your local Buy Nothing group. Borrow something instead of buying it. Go to the public library, pick up litter on a walk, look up when your next town council meeting is or when your next local elections are. Find out who your local ward counselor is.

Go to your municipality website and look at the recycling rules again. Talk to your neighbor, say hello, say good morning. Look up one local issue that is related to something happening with a development in town. Just choose one thing, one action that reminds you sustainability is something you practice and share and build where you live. Because the suburbs were designed, and that means they can be redesigned. Until next time, start where you are.

Use what you have and live a little greener.

Thanks for tuning in to Sustainable in the Suburbs. Every small step adds up, and I’m so glad we’re doing this together. If you enjoyed this episode, please make sure to follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. You can find me at Sustainableinthuburbs.com or at Sarah Robertson Barnes on all the things. Until next time, start where you are, use what you have, and live a little greener. This podcast is produced, mixed, and edited by Cardinal Studio.

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