Do small environmental actions really matter? How everyday choices add up to change

Yesterday, I was listening to Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast. Two experts were talking about the state of the world: climate change, the war in Ukraine, where China and the US are heading, the flaws in our economic system, and how people are supposed to cope with all of it.

I was out on a refreshing walk in the woods with the dog at the same time, but I still noticed myself getting anxious. I’m guessing you know the feeling. The news comes at us from every direction, and eventually your brain lands on the same conclusion mine did last night:

“What difference does it make what I do?”

That might be the most dangerous sentence in the climate conversation. Especially when it comes from the people who actually care.

Change doesn’t stop because of the people who deny there’s a problem. It stops because of the millions who see the problem clearly, but feel too small to do anything about it.

But the concern hasn’t gone anywhere

First, I want to clear up one assumption that seems to be floating around. It’s not true that people have stopped caring.

A study published in Ambio last November surveyed a couple of thousand Ukrainians in the middle of the war. Those most severely affected by the war were 2.35 times more likely to be extremely concerned about climate change than those who had been affected the least. The crisis didn’t make that concern disappear. If anything, it made people more sensitive to it.

And PwC’s 2024 survey of 20,000 consumers across 31 countries tells a similar story: 85% say they are experiencing the effects of climate change in their everyday lives, and 80% say they are willing to pay more for more sustainable products.

People care.

We haven’t run out of concern. What we’ve started to lose is the belief that our own actions actually matter.

Let’s do the maths on one tiny environmental action

Let’s look honestly at one of those supposedly “meaningless” choices. 
Choosing one Dilute® refill instead of another single-use bottle of ready-to-use cleaner saves around 60 grams of plastic and roughly 2.5 kg of CO₂ emissions.*

That sounds almost laughably small.

The experts on the podcast were talking in gigatonnes, so 60 grams isn’t exactly going to show up in any global statistic.

On its own.

But small actions don’t stay small when we don’t make them alone.

So far, our customers, ordinary families, cleaning companies, restaurants and hotels, have avoided buying almost 200,000 ready-to-use cleaning products in plastic bottles. Depending on how you calculate it, that adds up to an estimated 200–500 tonnes fewer CO₂ emissions.**
Not one of them did that alone. Everyone did their part. For many, it was something almost ridiculously small. For some, it was already quite a bit bigger.

But together, the result is something none of them could have achieved on their own. And that’s just the customer base of one small Finnish family business.

Apply the same logic to every choice we make at the supermarket, at work and in the voting booth, and suddenly “what difference can my actions make?” starts to sound like what it really is: a false belief.

One swallow doesn’t make a summer. That part is true.

But migration isn’t carried out by some creature called “all the swallows at once”. It happens because individual birds start flying, partly because the others are flying too.

So what do you actually do with that?

Three things I took with me from yesterday’s anxiety.

1. Anxiety is a sign that you care, not a weakness. You don’t have to be ashamed of it, or try to switch it off by avoiding the news altogether. It can become fuel, but only if you give it somewhere concrete to go. Anxiety without action wears you down. Action without motivation gets forgotten. Put the two together, and you can get change.

2. Don’t choose an action based on how big it looks. Choose it based on whether you can keep doing it. One big gesture will almost always lose to a small action repeated as part of everyday life. The climate doesn’t recognise heroics. It recognises results.

3. Make what you do visible. This is the part many Finns tend to skip, because talking about our own choices can feel like showing off. But visibility is exactly how one action becomes many. No one joins a migration by looking at an empty sky.

That’s also why I write these things. Not because Dilute® refills are going to save the world. They won’t, at least not on their own.

But because every time someone sees another person doing something, it gives them a little more reason to believe that doing something matters.

You’re not the only one.

The world won’t get better because we all sit quietly on our own feeling anxious about it. It gets better when enough people do something small, for long enough, and tell someone else about it.

So I’ll leave you with this:

What’s your “too small to matter” action, at home or in your business, that you’ve put off because one person supposedly can’t make a difference?

Tell me in the comments. Maybe someone else will read it and decide to join in. That’s how the flock starts.

#climatechange #sustainability #environmentalaction #responsibility #wellbeing #madeinfinland #dilute

**) How the figure was calculated: The lifecycle emissions of one 500–650 ml bottle of ready-to-use cleaning product are estimated at 1–2.5 kg CO₂e. The lower estimate is a conservative partial calculation: production of the plastic bottle (60 g ≈ 0.2 kg CO₂e) + production of the cleaning product (≈ 0.5 kg) + packaging materials (≈ 0.05 kg) + transport of the filled product roughly 2,000 km from Europe to Finland (≈ 0.12 kg) + incineration of the plastic after use (≈ 0.19 kg). The upper estimate is based on a full lifecycle assessment of approximately 2.5 kg per bottle. 200,000 bottles × 1–2.5 kg ≈ 200–500 tonnes. As a side note, roughly three quarters of the transport emissions come from moving water around, because a ready-to-use cleaning product can be up to 90% water.