Those who spent decades composting, saving water, buying local, and generating less waste do not suddenly lose interest in those efforts when they turn seventy or eighty. Yet in reality, it becomes more difficult to maintain a sustainable lifestyle as mobility decreases, energy wanes, and daily activities become more complicated. It’s not that older adults don’t want to continue living sustainably; it’s that their living situation may not allow it.
Once someone moves to a care facility, they’ve ceded control over such choices. Institutions rely on efficiency and standardization, which rarely cater to independent values for sustainability. Meals are pre-packaged, cleaning supplies are whatever is on hand, recycling potential is mixed (or nonexistent), and residents have no say over energy consumption or minimization strategies. For someone who’s spent decades controlling their contribution to the environment, that’s disheartening.
The Answer is Aging in Place
Aging in place allows for the consistency of effective systems. Someone can keep their garden, their compost, their thermostat adjusted based on need as opposed to overarching building limitations, and their shopping and administrative choices intact. These are not small feats when someone has spent most of their adult lives considering their environmental impact.
But the complication is that they will need enough support to age in place without sacrificing their contributions. Relatives who don’t live in the area or work full-time are not necessarily able to give the kind of consistent support needed. Instead, professional support becomes requisite instead of optional.
Working with providers such as a home care agency Philadelphia or similar local organizations allows seniors to receive assistance while staying in their own homes where they maintain control over daily choices. Professional caregivers can be instructed on household practices – using specific cleaning products, following composting procedures, shopping at farmers markets, or handling recycling properly. The senior remains in charge of how things are done rather than adapting to institutional protocols.
Environmental Impact
Additionally, there’s an environmental impact of aging at home versus in a facility. Institutions employ large-scale resource management – kitchens for feeding everyone, laundry for all linens/sheets, climate control for expansive buildings, parking lots filled with employees’ cars. While per capita might seem efficient in resource consumption, it’s excessive.
Aging at home utilizes existing housing stock to avoid new construction. A caregiver can visit three different seniors on one block to reduce the transportation impact of everyone driving to a centralized location. Meals come from community efforts (what’s in the home already or from already-established relationships). Waste goes into existing municipal possibilities. Energy usage exists within residential parameters instead of commercial.
While home care isn’t always the most sustainable option, it provides the opportunity to maintain lower-impact lifestyles that institutional settings often cannot provide.
Daily Impact
The little daily impacts that employ a reduced environmental impact are the very things that become problematic when one needs physical assistance. Carrying compost out to the bin, sorting recycling correctly, remembering reusable bags to drive down waste efforts, maintaining a garden that’s reducing food waste – those all require physical stamina that may be declining from years of use.
But with the proper support, these efforts can continue. A caregiver can handle the compost and recycling while having the senior explain how their strategies have worked best for them over the years. The garden needs maintenance, food waste must be dropped into the right receptacle, shopping can still occur at particular places based on values. These values are maintained even when someone can no longer do all the heavy lifting themselves through any number of strategies.
Community Connection
Furthermore, sustainability has always been about supporting local communities and economies. By staying in a neighborhood for decades instead of re-locating to a facility, people maintain those connections. Local businesses get their long-time patrons, neighbors help each other out, communities get sustained older populations who often know everything there is to know about an area since they’ve lived there the longest.
Home Care keeps employment localized. Caregivers tend to work in their own communities without commuting to a suburban campus-type facility, money remains more localized than in larger settings with larger systemic markets, which sustainability advocates prefer for more community-based economies.
The Ideal Picture for Home-Based Care
Finally, environmental values do not diminish with age. Instead, they just need the proper support structure to promote value systems that have existed for decades, even through change. Aging in place with proper support helps maintain autonomy over daily decisions more so than institutionalized care can ever provide. To people who’ve spent years trying to reduce their environmental impact footprint to create a life built around such efforts, it makes sense that even as they age, they would want to continue living in a manner that’s familiar – one that doesn’t diminish quality of life. Instead of comfortability, it’s about avoiding hypocrisy when living by values that have consistently made sense for them for so long.
The option to age in place while keeping control over sustainable practices makes a real difference in quality of life for environmentally conscious seniors. It’s one more reason why home-based care arrangements continue gaining ground over facility-based alternatives.