Green Living at Home
Living your life in a earth friendly manner can encompass a variety of habits and routines including what you do in your home, at work, as you travel, and when you shop. One important focus for green living is best practices that you have for your home.
Considering what you bring into your home, what you do inside your home, and what leaves your home will determine if you are living a sustainable lifestyle. Almost any person can make a greater effort to conserve water and other natural resources, or reduce waste. While one person cannot save the earth alone, each person doing his or her part will add up to a cleaner, greener earth.
Conserve
Reducing the use of water, electricity, and natural gas can be done fairly easily.
- Time your showers. Also, install a water saving shower head.
- If your toilet isn’t a newer version, place a brick in the tank to use less water each time you flush.
- Turn the thermostat down a couple of degrees (68 works well) and put on a sweater. Turn it down even lower at night and add blankets to the bed.
- Purchase a programmable thermostat which will keep the temperature lower when no one is home.
- Teach the kids to turn off lights when they leave a room.
- Investigate your home to see things that are drawing energy when they don’t need to be. DVD players, game consoles, and other unnoticeable items (particularly those with lights or clocks) may be using up energy while dormant.
- Check your insulation to be sure there are no leaks.
- Wash clothes in cold water to save energy. This is also better for the care of most garments anyway.
Reduce
Having less outgo from your home will help in living a greener lifestyle.
- Change out to long lasting light bulbs which will last several years instead of months. These also use less energy.
- Be attentive to the packaging used in what you buy. Buy products which comes in recyclable cardboard or paper instead of a less easily recyclable plastic.
- Use rechargeable batteries instead of throw away batteries.
- Wrap birthday or Christmas gifts in re-useable gifts bags instead of wasting wrapping paper. Even better, use a cloth bag which can be reused for shopping.
- Limit the amount of fuel you use by planning trips more carefully. Plan errands together, and ask a neighbor if you can help out by adding their errands in with yours to save on fuel.
Green living is the essence of everyone working together to think and act in environmentally friendly ways. There are dozens of ways one person, a family, a community, and all of the people of the world can make small changes in order to make a great impact on our ecosystem and our planet.