How To Live An Eco Friendly Lifestyle At Home
What Is Eco-Friendly Living?
Having an eco-friendly lifestyle means living a life that is environmentally-friendly where you work towards protecting and conserving nature and polluting less while reducing the carbon footprint. It's not as hard or scary as it sounds and you might even be actioning some of my tips already. If you're new to all this and you want to start making some changes then don't feel like you have to go full kilter straight away. I would definitely recommend making one or two easy changes a month until you get into the swing of things. As Anne-Marie Bonneau, author of the One Green Planet blog and Zero Waste Chef, stated ‘We don’t need a handful of people doing zero waste perfectly. We need millions of people doing it imperfectly.’ A sentiment I wholeheartedly agree with.
My aim with The Eco Friendly Living Co is to encourage families to ditch their single use plastic household goods for more sustainable alternatives so I've put together this beginners guide to eco-friendly living to help any newbies,
Eco-Friendly Living Tips
Below are a few tips on how you can easily implement environmentally friendly changes in your home and quite often they will also save you money.
1) My first easy peasy eco tip is to make sure you’re recycling properly. Do you know what recycling services your local council offers? Our local council does not offer a food waste recycling service so we would have to put food waste in our general waste bin. However, this is taken to landfill where it could take years to decompose so we opt to compost our food and garden waste at home.
On the subject of recycling, did you know that waste that is spoilt by food cannot be recycled? Not only that but it also contaminates clean recycling around it. Make sure you clean any food packaging before recycling but if you can’t save it (like greasy pizza boxes) put it in your general waste bin.
Other waste that cannot be recycled includes kitchen roll and tissue paper. As it is already recycled paper it cannot be recycled again as the fibres are too short and will result in poor pulp in the recycling process.
2) Turn your vegetable peelings and garden waste into compost and save money when it comes to growing your plants! See our blog on composting here.
3) Only put the dishwasher or washing machine on once they are full. Half-empty washes just waste energy & money. If you don't use a dishwasher then even better! Filling up a sink with water costs less and saves energy.
When it comes to washing clothes, put your wash on at 30 degrees or under. This can save up to 75% of the energy used on a typical wash! It will also save you money. Try not to go the other way though and overfill as this won’t clean your clothes properly.
4) Use energy-efficient light bulbs, these typically use between 25-80% less energy than normal light bulbs!
5) Leaving appliances on standby accounts for up to 10% of residential power use. Turn off what you can!
6) Don’t throw any cooking water if you can reuse it. Reuse it to water the plant's so you don’t need to run the tap again and on a warm day, water your plants first thing in the morning or last thing at night as the water will just evaporate in the heat.
7) Using tap water rather than bottled water will save you so much money. 90% of the cost of a bottle of water is the plastic itself! If you don’t like your tap water then invest in a water filter- it will taste so much better and it will save you so much money compared to buying bottled water.
For more tips on eco-friendly living in the UK head over to this blog I posted a few weeks ago with lots more tips that will also save you money.
Make The Switch To Eco-Friendly Products
Other ways of making your home more eco-friendly is to swap your single-use plastic products for eco-friendly alternatives, and again, some of these swaps can also save you money in the long run. I recently worked out that by ditching the disposable face wipes for reusable make-up remover pads, like the ones below, you could save around £50 in just one year!
There are eco-conscious swaps for almost every household product so I’m just going to list a handful of everyday products.
Eco-Friendly Bathroom
A lot of people start their eco journey in the bathroom as there are so many environmentally friendly swaps you can make in this room. Straight forward and popular swaps include bamboo toothbrushes and cotton buds that are just as good (if not better) and used in the same way as their plastic counterparts. To completely ditch the use of plastic bottles in the bathroom consider trying shampoo, conditioners, soaps and body washes that are in bars rather than bottles. Simply lather them up under water before use. Just think of all the plastic bottles you’ve saved from ending up in landfills! For more eco-friendly bathroom products just check out our bathroom section on the website.
Eco-Friendly Cleaning
When you look at the cleaning products on the supermarket shelves most of them are packaged or contain plastic. A great eco-friendly cleaning alternative are the plastic-free concentrated water-soluble cleaning sachets such as the ones from Iron & Velvet or Ocean Saver. They are predominantly plant-based solutions so are kinder to you and your home but tough on dirt and grime. Simply drop the sachets into a reused plastic cleaning bottle that you’ve filled with warm water and give it a quick shake before using it for the first time.
Eco friendly cleaning equipment is often made of bamboo, loofah, coconut or cotton such as these Ecococonut scourers made from the outside of a coconut, a product that would normally end up in a landfill. All of these materials are completely compostable after use is exhausted.
Eco-Friendly Lunch
Instead of wrapping sandwiches and lunches in cling film or using plastic bags consider swapping to Beeswax Food Wraps. Beeswax food wraps are reusable wraps that can be used over and over again for up to a year, after which they can be composted so they are a zero-waste product.
Plastic lunchboxes can be swapped for bamboo or rice husk (a by-product of the rice industry) that are just as hard-wearing and useful but can be composted once use is exhausted.
On the website we also stock lunch bags made out of recycled plastic bottles and they come in these amazing designs- Cloud Face, Best In Show, Space & Unicorn. If you can't swap to a product that is made from a sustainable materials then recycled materials are your next best bet.
Keep an eye on our blog for lots more tips on how to live a more eco-friendly lifestyle. I’d also highly recommend the following straight-talking guides to eco-friendly living:
Save The World: There Is No Planet B by Louise Bradford
Give A Sh*t. Do Good. Live Better. Save The Planet by Ashlee Piper