Tips For An Eco-Friendly Home, It's Never Too Late

Being eco-friendly is a lifestyle, and such a lifestyle begins from home.

If you are musing over building a sustainable home, retrofitting or converting your current abode into an eco-friendly one, delay no longer. Style, comfort and green living are not mutually exclusive. If you want to make your home environmentally friendly, start right from the very walls of your home.

Install Low-Flow Toilets

For many households, toilets are the primary source of water consumption in the home, comprising almost thirty percent of residential indoor water use. With this knowledge at hand, you might opt to replace your current toilet with a low-flow and water-efficient model. Otherwise, you might try to modify your toilet by installing an adjustable flapper to determine the amount of water that flows into the toilet when it is flushed. You might also instal a tank bag to lessen the amount of water to refill the tank after each flush.

By either replacing or modifying your toilet system, save on your water consumption and water bills at the same time. Low-flow toilets are constructed in order not to take out a significant amount of water from the surrounding pipes. Older toilet models use about 3.4 gallons per flush, whereas the popular low-flow toilets could save you about two gallons of water per flush. If you are a homeowner living with family members, such water savings would accumulate into actual dollar savings for every month.

Home Composting

Composting has been touted as an effective and simple method to adopt an eco-friendly lifestyle. Compost is simply organic matter undergoing decomposition with the help of microbes and worms. By converting your kitchen leftovers into compost, you can decrease the amount of waste that ends up in landfills and pollutes the environment in the form of greenhouse gas emissions.

If you are living in an apartment, you might worry that you do not have enough space to bury the compost that has been generated. Fortunately, if you have a balcony, a rooftop patio or any communal area in your apartment block, you might want to invest in a worm composter that would actively aid in the decomposition process. That being said, in a hot climate, you might have to shift your worm composters indoors in order to prevent the worms from dying due to the heat.

Don’t Just Reuse And Recycle, But Reduce!

Although recycling and reusing things might help us feel that we are contributing our part to the environment, not everything we put in the recycle bin gets recycled. In fact, due to factors such as storage time, processing costs and commodity demands, much of what we think we recycle still ends up in landfills eventually.

For example, you discard a plastic plate into a recycle bin, thinking that this plastic waste would “vanish into thin air”. Yet, the discarded plastic plate would remain in the recycle bin and other storage spaces for a period of time before it gets processed. Meanwhile, you might use another plastic plate in the meantime, only to discard it again in the recycle bin. What you are effectively doing would be to discard old stuff to use new stuff, instead of actively conserving resources. While we are not trying to discount the role of recycling in eco-conscious living, the best strategy to live an eco-friendly lifestyle at home would be to simply reduce the amount of things used!

Use Sustainable Materials For Your Green Home

Look for products that are made from renewable and natural resources or even products with recycled content. For example, you might opt for bamboo as a material for your furniture or even flooring. This is because bamboo is a fast-growing grass that is harvested under specific conditions around every five years or so.

Another instance of using sustainable materials would be to use natural-fiber carpets made from seagrass and wool instead of buying synthetically produced ones. Or better yet, furnish your home with secondhand furniture. If you are thinking of painting your home, consider using biodegradable natural paints.

Coliving

Coliving provides you with a solution to eco-friendly home living. Hmlet encourages sustainably designed spaces as well as communal sharing. Hmlet members share, swap and borrow assets. Sharing is caring when coliving, you would not face the problem of “not having enough”. Also, if you have some extras, chances are another Hmlet member would benefit from them. Nothing would go to waste then!

Eco-friendly living is a lot easier when you're surrounded by a support system and a community that thinks the same. Whether you wish for a private apartment or flat sharing option, have your pick from hundreds of rooms and apartments listed on Hmlet – you're guaranteed to find another member who's as passionate to live green. Our dedicated Hmlet team would help you find a home fuss-free so you can live life your way. Get started here.