How to Green Your Home

reusable bag and phone with recycling sign on it
October 30, 2020
While not everyone can install solar panels on their roof or welcome a wind turbine in their backyard, there are a number of ways to make your home more sustainable.
 

Update your lights

  • Turn off your lights if you’re going to be out of the room for more than fifteen minutes 
  • Switch out your light bulbs for LEDs
  • Dispose of your light bulbs properly
Turning off your lights is an easy way to reduce your usage of non-renewable resources that emit carbon and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Switching your light bulbs to more sustainable options, such as light emitting diodes (LEDs), may have a higher upfront cost, but they need to be replaced less often and use up to 80% less energy. A win-win! Check out this article for energy-efficient light bulb recommendations. Light bulbs typically have small amounts of mercury in them, so take them to specific disposal sites for hazardous waste. Find a disposal site for light bulbs near you on Earth911.
 

Take more sustainable showers

  • Either don’t do other things while your shower is heating up to limit the amount of water wasted or get a ShowerStart
  • Install an EPA-certified shower head
Typically, around 20% of total water used in a shower is wasted due to the time people spend waiting for the shower to warm up, while doing other things. For every minute spent in the shower, 2.5 gallons of water are used with the average showerhead. Showering makes up around 17% of water usage in the average household, using around 1.2 trillion gallons of water for showers every year in the United States.
 
If 20% of all of that is wasted from waiting for the water to warm up, that means 200 billion gallons of water is wasted, so make sure to stay in the bathroom and touching the water to ensure that you’re there and ready to get in the shower when it’s warm, rather than walking around and doing other chores. Alternatively, you can install a ShowerStart to help with this problem. A ShowerStart lowers the flow of the water coming out of the faucet to a trickle as soon as the water reaches 95 degrees fahrenheit. Additionally, installing an EPA-certified shower head, which uses less than 2 gallons of water per minute, saves the average household 2,600 gallons of water per year.
 

Keep your heating and cooling moderate 

  • Keeping your thermostat on a higher temperature during the summer and a lower temperature during the winter helps to keep your energy consumption down.
  • Get a smart thermostat to help with temperature control.
Keeping the thermostat at around 68 degrees in the winter, and lower while you’re asleep or away from home, can lower your energy usage. In the summer, try to keep your thermostat on 78 degrees while you’re home, and warmer when you’re away. This can be done manually or with a programmable thermostat, which allows you to schedule these times of higher or lower temperatures around your schedule. Some programmable thermostats also connect to an app on your phone that allows you to track your energy usage and control your thermostat while you’re away, if you forgot to turn the heat down. Alternatively, try turning off your air conditioner entirely and cooling your home using fans and open windows.
 

Buy Fair Trade products

In order for a product to be considered Fair Trade, it must meet certain environmental, economic, and social standards, as decided by the third-party auditor FLOCERT. When there is an option, buy a Fair Trade product over others as an easy way of ensuring certain standards are met in the supply chain and creation of the product. You can check what the specific standards are for particular industries here.
 

Hang dry your clothes

Air drying your clothing can reduce the average household’s carbon footprint by 2,400 pounds per year, which is the same as 122 gallons of gasoline or 1,200 pounds of coal burned! If all Americans air dried their clothing, there would be an estimated 3.3% reduction in the residential carbon dioxide output, and 1-2% reduction in the United States’ total energy use. Running your dryer costs about $0.36 due to the cost of energy. This means, if you do one load of laundry per week, you could save $51.84 per year by simply hanging up your clothes to dry them. It also makes your clothes last longer! 
 

You know the three Rs: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle! 

  • Try to limit the amount of waste you create by eliminating certain products from your life or by reusing the packaging for another purpose.
  • If you can’t reduce or reuse, then recycle as a last resort
Find a list of ways that you can repurpose your trash here. Paper makes up around 25% of the trash that’s generated each year, but Americans only recycled 66% of the paper thrown away in 2017. In the United States in 2017, 35 million tons of plastics were generated, yet only 8.4% of plastics were recycled. Glass can be recycled over and over again to make new products and bottles, as it’s 100% recyclable, making it a more sustainable material for containers.
 
Americans dispose of around 10 million metric tons of glass in the average year, but only one-third of it is recycled. In addition to recycling your glass, try to buy items that are packaged in glass rather than plastic. Some other common materials that can be recycled: aluminum cans, cereal boxes, comic books, egg cartons, laundry detergent bottles, nails, newspapers, steel products, trash bags, and many more. Check what materials can be recycled in your area in order to ensure that your recycling is not simply thrown away due to contamination.