15 Tips for Raising Baby Green for the Eco- Friendly Family!
Tuesday, September 7th, 2010
15 Ways To Paint Your House GREEN for the Eco-Friendly Family…
In these globally enlightened times, where eco awareness and healthy living choices are being adopted into so many households, it has become easier than ever to live life to the Greenest. With all the eco-friendly information available to the public at the touch of a fingertip, living an ignorant life of consumption seems careless at this point, if not downright lazy.
Below are 15 simple and easy to follow steps, aimed not only at helping our earth but also at making families reassess their wasteful habits, and hopefully changing them for the better. If you start now, your baby and kids will learn healthy ways and you, your family & friends and Mother Earth will benefit.
1. Turn Down the Thermostat!
I know it may seem silly, but turning down the dial of your thermostat by even a few degrees saves you huge energy and money in the long run. For every unnecessary degree warmer you keep your home, you increase your energy use by 6-8%. Over time, those extra degrees add up and can make for a hefty heating bill in the winter.
2. Replace Your Light bulbs with LED
Many are reluctant to invest in LED light bulbs for their homes based on their higher prices, though after even a few short months the change in your bill will make you glad you did. The normal light bulb is only 10-15% efficient, wasting 85-90% of its energy on producing heat. The LED bulb has a 90% efficiency rate and uses 75% less electricity. The facts are simple, living green means living with LED.
3. Keep Electronics Plugged into a Power Strip
Idle current, also known as phantom load or vampire power, is the wasting of your homes electricity through inactive devices that are still plugged in. Idle current accounts for 10% of your homes total energy usage, and 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Power Strips are a helpful invention in that you can plug more than one appliance into the strip and turn them all off or on easily, though recently theses Power Strips have been improved to be more energy sufficient. Using a sensory circuit the strip reads the level of current running through the socket, and if the devices enter a “Standby Mode” (30 watts or less) the strip will turn off, saving energy during periods of inactivity.
4. Shorten Showers and Baths
Baths and showers are responsible for nearly a quarter of all domestic water use. The average shower can use up to 11 liters (3 gallons) of water or more per minute! And a full bathtub can use 150 liters (40 gallons) Aside from doing your best to cut down shower time it is also worth it to invest in faucet aerators and low-flow showerheads. You can also purchase an eco-friendly front loading washer and dryer for a reduced energy expenditure when washing cloth diapers, hippie baby and other clothes! If 10,000 B.C. households switched to low-flow showerheads, the annual energy savings could power 300 Canadian homes for a year. (http://www.bchydro.com/guides_tips/green-your-home/water_guide/low_flow_shower.html)
5. Donate or Recycle Your Electronics
Electronic devices can contain many harmful materials, which is why the proper disposal of your electronics is so important. The Recycling Council of British Columbia has made it possible to dispose of your electronics at local Return-it depots for proper handling and recycling. The growing problem prompted the B.C. Government as of August 2007 to ban certain electronics from being collected by garbage pickup. Every year over 140, 000 tones of improperly disposed of electronics still manage to find their way into our landfills, and it is up to us as consumers to drastically decrease that ridiculous number.
(www.bchydro.com/guides_tips/green-your-home/electronics_guide/r_r_electronics.html)
6. Activate the “Sleep Mode” on your Computer
Sleep Mode is a low power state for your electric device that significantly saves energy consumption. It is ideal for computers as when inactive go into a kind of hibernation, but can quickly restart without the loss of data. Another power sucker from the computer is the screen saver. Originally invented to prevent images from burning into older monitors, the screen saver has now become obsolete, burning massive energy for no other purpose than a pretty picture. Simply set the sleep mode of your computer to your preferred inactivity time, it is that easy.
7. Compost
Composting is an efficient and easy way to dispose of anything from fruit and vegetable waste to coffee grounds to wood shavings. All you need is a partially shaded spot in your yard and a container with breathable holes. Compost containers vary, many available for sale in stores, but home made ones are easy to build with just some boards and chicken wire. Balance is important to a compost bin, and need a mix of one-part greens (fruit or vegetable waste, grass mulch etc.) and two parts browns (dry grass and leaves, twigs, shredded newspaper etc.) Add finished compost to the soil in your garden to give the plants extra nutrients.
8. Check Your House for Leaks
20% of all heat lost in your home is due to poor ventilation and draughts, which is why it is so important to inspect all windows and doors for air leaks. An easy way to do this is to hold a lit candle up to the window, and if it flickers you’ve found yourself a leak. A major culprit of draughts in the house is the fireplace, which can account for 14% of the cold air in your house. It is therefore very important to keep all airflow in your home under control.
Another easy way to control temperatures in your home is to simply open the blinds during the day to let natural light in, and close them at night to keep cool air from entering.
9. Switch to e-billing
The advantages of e-billing are numerous, aside from the benefit to the environment you would now have all your documents organized and available instantly from any computer in the world. Skeptics question this new tool and doubt its reliability and privacy, and its true, nothing is as safe or concrete as paper, but with the improvements of the programs the safety is steadily becoming equal.
10. Subscribe to Online Newspapers and Magazines
They seem a simple luxury, but a newspaper subscription to one household in a year can produce 250 Kilograms (550 pounds) of paper that may not even be recycled. Every year in the United States 2 billion books are published, 359 million magazines are being printed and 4 billion newspapers are being published. (Purdue Research Foundation and US Environmental Protection Agency, 1996) and we have the ability to not recycle any of it. If not yet ready to make the switch, then at the very least buy a blue bag for your newspaper to be picked up and recycled each week.
11. Thrift It
Thrift and donation stores are hugely beneficial for two primary reasons. They are a great place to drop off your old and unwanted clothes and other items, while also providing a very cost effective place to shop. Thrifting, as known by any collector, is a great way to find fun and nifty artifacts for decorating both your home and wardrobe. In fact, we regularly cruise thrift stores for wonderful vintage and hippy fabric to ‘rescue’ and upcycle into hippie baby clothes. An easy way to keep you donating is setting up a bin in your home, much like a laundry basket, to store your unwanted clothes in-between trips to the thrift store, then at the end of the month gather all items from around the house and drop them off.
12. Air Dry Whenever Possible
It may seem like a hassle, but drying both your clothes and dishes without the use of appliances can save you serious money on the bills. Aside from the refrigerator the electric clothes dryer is the main energy leech in a household, which is why using a clothesline makes all the more sense. All you need a moderately sunny spot in your yard or balcony with a breeze. They’re easy, use 0 electricity and are completely free. Another great way to use air to the best of our advantage is to turn off the dry cycle of your dishwasher and open the door and let the dishes air-dry. If not yet ready to make the shift to a clothesline there are many energy efficient washers and dryers out there. The most efficient are front load models, which fit more laundry per load and conserve much more water. Another thing to always remember is to clean your lint tray after each load, because a clean tray makes your dryer 10% more efficient.
13. Landscaping and Planting
If you are planning to landscape your yard and plant new plants it is wise to choose the plants carefully. Yes, we all love visually appealing flowers, but they become very impractical and during the harshest months of summer and winter. A great way to ensure the renewal of your garden in the spring is to pick plants that are native to the area you live and are accustomed to the terrain and weather. Aside from lasting much longer than some flimsy flowers, these plants will flourish under the lowest of water amounts, as they have been engineered to fit to your climate.
14. Use the Rain
A great and easy way to lessen your household’s water intake is to utilize your regions rainfall. A simple and hassle free way to do this is to direct the spouts of your gutters towards any nearby trees or gardens, giving them an extra dose of water every time it rains. Another easy and efficient use of your rainwater is to set up a rain barrel. This is simply a large barrel with a lid (45 gallons or so) that collects water from the eaves of your house through the downspout that can be saved and stored through all seasons. With rainwater being completely natural and chemical free it is perfect for use on your plants and lawn and is absolutely free! There are even rain barrels with taps attached that can be connected to a hose for easy use.
15. RECYCLE
Recycle, recycle, recycle! This is the final and most effective step you can take to make your house a green house. The best way to keep yourself recycling is to have designated and accessible bins or boxes to keep your papers, plastics and returns in order. Also get in the habit of thinking carefully before throwing something into the garbage. What is it made of? Can you reuse it? Compost it? Recycle it? One ton of recycled paper can save 17 trees from being produced into paper. If everyone recycles just one issue of their newspaper per week it would save more than half a million trees in just one week. The proofs of the positive effects from recycling on our earth are endless, which is why it is the single most important thing anyone can do to save our planet.
This concludes our list of tips for making your house more Green, and I truly hope I have at the very least made you think about the impact we as a people have had and will continue to have on our planet. We cannot continue living as we have done, with our blind consumption and mindless harvesting of irreplaceable resources. We must change our ways now, or be forced to change in the years to come.
Be cool hippie babies,
Delaney Ryan ~ Hippy Grandma Eco Love “Fresh Age” writer & primo creative hippie wild child!
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