Two Easy Ways to Green Your Home
- Published on March 29th, 2016 by Guest Contributor
Sustainability is not a “trend” or a movement. It is the only way to ensure that future generations won’t inherit a planet that resembles a smoking landfill. Most people assume that doing good by our planet will inevitably make their life more expensive and more difficult. It is vitally important that we fight this misconception and provide solutions that allow people to build a sustainable lifestyle from the ground up.
Most of this starts in our homes, but there are two important tips that many overlook when working to green your home.
If every American home implemented the following two steps we could prevent millions of tons of plastic from ending up in a landfill, eliminate the unnecessary use of tens of millions of barrels of oil a year, and collectively save homeowners hundreds, possibly even thousands of dollars a year.
1. Buy a water filter
2. Regularly change your air filter
Maintaining clean air filterscan result in 10-15% lower heating and cooling bills. A dirty filter can cause restricted airflow and reduce efficiency. Imagine if everyone took the simply step of regularly changing their air filters? We could reduce the energy used to heat and cool tens of millions of homes by 10-15%. The reduction in carbon footprint would be enormous.
Is there a better representative for excess and waste than bottled water? I would like to know if there is. A year supply of high quality water filters will cost about $40. Let’s examine just how wasteful this very popular habit is.
Let’s say a household goes through a modest estimate of 800 bottles of water a year; at a conservative estimate of 20 cents per bottle, it still costs you an outrageous $200 per year. Not to mention each bottle has a plastic weight of about .05 lbs, leading to massive environmental and health hazards.
If we could encourage all those households who still rely heavily on plastic water bottles to switch to water filters, we could eliminate hundreds of millions of pounds of plastic waste every year. Not to mention the millions of barrels of oil required to make said plastic.
Some of the best ways to live green are right in front of us. And in many instances, when our planet saves, so does your wallet. Simply eliminating all waste bottles and changing your air filter can save you hundreds of dollars a year, while also reducing your carbon footprint and the sickening amount of plastic waste in our landfills.
Source: https://greenlivingideas.com/201 ... to-green-your-home/
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