Five Tips for a Green Household

Home is where life starts, and what better way to raise environmental awareness and keep your family healthy and happy than making your household environment-friendly? Going green at home is also economical — reducing, reusing, and recycling can help you cut back on extra costs, and doing this isn’t as difficult as one would think. It just takes a little discipline and practice to get into it. You just need to get it started together with your family. The next thing you know, it’s become a lifestyle. Here are five things to live by if you want your household to go green:

1. Conservation is key. Rule of thumb: if it’s not necessary to use something, don’t. Turn off the lights, keep faucets shut when not in use. Same goes with electric appliances and other devices. Electricity and water are valuable (not to mention expensive) resources, and it is wise to conserve their use.
2. You gotta sort it out! Don’t just throw your trash — sort it out as you do. Start using separate bins for recyclables and for perishable items. This practice makes it easier to identify items that can be reused or remade into new things. Plus, it makes taking out the trash more efficient — you can have a bag for regular garbage collection, and another bag to send to a recycling facility near your home. 
3. Make environment-friendly purchases. There are a lot of greener, environment-friendly options in the market nowadays, and making the choice to buy these is good practice. Check the packaging or label — these usually indicate recyclability, recycled content, and other relevant information. From healthy, organic food alternatives to plastic garbage bags (like PlasticPlace’s bags, for example, which are made of 80% recycled content), there’s usually something available for your green household needs. 
4. Reuse, don’t refuse. Most recyclable items are easily reusable at home. Plastic and glass bottles can be used for both storage and decoration. Boxes and other similar packaging material can be used for storage as well. Plastic grocery bags have a great number of uses: from trash can liners to shoe and package stuffing to emergency gloves for those sudden messes that need to be picked up and cleaned, there’s always a new use for old things.
5. Craft (re)cycle. Reusing and repurposing discarded items is not only practical and good for the environment, these can also be fun and creative ways to bond with your family. Turn an old peanut can into a pretty little pencil holder or a glass bottle into a nice vase. Plastic makes sturdy material to weave or knit bags, rugs, baskets, and even scouring pads for cleaning around the house. There are countless ways to create new things from old items. Be inventive and have fun!

Each household is unique. Therefore every set of house rules can be different for every one. Several other ideas can stem from these five basic green household tips, and these can be adapted to easily suit your family’s needs.