Celebrate Earth Day with these 4 eco-friendly tips for your home
Earth Day is celebrated every year on April 22nd as a way to demonstrate support for environmental protection. You may know it as the day everyone turns off their lights for an hour. This year, let’s go beyond this simple gesture and make a longer lasting impact on sustainability.
Here are some measures that you can incorporate in your everyday life that not only help protect the environment, but improve your health and well-being at the same time. Read on to learn more about how else you can play a part in environmental sustainability.
1. Go Local, Go Natural
We all know from high school that the resources on Earth fall into 2 categories, renewable and non-renewable resources. But did you know there is another measure of sustainability for materials called embodied energy. Embodied energy refers to the total energy used in the life-cycle of a material from extraction, to production, to transport, to disposal. This means that your luxury Danish walnut dining set might be made from a renewable resource, but it still requires a large amount of petroleum fuel to import it from Denmark.
Hence, we always recommend everyone, especially young homeowners, to go local and go natural. Firstly, consider renewable materials like natural wood or fabric when furnishing your new home. Next, go for local or regional sources as they carry significantly less embodied energy to produce and transport to your home. If these materials are unsuitable, do take the effort to find craftsmen that specialise in reclaimed/upcycled or recycled furniture. That way, we not only support local manufacturers, we also reduce our carbon footprint on the planet.
2. VOC? More Like V-No-C
We only use finishes and paints with low or 0% VOC
If you’ve ever caught the smell of paint, then you know what Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) are first hand. While it might be harmless in short exposures, some people do experience headaches or dizziness if they spend a long time indoors with such smells. These gases are released by chemicals in products like paint, cleaning agents and other materials. Not only are they harmful to your health, they may also act as additional greenhouse gases and worsen climate change. Talk about a lose-lose situation.
We don’t need to tell you about the short-term and long-term health effects of such VOCs compounds. Fortunately, it’s actually quite easy to avoid VOCs in your home. From the start of your homeownership journey, you should be on the look-out for “Low/No VOCs” labels in paint and flooring finishes. You should also avoid furnishing your home with certain plastic furniture if you’re unsure of the origin. Likewise, for wood furniture, look out for natural wood instead of plywood or particle board of unknown origin, as they may contain higher levels of formaldehyde and toluene. At Ugly Wood Company, we use natural or VOC-free finishes like Rubio Monocoat on our hardwood products to do our part for both health and home.
3. Let There Be (Day)Light
Energy is another resource we can incorporate into our sustainable lifestyle. In the context of home and interior design, the common requirement across all rooms is the need for lighting. Given a choice, always opt for natural lighting because not only is the natural daylight more aesthetic, it has also been proven to improve mental health and sleep quality. To deal with some possible problems of sunlight, like glare and heat, you can use blinds, curtains or even double-paned glass to control its effect in your room.
However, in rooms where daylight cannot access, such as basements, windowless rooms or otherwise poorly positioned spaces, energy efficient light bulbs are also a suitable alternative. LED light bulbs, not curly CFL light bulbs, are the superior choice across all 3 metrics of lighting sustainability: bulb lifespan, cost and energy efficiency, using up to 75% less energy than conventional incandescent bulbs.
4. Reduce, Reduce, Reduce
Replace single-use plastic bags with recyclable bags
Last but not least, the greatest, but often most difficult, method to improve sustainability is to reduce consumption of materials and energy in your day-to-day actions. The modern world comes with the luxury of comfort and convenience, but with a hidden cost to the environment. Single-use plastics, cab rides and having a meat-based diet all create a negative impact on the environment.
While we are certainly no saints ourselves, Glennard and I do try our best to reduce our carbon footprint in small, incremental steps. In our home, we focus on reducing our material and energy consumption. We buy appliances with energy efficient ticks, use our own takeaway boxes and avoid single-use items like plastic bags, among others. We are also looking into installing smart energy tracking software in our homes so we can better monitor and switch off appliances when they are not in use.
At the workshop, we design our furniture such that we minimise wasted wood during the production process. We also keep our offcuts and scrap wood for use in our product quality improvement experiments. Go over to Instagram to see what we’re up to!
Let’s do our part by starting this Earth Day 2021 right!
Thank you for reading! For more articles on DIY, design, and other shenanigans, click here!
- Glennard & Nicole 🕺💃
