What are the five tips for how to go green at home?
How to go green at home was first introduced in the article titled “what is going green” where going green was defined as the process of knowing your sustainability impact and then acting on it to reduce your specific environmental burdens through continuous improvement. Based on this definition, we can approach going green as an interesting process for switching to sustainable eco-products or eco-friendly processes and move towards the sustainability path. Therefore, the other question we ask ourselves is “how to go green at home” while saving money at the same time. Learn more here about these five tips.
Self-assessment
Identify low hanging fruits for going green.
Use online tools to compare pricing for the different eco products or eco-sustainable solutions before making any purchasing decisions
Research for green reviews on the eco products you maybe are interested in.
Develop an action plan once you have decided which eco products or eco-solutions to adopt.
1. Self Assessment
How to go green at home will start with self-assessment to determine your environmental impact, commonly referred to as calculating my carbon footprint. You don’t have to calculate this by yourself because there are various tools available online that you can use to determine the carbon footprint for your house, vehicles and house activities. This self-assessment is vital to determine the baseline of your current situation and an understanding of the areas that might need a sustainable action, for example, going solar to off-set your house emissions or adopting other eco-sustainable solutions that will help you save the environment and money in the long-term. Get started with your self-assessment by using this carbon footprint calculator. Find this carbon footprint calculator at the end of this article.
2. Identify low hanging fruits for going green
Identifying low hanging fruits is an important exercise because you may want to go green with eco products or find good eco-solutions that will help you save more money while contributing to environmental performance. Also, you want low-hanging fruits without spending so much money to implement sustainable actions. For instance, some actions may require you re-design your house and you may not be ready such as sustainable building solutions.
Therefore, identifying the best options for your going green will help you make the right decisions when it comes to the green solutions you want to adopt. In some cases, going solar could be one of the low hanging fruits that you may be may consider, especially if you are a homeowner that is interested in saving the environment and money at the same time. Going solar, it is a win-win opportunity and today many people are making this decision with the US having over one million households going solar.
Going solar is made possible because of new financing schemes like solar power purchase agreements (solar PPA) and leasing. These financing innovations enable homeowners to go solar with no money down. You can learn more about such financing innovations here. You can also decide to adopt solar or adopt LED lighting at the same time and save more money. Implementing energy efficiency measures first and then going solar helps to reduce the number of solar panels needed in your rooftop to switch to solar.
Furthermore, today solar marketplaces are there to help you conduct your own research about switching to solar easier and faster to estimate your average solar panel cost or even find places with the best residential solar panels and so on. Click here to get an experience of such an online solar marketplace called EnergySage.
Solar is just one example that could be considered as a low hanging fruit for going green among others. Others include but not limited to adopting eco products or eco-friendly home products and using eco-friendly shopping bags, energy efficiency lights, eco paper products, etc.
3. Use online tools to check the sustainability impact of your actions.
Today there are various tools that can be found online that will assess which of your sustainability impact or adoption of eco products will help to reduce significantly your carbon footprint while presenting you with cash savings at the same time. Such tools can help you with planning and finding ideas for becoming more sustainable while sorting them by popularity, cost or CO2 and cash savings.The different categories for going green presented in this website include,
Energy Efficiency measures
Energy Conservation measures
Renewable energy (switching to solar energy etc)
Recycling and composting
Adoption of Eco products
4. Research for green reviews on the eco products you maybe are interested in.
In as much as going green is trending in many places, beware of greenwashing for products that may be referred to as “green” but in fact, they have not been tested or scientifically proven. Some products may claim to have some environmental benefits or reduce environmental impact, but in actual fact, they may exaggerating such claims or false. Greenwashing usually happens with products that are termed as green but do not meet those specifications or do not help as indicated in the product label. Conducting your own research will help to make your own informed judgment before making your purchasing decision.
5 Develop an action plan for how to go green at home once you have decided which eco products or eco-solutions to adopt.
Developing an action plan will help you to start somewhere depending on how your baseline is and help you to improve and save you more money in the long-term. Going green is not just for environmental reasons, but also for economic reasons such as saving money.
For example, going solar or switching to LEDs will help to save you more money in the long-term than business as usual scenario. Developing a simple action plan will help you to keep track of your carbon footprint and the money you have saved because of your switch to sustainable solutions.
To learn more about what is going green and tips for going green, check this article for more details and examples. Thank you.
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