We’ve only got one planet, and a short time on it to make a lasting impact! If you are starting your journey towards a sustainable lifestyle or looking for ways to improve your practices in the New Year, look no further. 

Our mission is to help create a community around sustainability and empower those at any stage of their journey to find fulfillment in helping the planet, being more environmentally responsible, and dedicating time to giving back. When you think of sustainability, expensive trends shouldn’t be the first thing to come to mind. Instead, sustainability should inspire you to do more with less – that’s really what it’s all about! 

Evaluate Your Heating/Cooling Habits In Your Home

If you want to really start your sustainable lifestyle right, evaluating your home heating and cooling habits is a great place to start. Not only are heating and cooling expenses, but they can also be taxing on your home’s structure and the longevity of your living quarters! Stuffy dry heat can lead to a slew of health issues while pumping cold air into the rooms around us can have us feeling under the weather. 

To start evaluating your home heating and cooling process, begin by creating a spreadsheet, diary, or whatever suits your fancy to track the temperature you keep your home at versus the temperature outside! This is a great way to get a feel for how different the inside of your home is from the outside world so you can evaluate when you really need to crank up the heat. 

Comparing electricity bills month over month is another great way to get a grasp on how much you are spending on heating and cooling your home overall. Due to inflation and resource scarcity, electric bills have been skyrocketing across the country. Try to examine what you have been paying over the years and allocate this budget to something more earth-friendly. 

Lastly, you want to remember to layer, layer, layer! Encourage your housemates to invest in layering pieces as well to help keep the heat off when possible. Don’t be afraid to get cozy! Burning oil and using electric AC can cause significant damage to our environment and be toxic to our health overall. The first step to a sustainable lifestyle is to become aware of the impact you are having – the rest will follow with action based on these observations! 

Hang-Dry Your Clothes

Speaking of your home electric bill…have you noticed how much electricity your dryer uses on a monthly basis? If not, contact your electricity provider and ask for an itemized receipt so you can truly evaluate where most of your energy is being allocated. They should be able to provide you with a list of all of the electricity sources in your home, so you can see what is taking up most of your resources. 

One of the easiest ways to cut back on your electricity usage is to hang-dry your clothing! You don’t have to hang a line outside your home as you’ve seen done in your favorite films! You can invest in a bamboo drying rack to use when hang-drying your clothes going forward. Once they are washed, simply lay them out to dry and your items will be ready to be worn by the next morning! 

Make Your Meals at Home

If you order takeout frequently or enjoy going out to eat, try and cut back on these habits as much as possible. When ordering food from restaurants, you are contributing to massive amounts of food waste, as eateries struggle to predict their business trends resulting in food going bad. Delivery also contributes to the problem, as drivers must use cars to get one person’s meal across town for delivery. If you can commit to cooking meals at home, you will have a better likelihood of controlling how much you buy and spend on food. 

Cooking at home is also a great way to spend time with family, try new recipes, and embrace new cultures! Plus, you’ll be able to better cut down on costs as you transition from ordering out to eating at home. 

Shop Local

One of the best tips for sustainability is: buy less. Of course, this is not always possible when living in an environment that is highly based on consumerism. Shopping locally is a great initiative you can implement to help counteract the harm of buying from large corporations that ship products and goods overseas, using immense amounts of fuel to get items from point A to point B. Shopping locally for foods, clothing items, household goods, and more is a great way to cut down on carbon emissions (something that might seem out of your control!) and get in touch with vendors and small business owners in your community. 

Ditch Your Toxic Cleaners

When putting your health and the health of the planet at the forefront, ditch the toxic household cleaners! This is a quick and easy way to prevent chemicals from seeping into our land, causing food and water to become contaminated. You will also be able to save a little extra money when shopping for cleaning supplies as these items cost a pretty penny!

Instead, try to make your own cleaners. You can start with simple recipes such as:

Laundry Detergent:

• Boil 8 cups of water
• Add one cup borax to the water
• Add one cup washing soda to water
• Dissolve and store

Floor Cleaner:

• 1/4 cup white vinegar
• 1/4 cup baking soda
• 1 tablespoon dish detergent
• Mix in 2 gallons of hot water

Room Spray:

• 30 drops of essential oil
• 1 cup of witch hazel
• 2 cups of water

We hope this article helped provide you with new insight to help spark new ideas you can try when it comes to being kind to yourself and our planet. A sustainable lifestyle doesn’t have to be scary, which is why joining a community like ours can help to make it more achievable! To share your sustainability journey or learn more about our initiatives, contact Home Organic today.