Spring Time

The first day of spring always brings a smile. A warm breeze. Blue sky. Birds chirping. It’s the season of life, rebirth, and growth. As a transitional season, it’s also the perfect opportunity to refresh your space and embrace the changes in weather. In this article, we’ll offer some simple Hints and Tips to make this seasonal change more sustainable by looking at your home, garden and how to go about day-to-day living.

 

The Home

Energy and Air Quality – Small changes make a big difference to the environment:

  • Turn off lights and embrace sunlight. Simply opening the blinds can make a big difference in interior light. Use mirrors to amplify the amount of daylight in your room. Sunlight also gives us Vitamin D, which is good for our health as well as our mood.
  • Open windows to create a cool spring breeze that can refresh your space while replacing stale air in your home.
  • Lower your thermostat. You can save 3% on your heating bill for each degree you lower your thermostat.
  • It takes a lot of energy to heat water. Use less hot water by taking shorter and cooler showers and washing your clothes in cold or warm instead of hot water (and hang them on the line rather than using the dryer). If we boil too much water to make a tea, that can double the carbon footprint of the tea, irrespective of the transport and the production emissions.

 

The Garden

Maintenance – Make your garden eco-friendly:

  • Trim trees and shrubs that are still dormant, so that they are tidy, healthy, and happy as they burst into life this spring.
  • Weeds have a hard time taking root and growing when grass is longer (around 2½ to 3½ inches) for most types of grass.
  • Planting a single tree will absorb one ton of carbon dioxide over its lifetime (planting is best done between October and April).
  • Create an eco-friendly garden with a vegetable patch, bee & bird boxes, using environmentally friendly weed killers and composting your garden waste.

 

Day-to-Day Living

Food Shopping – Buy locally and avoid unnecessary packaging:

  • Buy from your local shop and markets. Avoid products with a lot of packaging as it accounts for about 5% of the energy used in the life cycle of a food product. Plastics and their by-products are littering our cities, oceans, and waterways, and contributing to health problems in humans and animals.

Clothes Shopping – Buy second hand / quality clothes:

  • Fast fashion expels 1.2bn tonnes of CO2 a year (more than the aviation and shipping industries combined) - the wear-once-then-toss scenario means that racks of flimsy clothes are quickly transformed into one million tonnes of waste a year, much of will be incinerated or added to landfill.