In this modern era, living in an apartment is not an exclusive thing anymore. In fact, it has been a lifestyle for people who live in big cities, since there is not enough land anymore to own and build a traditional house. Well, in this case, then vertical housing is the answer.
But the thing with living in an apartment is that everything is identical from one room to another. The developers are the ones to determine how the rooms look like and what features are included. Anything else will be considered ‘additional request’ and should be bought with money, which usually is not cheap. This is the problem with people who have ‘special preferences’, but don’t want to spend too much money on making their preferences come true.
While going green is actually not a preference, but if you are living in an apartment it is a special preference. There are not so many apartments that can provide and support green lifestyle. While you are living in an apartment, insisting on living green should cost you more.
That’s why, in this article we are going to give you some tips on how to live green in apartment that don’t cost you much in cash.
Green Washing
Whether you are living in reserve square cleveland oh apartment or conventional housing, washing is just another daily chore. We all do that every day, and just for your information, this activity consumes tons of water. So, this would be our first pick.
There are two kinds of washing activities, dishes and clothes, that both requires a lot of water. However, you can manage your water consumption to make both of those activities consume less water than usual.
First, make sure to not wash your dishes in running water. Get two water containers, fill one container with warm water and soap, and fill the other with cold and clean water. Use the first container to wash the dishes, and the second one to rinse.
While for washing clothes, you can save water by only wash them when your laundry bin is full. This way, not only you can save water but you can also save the amount of energy consumed by the washing machine.
The next thing about washing is drying the loads up. The sun provides us enough heat to do everything, including drying your wet dishes and clothes. Living in an apartment might not provide you enough space to get that much amount of sunlight, but making up a little space to dry your clothes and dishes should not be that hard.
Green Bathroom
There are so many things you can change to make your bathroom greener. Even simple things you do can give big results. By this, we mean to make your bathroom eco-friendlier, not changing the color of your bathroom tiles.
First method is by changing your liquid soap and shampoo into bars. Bar shampoo and soap doesn’t come in plastic bottle, which means don’t need to be refilled with plastic-container refill too. We have reviewed bar shampoo product in one of our articles, so you can learn more about this innovation.
Second, place a jar or other kind of small water container inside your toilet flush. By doing this, anytime you are flushing your toilet, there will be small amount of water trapped inside the bottle. This is a simple method to save water consumption.
Third, change your habit of using toilet paper into water cleaning. By using water cleaning, you can save more trees by consuming much less toilet paper, and this method only requires small amount of water.
Last but not least, change the light bulbs in your bathroom into LED. You don’t need extravaganza lighting in your bathroom, unless that’s where you do your concert. LED lights save enormous amount of electricity, which eventually will save you more money.
Transportation
This is something that you need to consider before choosing the right apartment, actually. Try to make your way to places consume least energy possible. And by this, we mean consume fossil fuel as little as possible.
Choosing the right transportation method is the easiest way to do this. If you need to use personal car, try to buy the most high-efficiency car you can afford. But if you are going in a fixed route, try to use public transportation as often as possible.
Using public transportation means you are wasting less fossil fuel from your personal car and the already-running public transportation such as bus and train. This way, you can cut air pollution, greenhouse gas emission, and oil consumption.
Try to choose an apartment that provide you comfortable transportation solution to your workplace, since this is something you need to do every day. Choose an apartment as near as possible to your workplace, since there is a possibility you can just walk there.
Buying bicycle is also a nice idea, you can go anywhere you want without caring about those things mentioned above and get the benefits of cycling. It also costs you much less than cars or repeatedly buying transportation tickets.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
This step is not about facilities or features, but it is about your habits. Try to always apply the 3R rule which is reduce, reuse, and recycle in your everyday activities because anywhere you live, you are consuming energy and producing waste.
First, make sure to stop subscribing on junk mails that you don’t want in your mailbox. It stops you from consuming useless papers that will not go anywhere else but the trash bin. About 100 million trees are cut down every year for this stuff, so you can imagine how much trees are going uselessly into trash bin.
Second, make sure to cook only as much as you can eat, so you don’t waste any food. The National Resources Defense Council estimates that 40% of the food produced in United States go to the trash bin. So, make sure you only buy enough groceries that none of that will go to waste.
Also don’t forget to recycle anything that can be recycled. Recycling gives so much impact to our environment. A data even showed that in 2010, we have recycled 85 million of waste, the equivalent amount of 230 million barrels of oil.
It is not that hard nor expensive to live green in your apartment, right?
Sources:
http://www.greenlivingapartments.com
Leave a Reply