Eco Friendly Home Products for Today’s Earth Conscious Generation
Consumer weight and opinion has had a lot to do with the increase in eco friendly products for the home. From carpeting to countertops, furniture, and more, there are plenty of ways homeowners can join the recycling revolution and make their homes, and the things within it, more eco-friendly.
It’s not just the interior pieces in our homes either such as furniture and decor that can lay claim to being “green.†Exterior siding and even home outdoor furniture are getting into the act as well.
Eco Friendly Products for the Home and Living Green
Choice is a good thing when it comes to populating your home with furniture, innovative products and new style designs. A good way to get a feel for what products are trending right now is to visit trade shows and subscribe to Facebook groups or blog newsletters.
Eco Friendly Home Design Video Ideas
These choice video selections offer some visual insight into what is possible when adopting an eco friendly design stance towards your own home. From solar roof tiles, to building a green home from scratch.
[yottie id=”19″]
There is always a great deal of interest in future tech and new products that are close to being launched commercially. Some eco friendly products for the home are quite radical, such as Elon Musk’s revolutionary solar roof tiles. You do not have to go this far but obviously with a new build house it might make sense. Here’s a look at some of the ways you can be part of the recycling generation and make your precious home appear far more eco friendly in 2017.
Building the Ideal Eco Kitchen
A kitchen of course is one of the focal points within any home. It is here that families and guests converge to cook, eat and converse. Most households will replace a kitchen every decade or so since it is one of the most important rooms in the home.
New kitchens that incorporate the latest design trends simply add to productivity levels and increase the value of the home. If this time is coming up consider directing your kitchen designer to incorporate the following eco friendly materials into their kitchen design concepts.
Recycled glass: Glass can be made to imitate stone countertops or you can select glass tiles for the countertop with a mix of different colored glass.
Paper: Try a paper-based countertop made mainly of pulp, sourced from trees in a sustainable forest. You’ll have lots of color options in a paper material that resists most stains, scratches, and heat.
Repurposed materials: Hunt for pieces that can be repurposed as kitchen cabinets, such as dressers or old door panels.
Sustainable products: Bamboo grows fast and doesn’t require pesticides. It makes another green option for cabinets and even flooring.
Going Green In the Bathroom
Much like the kitchen; the bathrooms and cloakrooms in our homes are very busy and active areas. Either for getting ready before work or relaxing with a long soak at days end. Bathrooms can be put to task in planet friendly ways by integrating eco friendly products into these wash room areas of the house.
Along with shorter showers and turning the faucet off while we brush our teeth, new dual-flush toilets offer another way to curtail water use. The dual-flush toilet gives homeowners two options: One button uses about a half-gallon of water, while the second button uses increased force and increased water, between 1.2 and 1.6 gallons per flush.
Adopting Green Exterior Siding
In exterior siding, you’ll have to weigh the embedded energy, or the energy needed to create the exterior siding, against its ability to decompose in landfills, as well as options for recycling the waste material.
Vinyl siding: Virtually maintenance-free, this siding lasts 30-50 years. It is created with PVC, a compound of chemical ingredients that doesn’t break down. Another minus are the byproducts, such as dioxin, that are released during the making of PVC. It is recyclable, however.
Fiber Cement Siding: Made of a mixture of clay, wood pulp fibers, sand and Portland cement, this siding is resistant to fire, termites, and rot while offering a long life of several decades. It carries high embedded energy, however, in the amount of energy used to produce it.
Wood Siding: If taken from a managed, sustainable forest, using high quality wood is a great choice for siding, offering a beauty unmatched by other materials. Its biggest drawback is its high maintenance with refinishing needed every few years or so. Wood exterior sidings can easily be recycled and it also decomposes in landfills.
Eco Friendly Outdoor Furniture
For maintenance free pieces of outdoor furniture that don’t need to covered or moved for colder seasons, eco-friendly furniture is gaining in popularity. Traditional wood furniture is a high maintenance product when it’s used outdoors as it can rot and fade quickly.
Today’s outdoor furniture options are constructed from recyclable materials that are non-toxic, renewable, and don’t release harmful chemicals during the manufacturing process. You can choose a wood-look plastic lumber, aluminum (which can be recycled) or bamboo. The point to be made is that they are easily recycled once their lifespan has run its course.
Eco Friendly Outdoor Furniture Infographic
This useful furniture infographic explores some of the benefits of adopting eco friendly products such as outdoor furniture that is functional, comfortable and entirely eco friendly. Simply by making a few green lifestyle choices for your home you can help better protect and preserve our world. The more people who follow these eco steps the greater the impact green choices will have.
Final Thought on Living Green
While we all share the planet we call home, it has been clear for a long time that both consumers and designers have different priorities when it comes to developing or purchasing eco friendly products. This is true in all walks of life and not just in making green choices for the home.
There are two kinds of people. Those who live for the here and the now, happy to accomplish their goals no matter how they are achieved. Then there are those people who value the beauty and resources of our planet. People who wish to offer a truly amazing legacy for future generations to inherit.
However ‘green’ voices are loud and when in large numbers can sway product designers into focussing their efforts on designing for the benefit of the planet. Consumer power is significant and can be the the tipping point for those corporations and individuals who care little for our world.
As new eco friendly products are nearly always launched according to consumer demand and of course where the money is. The more people who desire green eco friendly products and vote with their wallets, the more big business will listen. Money talks, even in a world where climate change and planetary resources are so controversial.
