Sweet Greens

Having pets in the home can be one of the most wonderful experiences that life can offer. It can be a great way to liven up the home, and many people even say that it is not really a home if there are not any pets in it. But whether you are keen on having cats, dogs, or whatever else, you might also want to know how you can do it while minimizing the effect on the planet. If you aren’t careful about how you do it, you might find that keeping pets can be hugely damaging in terms of your footprint on the planet, so it’s a good idea to think about this and find a way around it.

In this post, we are going to take you through an eco-friendly approach to keeping pets in the home. As long as you have thought about all of the following things, you should find that you are much more likely to keep your eco-footprint at an acceptable level, even while surrounding yourself with the pets that you have always wanted to have, and enjoying the feeling of love that they can provide a home and a family.

Offset Their Emissions

Ultimately, you can do what you like as long as you are offsetting the emissions in some way or another. It is true that there are emissions that come from keeping pets. You have the food, for example, which will have required animals to be kept and slaughtered, and all of that takes energy to do. You need to make sure that you are offsetting these emissions in whatever way you can, but first, you’ll have to work out how much you actually need to offset, and in a way, this can be the hardest part.

The simple solution there is to go online and use a calculator that can do it for you. You just have to put in how many pets you have, what you feed them, and a few other details, and it will show you exactly how much carbon you need to offset. You can then offset it in many ways, including changing your diet to a vegan one for a while, not going on any flights, and so on. The more that you offset, the more of a clear conscience you can have about keeping pets in your home, so it’s something to definitely think about.

Use Eco-Friendly Waste Bags

If you have a dog, one of the main issues that you are going to come across is how to dispose of their fecal waste when you take them for a walk. Most people end up using plastic bags, but as we all know these can take many years to decompose, and they are not very good for the environment at all. You should therefore consider using a more eco-friendly option, as this is going to be much preferred in so many ways. That might mean a compostable bag, for instance, so that it will simply decompose as the waste itself does.

In a similar vein, if you keep cats, you’ll want to choose a litter that is eco-friendly in some way too. This is a simple case of changing brands, and if you look at the packaging you will see that some are proudly made to be environmentally sound, while others are not. Choose the ones that are, and you will already be doing more than most cat owners to keep the planet in a good condition, and to avoid destroying it further. Some litters just never break down and thus are to be avoided.

Stop Your Cat From Being A Predator

In many respects, it is always going to be a challenge to fully be able to stop your cat from going out and killing things. But you can definitely see that cats are something of a menace, and they do tend to have a way of killing all of the wildlife in an area. As a responsible cat owner, you might want to try and find a workaround, so that your cat is being minimized in how many things they are killing. Of course, cats are notoriously hard to control, which is why this is something of a challenge. However, you do have some options available to you.

First of all, you might simply consider keeping your cat indoors. Indoor cats do not have a chance to kill anything in quite the same way, and this is a simple solution. But if your cat must be outdoors, you can keep them in your garden as best as you can, or you can also avoid training them to hunt through the use of toys when they are young. This can be very effective. You can also punish them when they bring mice and other creatures into the home, to discourage them from doing so again in the future. You might need pest control services if your cat brings in lots of mice anyway!

Whatever you can do to stop your cat from killing too much can help the local wildlife to flourish, so don’t overlook this for how simple it seems. It is one of the most important things you can do as a cat owner, and it’s going to make a big difference to the planet, especially if all cat owners think about doing the same thing as best as they can.

Stay Local

When you are out walking your dog, consider staying as local as you can. Traveling too far by car is of course going to rack up your emissions, so you might want to simply avoid using the car at all, and keep it as local as you can. Staying local means that you will be able to see more of your local area too, and you might discover that there are many more nice walks than you might have immediately assumed. This is a doubly good reason to keep your walks as local as you possibly can. Your dog won’t know the difference anyway.

Choose Food Wisely

Probably the number one concern with keeping pets, however, is their food. A lot of cat and dog food in particular is not produced in the most eco-friendly way. You need to do all you can to try and improve this, and the main thing that you can do as an individual is to be careful with which companies you choose to support. Go for those that are making a real point of trying to be eco-friendly, and you should find that you are going to be able to make a big difference this way. You can also make sure you are not overfeeding them, and feed them other food as well that can be good for them – cats can eat, and frequently enjoy, rice and boiled vegetables, for instance. All of this makes a difference ultimately.

Have Fewer Pets

Finally, one simple top-down way to improve your footprint is to have fewer pets in the first place. This doesn’t mean that you need to do away with having any, but if you can reduce how many you do keep in the home then it is all going to add up and make a significant difference, so it really is worth thinking about. You’ll find that you can still have the joy of keeping a pet, but that you are also trying to maintain your eco-friendly ways as best as you can. Like with many things in life, it is a compromise.

How often do you think about your home? Most people don’t give it a second thought. They simply go on living their lives and never consider what they can do to make their house more eco-friendly. However, there are many things that you can do to improve your home for the environment! Here are some of the eco-friendly tips:

Control Room Temperatures

It’s important to use energy-efficient systems to keep the temperature in your control room at an optimal level. If it is too cold, you will be uncomfortable, but if it gets too hot, various health problems can occur because of this issue. The control room temperatures should always remain comfortable no matter what season or time of year it is outside.

Many factors can contribute to the control room temperatures, and you must address them all. It may be helpful if you have an office building or facility with multiple units, especially when using air-conditioning, because having this system will make each unit colder than usual. In such cases, there should be 24 Hour AC Repair for quick maintenance and more air-conditioning units set up to accommodate the extra demand.

Use Cold Water To Wash Clothes

Using cold water to wash your clothes is a great way to save money while keeping them clean. The only downside, however, is that you may find yourself spending more time waiting for the rinse cycle, and then when it’s finally over with, you have to wait through another entire load of time before being able to hang dry your items. One way to make this process easier is by using a laundry rack on your deck or patio. This allows you to hang dry all of your clothes without spending time in the waiting room.

This is a great way to save money and have your clothes be as clean as possible. While it may take longer for your items to dry, you can usually just bring them inside at night or when the rain comes to keep them safe from the elements while they are hanging up outside. You will find that this process saves you time overall in the end.

Buy Plants for Your House

Plants bring greenery and life into your home. They are a great way to decorate, but more importantly, they have a remarkably beneficial effect on the air in your house. Air purifiers do not remove all harmful substances found in indoor environments (dander, bacteria, viruses, etc.). However, plants trap these particles and turn them into the nutrients they need.

Use Led Bulbs

When you use led bulbs, you save energy and money. There are many different types of led lights available for a variety of uses. If you want to have an environmentally friendly home, you must buy led light bulbs instead of traditional incandescent or fluorescent light bulbs. You can also purchase these online at competitive prices, so you don’t have to spend too much money on your new eco-friendly home.

DIY Items

DIY items are the best for the home because you can save a lot of money and know exactly what is going into your house. DIY items that could be good for an eco-friendly home would include:

• Use dryer balls instead of fabric softener or use environmentally responsible laundry detergent. You can make them yourself out of old socks and save money.
• Make your cleaning supplies from everyday items you have around the house and DIY them to ensure there are no harsh chemicals that could be harmful to an eco-friendly home. 
• Make your natural bug spray with essential oils instead of buying expensive and harmful ones.

Conclusion

This article has been a valuable overview of eco-friendly home tips. There’s nothing like good old-fashioned elbow grease to get your house in order, but finding the right products and using them correctly is key to making sure they’re not only functional but efficient. With some background knowledge about each tip, you can learn from other people experiences and find out what works for you.

Wherever you live, if you are serious about trying to make sure your home is as eco-friendly as possible, there are a lot of things that you can think about to make sure of that. Two of the first and most important places you should look are in terms of powering your home and heating it, and as long as you do these things in an eco-friendly way you are certainly going to be doing your part on the whole. In this post, we’ll take you through some of the best ways to approach these two things in an eco-friendly manner.

Avoid: Electric Heating

If you are looking to keep your home warm without harming the planet too much, you should definitely look into avoiding electric heating of some kind or another. This is the kind that tends to produce the highest number of emissions, and as such, it is definitely something that you should try to avoid. There are many other options out there, so it should never be necessary to go down this route.

Compromise: Mains Gas

Although it produces some emissions, for many people mains gas can be the only real choice in their area apart from the electric one. As such, practically mains gas can be the best option for a lot of people in that kind of position, as it does at least produce fewer emissions than many other options still. So although not the most eco-friendly, it can be a good balance. You might want to find a local propane company and see whether they can help you with this kind of heating.

Renewable: Solar

One of the very best kinds of renewable energy is solar. If you haven’t already, getting a few solar panels installed is easily one of the best things you can do for your home and for your eco-friendly credentials. It is a fantastic way to power and heats the home, and you don’t have to be in a particularly sunny place to make the most of it either. It can either be used to top up your energy supplies, or you might be able to almost run on it entirely. In either case, it’s going to make a difference – and many people find that the panels pay for themselves in due course, so as long as you have the cash up front, it is well worth it.

Ground Source Heat Pumps

You might not have heard much about ground source heat pumps, but they are easily one of the most powerful and eco-friendly ways to heat your home. You essentially have pipes under the ground that move water between the ground and the roof of the home, and this can change direction depending on whether you want cooling or heating. As such, this is an all-year-round solution and one which is particularly known to be efficient and easy to use. It’s also going to mean you use much less energy on the whole.