5 Sustainable Living Swaps to Save You Money
February 13, 2020
Saving money and being more earth-friendly are two ideas that can work beautifully together. In fact, today we’re bringing you five sustainable living swaps that will make the earth and your wallet smile.
- Bike or walk instead of driving – The price of owning a car includes purchasing the vehicle, regular maintenance and oil changes, insurance, registration, the renewal of your licensure, and more. While owning a car is a tremendous time-saver and luxury, it’s contributing to the increase of nitrous oxide and methane found in our air.
While major advancements are taking place to make cars more efficient and less harmful to our bodies and the environment, they’re still major contributors to our environmental problems and sedentary lifestyles. You can stymie the effects of all these problems by choosing to walk or bike to nearby locations. Making incremental choices to use your car less is contributing to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
- Reusable water bottle — While plastic water bottles were a major advance in society at their inception, they’ve since become an environmental nuisance. In the US alone, over 60 million water bottles are thrown away, ending up in landfills, incinerators, or worse, scattered across the streets or oceans.
With most locations having a water bottle filling station, water fountain, or sink, it’s easier than ever to have a water bottle without fear there won’t be a location to fill up. Consider purchasing a reusable water bottle to save on purchasing individual bottle waters. Moreover, doing so will help reduce your contribution of plastic into the environment.
- Invest in a metal/glass/bamboo straw — Like water bottles, plastic straws are a single-use plastic that are finding their final destination in landfills and oceans. Straws, however, aren’t just fun but are very useful to many people, too. With this in mind, you may want to consider hanging on to your love of straws but swapping out the materials they’re made of, instead.
Nowadays, you can find straws in different reusable materials including metal, glass, bamboo, and reusable plastic. They usually come with cleaning utensils, too, in case you use your straw for a smoothie or beverage with pulp.
- Air-dry your clothes — A tried and true money-saving hack is to air dry your clothes rather than having them run through the dryer. In doing this, you’re saving money by not using electricity, promoting energy conservation, and you’re extending the lifespan of your clothes by not subjecting your fabric to high-heat temperatures.
- Repurpose old t-shirts — One thing we can forget is to repurpose our old clothes. T-shirts provide a fantastic solution to those needing more fabric for household needs. The Huffington Post details twenty uses for old t-shirts including quilts, towels, kid’s clothes, sleepwear, and rugs.
Repurposing your old t-shirts is a great way to extend the lifespan of an item of clothing. Doing this can help keep unwanted donated clothes out of landfills and make the most out of something you’ve already invested money into.
Consider implementing one or all of these swaps. Any effort you make to be more environmentally conscious and financially prudent is a step in the right direction.
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