Six Easy Ways I Make My Home More Sustainable

Anything easy that I can do to help preserve the earth and reduce waste and my greenhouse gas footprint, I try to implement into my life. My goal is to share quick and simple sustainability tips that don't compromise on luxury or convenience. Each item below, you can implement in just a few minutes without leaving your couch!

1. Composting: I know, I know. This sounds smelly, messy and difficult--and that's what I always thought, too! I recently got this countertop composting bin to put my food scraps in throughout the week (avocado pits and coffee grinds/filters included). Once or twice a week, I dump it in a Santa Monica green composting bin on the street. This is a public composting program specific to Santa Monica (see here for details). Other counties and cities in California also have their own composting programs. The benefits of composting include reducing methane emissions from landfills (a greenhouse gas that warms our climate 30x more than CO2!) and enriching the soil that we use to grow crops to keep it from getting depleted of nutrients.

2. Renewable Energy: Stay with me here--I promise this one is way easier than you think! I found this company Arcadia about six years ago. You connect them with your energy utility company, they track your monthly usage and then they go to your local energy grid and demand that much energy from clean sources like wind, solar and geothermal. This ultimately reduces our demand for dirty coal which is a huge contributor to climate change and air pollution. Arcadia is completely free to use and they can even save you money on your monthly electricity bills. They also let you pay with a credit card without any fees so you can rack up extra miles or points. Too good to be true, right?! Here's a video explaining how they work.

3. Reusable Grocery and Produce Bags: This one is self explanatory. I love the insulated Trader Joe's bag for perishables and the canvas one for everything else. I also use these mesh produce bags for fruits and veggies.

4. Reusable Water Bottles: Plastic water bottles are so 2005! Using a Hydroflask or Swell can save you so much money and effort and save you from being exposed to the toxic chemicals, carcinogens and endocrine disruptors in plastic. Single use plastic water bottles are highly resource-intensive: they use about 3x as much water as what's inside of the bottle and the equivalent of 1/4 of the bottle in oil--ew!

5. Cloth Napkins: I replaced all napkins and paper towels in our home a few years ago with these cloth napkins and I like that they feel much more elevated and luxurious than paper. We still have paper towels in the pantry for really big messes, but we use them way less.

6. Re-Fillable Cleaning Products: Last, but certainly not least, is one of my favorite companies, BlueLand. They make natural, yet effective cleaning products that are aesthetically pleasing and smell great. How it works: order their starter pack which comes with three bottles (bathroom, glass and mirror and multi-surface), a foaming hand soap dispenser, and dissolvable tablets, and all you do is mix the tablets in the bottles with water. If you sign up for the subscription, they'll continue to mail you tablets in small, compostable paper packets that cost only $2 or less per refill. It saves me money, creates extra space in my pantry and the products have a pleasant, mild smell (conventional cleaning products give me terrible headaches and nausea). I can't say enough good things about this company.

If you can commit to implementing just one of these items a week, together, we can make a huge impact. Comment below with some of your household sustainability tips so that I can continue adding to this list!