Green Your Bathroom

The bathroom is one of the most frequently used rooms in your apartment, and there are some very simple ways to go green in this living space. Most of these ideas are hidden in plain sight and will be easy to incorporate into your daily living:

• Time your shower – A typical shower can use two gallons of water a minute, so set a goal to reduce your number of minutes each day.
• Turn off the faucet – Don’t let the water run while you brush your teeth or shave. You also don’t need to let it run while you soap up your hands or face. Try it.
• Unplug your electronics – Many electronic items continue to use electricity all day. Unplug them after use.
• Check your bulbs – Replace those incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents or LEDs. They use a lot less energy and last a lot longer.
• Keep the curtain – Wash old shower curtains and use them for drop cloths or tarps.
• Buy green – When buying toilet paper, look for the “Ecologic” logo for certified environmentally-friendly products.
• Re-use that roll – Toilet paper rolls are easy to recycle or reuse as sleeves for protecting seedlings or chew toys for puppies.
• Grocery bags – Use paper grocery bags instead of plastic waste basket liners.
• Save that toothbrush - Keep your old toothbrush for cleaning jewelry and other small or hard to reach places.
• Prescription bottles – Your old bottles make great containers for storing small items like change, buttons, needles, nails and nuts and bolts.

The SC Johnson Company came up with these great tips and added one more in their area of expertise. They would like to encourage all of us to use cleaner concentrates instead of buying our usual plastic bottles of tub, tile and glass cleaners. By adding our own water, we would reduce the amount of plastic packaging. “If just 20% of the 320 million cleaning products in trigger bottles sold each year were refilled with concentrate, we’d save more than 7 million pounds of plastic – the weight of 1,170 minivans.” Not to mention the energy and water used to make that plastic.

We hope you like these ideas for greening up your bathroom and will try some of them out soon.