Do you want to make your home more animal and eco-friendly but aren’t sure where to start? We can help! Our brief guide below lists five ways to make your home more sustainable and vegan-friendly, from reducing your home’s food waste to installing solar panels. Keep reading to learn how to embrace the vegan lifestyle!
Avoid Disposables
Single-use disposable plastic and paper items are some of the worst things for the environment in our modern society. Not only are single-use items a careless waste of resources, but they’re a significant strain on landfills and often pollute oceans and waterways.
While they are momentarily convenient, avoid single-use items like plastic straws, plastic bottles, saran wrap, and aluminum foil in your home. Instead, invest in reusable items like cloth napkins, stainless steel straws, and silicone bowls for leftovers and food storage. It may not seem like much, but over a few months or years, you could save the environment hundreds or thousands of single-use paper and plastic products from burdening our landfills.
Reduce Your Household’s Food Waste
Along with single-use items, food waste is another significant concern for environmentalists. While we may think that food waste decomposes easily, much of our food scraps, like lettuce, nut shells, and citrus peels, can take years or even decades to decompose in a landfill.
Invest in more reusable containers for food storage or freeze your leftovers before they go bad to reduce as much food waste as possible and make your budget stretch further. Before you go to the grocery store, always check your fridge and pantry to ensure you’re not doubling up on any of your items and letting food go to waste.
Get Cruelty-Free Furniture and Décor
Furniture and décor are other aspects of your household that you can make more animal-friendly and cruelty-free. Many home products consist of animal-sourced materials like wool, silk, fur, or authentic leather.
Having a leather couch or wool rug is antithetical to veganism and those looking to live more vegan-friendly and sustainable lifestyles. Consider buying furniture and home décor from manufacturers that use cruelty-free materials, like:
- Organic cotton
- Bamboo
- Faux fur
- Hemp
- Linen
- Faux vegan leather
Invest in Solar Panels
Investing in a solar photovoltaic panel system is perhaps the best way to make your home more sustainable and vegan-friendly. The basics of solar energy photovoltaic systems are straightforward—homeowners mount the panels on their roofs or other structures, and the panels harvest the sun’s energy, convert it, and store it in batteries for later use by the household.
Solar panels are excellent for creating an eco-friendly lifestyle and will reduce your monthly energy bills. Plus, many federal and state tax incentives exist to ease the burden of the financial costs of installing the panels, so homeowners receive an even greater return on their investment.
Make Your Cleaning Products
The bathroom is the last area of your home that could use a vegan’s touch. Unfortunately, many cleaning and beauty product manufacturers use packaging consisting of tons of single-use and disposable paper and plastic—and often test their products on animals. Always look for a cruelty-free logo on the package when shopping for bathroom cleaning products to ensure you’re buying from a manufacturer that does not test their products on animals.
As you can see, the vegan lifestyle involves much more than your diet. Keep these tips in mind for a more vegan-friendly home, and read SoFlo Vegans for more guides on living the vegan lifestyle!