Tips To Reduce Household Waste

At Thomson’s Cleaning Professional Maintenance Services (London), we know that home is where the heart is, and there’s always household waste. As much as depositing home waste to incinerators often sounds like the perfect option, remember, it may release harmful toxins and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Handling household rubbish irresponsible poses a danger to our wildlife, plants, and humans.

Some of these toxic substances and gases cause respiratory diseases, affect human genetics, cause various diseases, and may negatively impact the environment, leading to global warming and many undesired lifelong consequences.

According to a report stipulated by the World Health Organization (WHO), close to 4 million people die prematurely from diseases resulting from household air pollution. Such illnesses are stroke, pneumonia, asthma, ischaemic heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases (COPD), and organ damage cases like lung cancer.

The good of all this is that there’s a solution, or at least mitigates every problem, such as professional junk and rubbish services. If you want the DIY way, here are a few tips that will help reduce household waste yourself.

Make Your Cleaning Routine Eco-Friendly & Zero-Waste

Cut Down The Volume of Food Waste

Instead of buying food on impulse from the supermarket and knowing very well that it would go to the garbage, it’s important to live by our means. 

Around 6.7 million tonnes of food is thrown away as rubbish in the UK. This is sad, considering the millions of people across the globe who sleep hungry each day.  

Besides, there are huge amounts of money lost by households and businesses when food goes to waste.

Carrying Out & Diminishing Waste

Consider how much food you and your family will consume, either weekly or bi-weekly. 

Have a list of the items you’ll need, consider the frequency at which you eat per week, ensure that there’s no extra food on the freezer, fridge, or on the kitchen cabinets, stick to the idea of buying what you need, and avoid unnecessary junk,” comment experts at QuickWasters.co.uk.

While you’re going green and minimising your carbon footprint, you may also be interested in calculating the CO2 emissions of your household or rental property. This is something that Treehaus, the online letting agents, hope to encourage their landlords and tenants to work together on. 

10 Tips to Make Your Home Greener this Spring

Physical Storage of Waste

When you realise you’ve overbought food, make it a habit to invest in proper storage to avoid it going stale, especially if it’s fruits and vegetables, comments kitchen & cookery professional John.

Reduce Energy Usage

According to Gas Safe Register, leaning toward using gas instead of regular household electricity has a positive impact on the environment, as gas doesn’t leave by-products, unlike most sources generating electricity.

Cut Toxic Cleaning Products

Eco cleaning comes with several benefits and advantages over the old generation of cleaning agents. Still, also keep in mind that too much cleaning can hurt, too! That’s why experts advise you to arm yourself with know-how and cleaning hacks.

Stop Using Bottled Water

Plastic pollution has affected the environment adversely in the last decade. Switching to no-plastic pollutants really helps, but change is gradual and not everyone has adhered to the set guidelines.

They make plastics of cellophane, which doesn’t rot when mixed with the soil and ends up clogging the environment. In addition, plastics are highly toxic to wildlife, as they release poisonous chemicals when burned. 

Beeswax is a much better option, so when going for products, consider those wrapped with beeswax or settle for those that are eco-friendly. 

Also, while storing leftovers in the fridge, it’s important to go for silicone covers rather than plastic bags.

Plastics leech hormone-disrupting chemicals that may gradually affect the health of human beings, animals, or sea creatures when disposed of or burned in the incinerators. Glass jars, paper, stainless steel, aluminium foils are reliable alternatives to plastic.

Opt-out of Paper 

It goes for mailings, bills, local ads, junk mail, and phone books.

Our homes are not like the office. In the office, all our emails contain a spam alternative where all the unnecessary stuff gets filtered. But at home, you’ll have to deal with the waste of hard copies of letters, monthly billings, gift cards, and so on.  

Nowadays, you can arrange with your service providers or whoever you do business with, to do all official communications or billings via email to avoid papers at all times. Mind you, they cut a tree for every piece of paper. 

When governments and the people of the world are in a desperate rush to slow down global warming, protecting our forests should be your priority. There’s no better way of doing this than to embrace a paperless lifestyle in your household or even office. 

This simple act, if emulated by most people, would reduce deforestation. 

Drink Strawless

The UK generates almost 5 million tonnes of plastic waste each year; almost 90% of this plastic waste is plastic straws. Yes, those tiny and lightweight items we often take for granted. The British have this uncanny, unbecoming behaviour of dumping these plastic straws everywhere, majorly on the seashores and beaches. 

As tiny as they may seem, they easily risk the marine creature’s life as they are easily absorbable. In 2015, a viral video of geographic scientists trying all they could to remove a straw that embedded a turtle’s nose in the sea was widely shared. 

We owe it to our wildlife and planet at large to drastically lower our reliance on plastics. The average person here in the UK uses about 130 straws per year. Needless to say, only a small percentage of this will be recycled or get correctly disposed of. The government is on the frontline trying to implement the 25-year plan in managing our plastic waste. Part of the plan in this goal is to ban the use of single-use plastics in the next 25 years. This includes cotton swabs and plastic straws.  

Countries should join forces and express their solidarity in caring for our environment. In 2015, California took up the challenge and banned plastic bags; they joined other countries like Kenya, Rwanda, Bangladesh, Macedonia, France, and many other states that had already banned them. 

Boycott Paper Cups

We made coffee cups to look trendy and normal in social media, news, and newspapers. Images of celebs, TV show stars and others flaunting their plastic coffee cups are all over. 

Looks convenient especially when you’re on the move, right? 

Well, the number of disposable cups that end up being dumped anyhowly in the UK is as huge as it is shocking. Actually, only 1 in 400 of these cups end up in recycling plants; the rest end up in streets, beaches, drainage systems, you name it. 

“You are probably wondering, why is it difficult to dispose of paper when it’s recommended?” asks Tom’s Junk Collections. “Well, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the paper. It’s eco-friendly to the environment, for sure. The only difficulty the environmentalists are having is the virtue that they attach paper to plastic. The two become too difficult to separate unless there’s access to a special machine designed to help in separating the two.”

Such a machine, though it exists, is not readily available.

Again, if you can avoid plastic, that would be of great convenience to the environment. You can limit the number of Starbucks visits and make that coffee at the comfort of your home. 10 minutes of your time won’t hurt. Probably you prefer the fancy coffee but, it is all about playing with ingredients. You can even make it tastier than the one you get in your coffee shop.

If this sounds too strict for you, then you can invest in your reusable cups or recycle your paper cups. Look out for local recycling points and be an on-the-go campaign.

Reuse, Reduce, Recycle Right

With recycling, going back to the basics is mandatory for effective results. 

The immediate cause of action would be to go back to the drawing board and refer to the guidelines and common myths of science, what research industries, organisations, and collaborating agencies have in mind.

Rules for Recycling:

Recycle clean bottles, cans, paper, and cardboard. 

The number one instruction for recycling clean bottles, cans, and papers is to ensure they are empty. By empty, it means no beverage, food leftovers. Also, the paper and cardboard should be as dry as possible. 

All the recyclables should be loose. Don’t enclose them

Again, please note that not everything is recyclable. 

• You can download the printed press of all you need to know about products that should and shouldn’t be recycled to help you get the knowledge.
• Put all the items that qualify for recycling in the recycling bin. E.g., untapped cardboard, paper, empty plastic bottles and jugs, metal food and beverage cans.
• Avoid disposing of these items: foods and beverages, tanglers, take-out containers, Styrofoam, batteries, and haz waste. 
• It’s important you know the list of items that quality to go to the recycling bin.

Importance of Reuse, Reduce, Recycle 

• Recycling helps in putting up a fight against pollution by maintaining the environment in its clean state
• It saves on water and energy together with other non-reusable energy within the environment
• Prevents the clumping of incinerators, which may cause a landslide
• Makes it easy to locate raw materials
• Saves and aids the economy of major households
• Can create employment opportunities for the jobless youths

Household Waste Tips, Conclusion 

By recycling right, you’ll do yourself and other living organisms protected against contamination. Also, recycling right keeps waste materials at bay in the landfills and thus preventing further pollution. 

Maintain the same clean standards throughout.