Your Simple Eco Home Checklist and Tips

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I’ve been gradually adapting my lifestyle to live a little more sustainably since 2018. Prior to this, I have to admit that I was completely ignorant to the issues we had been quietly creating – waste, CO2 emissions, global warming – and I honestly didn’t give my impact a second thought even as I threw away that single-use item as it was supposedly “making my life easier”.

As a child, I remember the hole in the Ozone Layer, I remember CFC’s being talked about, I heard about endangered species and I used to get so upset and annoyed at the adults who weren’t acting fast enough. And then somehow I became one of these adults who wasn’t acting! I had forgotten how passionate I had once been, I had become someone who felt these problems were for somebody else to deal with and I got sucked in by all the clever marketing. I blindly went on with my life, buying into the must-have products, using single-use products such as wipes and then nappies on my first child without a second thought. It wasn’t until I joined Instagram and stumbled across reusable nappies that I began to ask more questions. I began to delve into this disposable lifestyle that large companies had been selling us for years. I started to question where everything ended up once the bins were taken away, I started reading about waste, landfill, plastics and researching how each was linked and all led to increased carbon emissions. I was left shocked. Reusable nappies really were my wake up call…

Small Eco Changes

When I discovered that disposable nappies contain plastic and can take up to 500 years to breakdown I was speechless. Every single nappy that had ever been used was still here, sitting in landfill, rotting, creating methane gases, warming our planet.

What started as a small swap to reusable nappies and wipes suddenly led to an overhaul of our life. For the very first time, I started to really see what we were doing, how much waste was going out of our house, how we were impacting the planet. And so, everything changed. From what we bought to how we thought about items, where we shopped, how much we would buy, why, even my blog took on a new direction! I discovered that there were many like-minded people out there who were enjoying seeing the swaps I was making, an online eco community was building and I was becoming a part of it. I felt that if I could show a normal family with kids and pets making small sustainable steps then I could help our environment a little bit more.

More Focus

In the last couple of years, the focus on being more eco-friendly and the demand for companies to step up with their sustainability policies has definitely increased and, what with COP 26 last November, we all saw a massive increase in media and online coverage on climate change which was amazing. What it really highlighted to me was how we need to carry on shouting loudly about how to focus on making small eco changes.

Simple Eco-Living

What I always want to show when I post how we are now living is that it can be so simple. Now, I don’t mean that every eco swap is simple for every single person but that many of the concepts are. Being more eco-friendly is really about thinking back to how we used to live, how much slower life used to be, how disposable products never had a place, how we would make do and mend and how more of us used to enjoy the simple activities in life, say a walk in nature. And when you look at these you begin to realise that all are in fact key to tackling our over-consumption, fast fashion addictions, carbon emissions, excessive waste and so on. The one thing I have really taken from living like this is that I feel reconnected to our environment. Simplicity is a personal thing and what comes easy to me may not to somebody else and vice versa but once you find those simple gems, you will hang onto them and feel proud of yourself for achieving them – you may even feel a little less stressed, not be quite so focussed on the latest “things”, not feel the need to hit the highstreets, you may lose those comparison issues and just be happy in your new easy-going life.

Why Help Others?

Why do I help others to make these changes? Because I love it! Honestly, I get to combine helping other people with talking about being more eco-friendly every single day and both make me smile. If you follow me on social media then you’ll know that most of what I create is free. Yes, I do take on ad work as and when it arises and if it is suitable but when I am showing you what works for us, what we do in our home, how we live, how I make my own cleaning products, how I garden/compost, how I speak to the kids about topics and so on, all of this is free content I create just for all of you because I want to.

Simple Eco Home Checklist and Tips

Over the years I have found that there are particular things I get asked about on a regular basis and obviously as followers/readers come and go I tend to have to recap on topics that I have covered in the past. This is all fine by me, as I say I love talking all things eco but I realised it may be hard for those who are looking for the info to put it all together to make sense and to give them a clear way of making changes. This gave me the idea to come up with a downloadable pack that would make these changes feel much easier.

I know I can waffle on (I do in real life too!) so I thought what would work the best is to break down everything I know and turn that into manageable chunks for people to follow, and so, my checklist idea was born. I love a good list I can tick off, it makes me feel productive, it helps to see what jobs are complete and which may need more work, it makes a task feel far more achievable. But I felt that checklists weren’t quite enough so I also decided to add some blog snippets, tips and my cleaning recipes to try and hit all of those areas of the home.

I carefully chose rooms in the house that can feel overwhelming when you start to look really closely at all the possible changes. I actually went around my own home to make sure I incorporated everything, even things I haven’t necessarily found have worked for us because what may not work for me may well work for you. There is no eco-perfection pressure here because I do not believe in that, I am all about doing whatever you can do. These swaps have to be sustainable for you and your family otherwise you’ll just be setting yourself up for failure.

Here is a sneak peek of what you will get:

“A simple eco home audit downloadable pack to get you started on your eco journey. This 36 page pack is ideal for anybody who has just begun to look at how they can make changes to become more eco-friendly. Written by parenting and eco blogger Emma Reed this pack includes tips, articles, cleaning recipes and audit checklists to help you to make small sustainable steps in a manageable way”

Something else that was really important to me was making the pack affordable and so I priced it at £4 which is a one-off price. Once you have bought it, you download it and you can use it as many times as you like. You could choose to print off the entire pack and work through it, you could just print off the checklists to use, you could even laminate those to reuse them as you require or just work from it on your device. Being more eco-friendly needs to be accessible, affordable and feel doable.

All I want to be able to do is help more people and in turn help our planet. You can view and purchase my eco home audit checklist here.

I hope you enjoy it

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