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Make Your Household Green in a Shared Apartment or Dorm: 5+1 Tips
When you live with others, choosing green solutions can be less motivating. It’s hard to go to eco-markets with a cloth bag if you see that the shared trash still fills up with plastic bags from your roommate’s bakery purchases.
Organize your household so that your housemates can also adapt to sustainable solutions, and you’ll be encouraging not just yourself but an entire apartment or community towards eco-friendliness! In this article, we offer 5+1 tips on how to implement planet-friendly ideas with minimal time and money investment.
Cook Together!
While it can sometimes be challenging to coordinate different eating habits, preferences, and sensitivities, if you can manage to share meals occasionally, you’ll save a lot of food from ending up in the trash and avoid the guilt of food waste. Cooking for one is difficult; it’s easy to end up with too much food that spoils before you can eat it all, or you get tired of eating the same thing for days and decide to throw it away. If you’re not comfortable cooking with your housemates or roommates, you can at least swap meals before you get sick of them. Plus, this way, your diet will be more varied. 😉
Y Generation Tip: Cook Together!
Attend Junk Removal Events!
Bored with your furniture? You don’t have to buy new pieces right away! In the capital, each district has different times for junk removal: you can find discarded furniture almost any month, which you can clean thoroughly and freshen up with paint or new upholstery. The same goes for clothes or almost anything you can imagine. Check where you can find junk removal events, hop on a bus, and start hunting! In the best neighborhoods, you can find real treasures!
If you’re a dorm student and want to organize a bigger community event, you can invite people from multiple rooms or ask the dorm committee to help promote the event.
Green Cleaning Tools
Cleaning tools are usually shared household items; it’s rare for each resident to have their own broom, detergent, etc. This is a great opportunity to make your shared toolkit green! Your housemates won’t mind, as eco-conscious cleaning is the simplest and cheapest way to clean: almost all dirt can be removed with citric acid, vinegar, and baking soda. Even if they’re not motivated by a sense of responsibility towards the planet, they’ll surely appreciate saving money!
Advanced Level: Indoor Composting
Vegetable and fruit peels, coffee grounds, eggshells – these are all items that typically end up in the communal trash. You can improve this by purchasing a composting device or creating a worm compost at home! Take it a step further: use the decomposed material to grow herbs in your window or balcony pots for soil enhancement.
Coordinate Shopping!
One argument against plastic-free shopping is that it takes too much time since you can’t buy everything in one store, making a simple daily shopping trip a real ordeal. Take advantage of living with others! If your roommate studies at Corvinus University, it’s easy for them to visit the Fővám Square market, and if you attend BME, the Ligeti packaging-free shop on Budafoki Road is nearby. These are just examples, but if there are several of you, feel free to trade off!
+1. Don’t Be Too Hard on Yourself!
As the saying goes, we don’t need a few perfect people; we need a lot of imperfect ones. This applies to environmental awareness too. If you can easily integrate a few green solutions into your life, you’re already ahead of most of society! Especially if you encourage others to take action too.
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