Eco-Friendly Tips for Your Home or Office

There are so many eco-friendly tips to make your home or office greener, but here, we are offering our top three for making the place you live and work cleaner and healthier. Obviously, we’re big fans of wholesale eco-friendly bags to help promote any business, but there are lots of other ways too to make you home or office cleaner, healthier, and less wasteful.

Three Top Eco-Friendly Tips:

1. Buy eco-friendly cleaning products:

Cleaning products that are not eco-friendly often pose a threat to your health as well as the health of our environment. It’s not always easy to know which products are harmful. We suggest avoiding products that are labeled: “Danger”, “poison,” or “warning.” We use caution if labels say “Flammable” or “use in a well ventilated area.” These phrases indicating toxic chemicals that are volatile and prone to explosiveness, evaporation and inhalation. Also se caution if labels warn that the product is corrosive or can cause skin irritation, which can also indicate toxic or caustic ingredients.

2. Go reusable and avoid things you use once and throw away.

Disposable goods are a drain on budgets and create unnecessary waste. Invest in fabric napkins and table cloths at home. At the office, do a budget analysis of your disposable products, and consider how much you might save by having a service supply fresh linens instead of disposables. You’ll be surprised by how much you are paying for things you use once and throw away. Promote your business, school or community group with wholesale reusable bags, and help others go green around you.

3. Read the labels of products you buy.

Taking the time to read the label just might be enough incentive to put the bottle back and find something that is less toxic. Some of those ingredients have impossibly long names and it’s hard to tell what they are. But if you know these three “codes”, you will be able to avoid the worst products.

• “chlor” in any ingredient, indicates bleach, a bio-cide meaning something that kills all life. While limited use of bleach for bathroom and laundry purposes can be wise, use beyond small amounts in sensitive areas can be harmful to you, your family, and beyond.
• Endings with “-ene” (like benzene), or “-anol” (like ethanol) indicate petrochemical solvents. These are VOCs, Volatile Organic Compounds, carbon based chemicals that form a vapor at room temperature. They are highly toxic to humans and the environment but rarely labeled, or sometimes just labeled generally as solvents. Any strong smell to a chemically based cleaner probably comes from a VOC.
• Petroleum distillates, aka naphas or “-phenol,” indicating toxic coal tar derivatives. These are ubiquitous in products from lipstick to paraffin, and fall in the category of POPs: Persistent Organic Pollutants. These ingredients stay in the environment (and people) for long periods of time and continue to disrupt eco-systems and health. Though some have organic origin, their presence outside their natural habitat can cause other ecological damage.

Buy reusable bags today from snapsac.com. Or make your business or a school or community group greener with bags of your own. Contact us today and take that step in becoming eco-friendlier.

Find more eco-friendly tips on our other LEARN pages.