Green Shelving

Despite our constant efforts as homeowners to design and decorate our homes so they fit our family’s needs best, we most often end up lacking enough storage. And that’s what every home needs: ample storage space to bring some order into our chaotic and cluttered worlds. For eco-friendly owners, there’s an additional must – making sure the solutions are sustainable as much as possible.

Here are some inexpensive, practical and sustainable storage solutions to help you organize your green home:

Declutter your home

Even though decluttering is not an actual green strategy, making sure you rid your home of clutter is a part of optimizing your living space and creating a healthier environment. Take a look around – all the things you don’t use on a regular basis needs to go, either to the bin or to a new owner. Organize a yard sale, sell items online, and give away to charities. top piling them in your storage to collect more dust and dirt.

Use sustainable building materials

If you’ve decided to build a green home, the only way to achieve it is using sustainable building materials as well. The traditional building industry is one of the biggest contributors to environmental pollution, but you can make a different choice and go for a green build. That means that everything from walls, roofing, insulation, flooring, cabinets, counters to furniture and shelving are no exception. Instead of buying ready-made bookcases and shelving, opt for reclaimed materials and objects to create practical and adjustable shelving for your living room and storage.

Opt for eco-friendly lighting solutions

Whether you create new storage and shelving in your basement, garage or living room, it doesn’t mean you need to give up on the aesthetics and keep everything in the dark. Clever built-in lighting can do wonders for the décor and help you finds things more quickly. The greenest option here is LED and CFL lighting bulbs. They’re wallet-friendly, last longer than traditional solutions and consume much less energy. If you continue with this type of lighting throughout your whole house, your overall electricity bill will be cut significantly.

Go vertical

Being green and expanding your storage or warehouse square footage don’t go hand in hand. Knocking down walls, building new rooms and new compartments would be an immense waste of building materials and a financial ruin. Instead, opt for going vertical as it will save much more resources. Vertical space is underutilized and it offers excellent possibilities for stacking and adjustable shelving, and the fact that there is no additional construction simply means no additional resources are used.

Change your habits

Most of us have gotten into a rut with our daily habits. We’re used to throwing things after they stops being useful and we tend to forget that landfills aren’t bottomless pits that can go on sustaining our waste indefinitely. Instead, we can do more reusing and repurposing and be more creative with storage. For instance, reuse cube trays as organizers for paper clips and rubber bands, egg cartons can become storage solutions for jewelry or holiday decorations, and empty tn containers are a perfect option for keeping screws, nails or pencils.

Changing your lifestyle and going green is probably one of the best decisions you can make to improve your health and the environment. Your home becomes a better and more positive space and with the financially sensible tips listed here, you can create enough additional storage that will complement your home décor nicely and help support our planet as well.

About The Author

Article written by, Amelia Atkins: author at Smooth Decorator and a fresh architecture student. The love for architecture and design runs in her family and she knew what she wanted to do from a very young age. You can often find her with a notepad in hand, just looking at the clouds, dreaming about the next skyscraper.