Decreasing your impact on the environment (and saving money!)

Thursday 04-04-2019 - 11:30

Blog by Chloe Foster (student at King's College London)

To help bring down those bills and curb excessive energy usage and wastage in your new home, here are some handy tips to help save your pocket and the planet. 

In the kitchen, there are loads of steps which can be taken to reduce energy consumption. These range from the obvious like turning taps off, to the less obvious, such as boiling the right amount of water in the kettle for the job. Based on average usage, kettles generate roughly the equivalent of 73 kg of C02 per year ! Using the correct size hob for the pan you’re using and using a lid both help to reduce the energy wasted whilst you cook. Finding meals that the whole household enjoy is also a great and fun way to lower your consumption as the appliances only have to turned on once to feed the household (if you can’t find a dish to decide on, cooking in bulk for yourself is also helpful). When cooking for one, try to cook the amount you will actually eat to avoid food wastage and try to utilise the microwave, which is 10 times  more energy efficient than most hobs (according to the Energy Savings Trust)!

The bathroom is a great place to reduce your water consumption and save some pennies! Try to reduce your shower time. Did you know that showers account for roughly a quarter of household water usage? Spending one minute less in the shower can save £1 per person per day! Having a colder shower also means less energy is needed to heat up the water. With your landlord’s permission, installing a water hippo in your toilet can also help save three litres of water per flush. Landlords can also help out by getting any leaky taps fixed in your bathroom or kitchen. According to the European Environment Agency a dripping tap can waste as much as a litre of water an hour!

Making sure to turn off your lights when you leave the room is estimated to save around £15 of energy annually. During the winter months, try putting on jumpers and wrapping up before turning the heating on and when it is on, make sure all the windows are shut or else the energy just escapes out of the window. Unplugging can help in many ways as well. Keeping the use of any appliances down will obviously save energy. Fewer hours spent on laptops and phones has also been proven to improve mental health and sleep!

We should also have an awareness of what we bring into our accommodation. Being more conscious of the packaging your weekly shop comes in and making an effort to avoid plastic can really help to reduce the production of plastics in the long run. Meatless Mondays can help you and your household to reduce your energy and water consumption. At the moment the meat and dairy farming industry produces 60% of greenhouse gas emissions so is a huge contributor to wider environmental issues. Meat production is also a massive consumer of water, with 1kg of meat needing between 5,000 and 20,000 litres of water to produce whereas 1kg on wheat requires between 500 and 4,000 litres of water (according to the IME). As a result, reducing your meat intake can also help to reduce your overall consumption of the planet’s resources whilst reducing the cost of your weekly shop.

So here are my tips for reducing your energy consumption in your private accommodation! I hope some, if not all, can help you out throughout the year!
 

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