Mindzle

Posts Tagged ‘home furnishings’

If you’re always on the prowl for ways of making your home greener, you’ve most likely come across this post title before. Although this post sounds like your everyday ‘make your home greener’ post, it’s really not.

The majority of the other posts are based on improving your home and how you can save money in the process. They tend to talk about the basics like having loft insulation, not leaving appliances on standby, double glazing, things like that. This post is all about what you can do to help the environment after all those things.

Although you may have managed to stop your home from wasting so much energy, there is one aspect that’s commonly forgotten. Every so often we decide to redecorate our homes, this often leads to changes in everything from wallpaper to bathroom accessories. This is where you can make some improvements.

When you are choosing new furniture, you rarely consider the environmental impact. I suppose it’s tough enough to find something everyone in your family likes, without it being green too. But when you think about it, a lot of energy has gone into making these products. Normally they are constructed in big factories, wasting lots of energy, then they get shipped back to the UK because they were made abroad.

Fortunately, due to everyone becoming more aware of our impact on the environment, many retailers are offering greener, more eco-friendly home furnishings.

From everything from tableware to kitchen accessories, there are lots of products out there that you can buy that are better for the environment. All these things you end up buying for your home all have a negative impact on the environment. This is something that should be in the minds of everyone when it comes to furnishing your home. Stopping your home from wasting lots of energy isn’t the only way you can reduce your home’s impact on the environment. Although you can’t avoid it with some home accessories, you’d be surprised how many green products you can buy for your home.

OK, so the Bamboo PC it was a gimmick. The laptop version of the bamboo PC launched last March at a computer fair in Hanover. It featured a laminated bamboo casing which was around a standard laptop, meaning that no less plastic was needed in making it.

Although the bamboo computers won’t make a huge difference to the environment, it did prove how versatile material really is.

Bamboo must be the only plant on the planet that is a source of food, works as building materials and woven fabrics. One of the early light bulbs created by Edison used bamboo. Because the material is so string, resiliant and cheap to use, it is used widely in building throughout Asia. The fibres within bamboo poles have both high tension strength, as well as high compression strength. It’s compressive strength works out around twice that of concrete, bamboo also has the same tensile strength to weight ratio as steel. Now there’s even a bamboo laptop!

Bamboo will please anyone whose buying eco-friendly home furnishings. For a start, bamboo is an extremely sustainable material. Some bamboo species are able to grow more than one metre every day. Local people are able to cut down as much bamboo as they need for carving or weaving and still have the same amount growing as they did before they cut some down. As for the global warming problem, because bamboo is a plant, all products made out of the sustainable material contains a large amount of atmospheric carbon. The plastic equivalent of a bamboo product is worse for the environment as it actually adds to the levels of carbon in the atmosphere!

Another point is that because bamboo is a plant source, there are many variations between two plants, these variations make it a difficult material to use in a mass production process. What this means is that you can be almost positive that a skilled craftsman has built the bamboo product you buy. If you go to a reputable source you’ll also know that the craftsman got a fair wage for his or her work, and that no one was exploited by western buying power. The final thing is that you’ll be sure that the item you bought hasn’t gathered any air miles during its creation.

With eco credentials this strong, it’s a surprise bamboo built products are so beautiful. Just picture a hand crafted bamboo box, layered 15 times with natural shellac. Both stylish and natural. Only the other day, I bought an amazingly crafted bamboo knife block and am seriously considering following suit with other bamboo kitchen accessories such as salad bowls. Stylish and ethical. Win.

So many things are now going green and it looks like the mobile phone is set to hit the market too.

All electrical appliances with the energy star are already deemed to be green and of course you have the option of going green when it comes to the car thanks to the hybrid. However, when purchasing your next mobile, will there be an option for somebody who is passionate about saving the world?

Well since the teaming up of Sprint and Samsung there now is. This new phone is actually made from corn and is made up from 80% recyclable materials. The real query is why this hasn’t been done before? With nearly everyone in the developed world owning at least one mobile phone it seems crazy why this sort of thing wasn’t released sooner!

To try and make you a greener person, the phone charger itself has the energy star on it and some of the applications for the phones are now put on there beforehand. Pre-loaded apps from the Discovery Channel are placed on there to help turn you into a greener person. They have even put a glossary on there to help explain things on climate changes.

This isn’t it for this phone, it is also a smartphone that has GPS, Web browsing and speech recognition. What this shows is that technology seems to be jumping ahead at a very alarming rate.

Of course it doesn’t just have to stop on the phone, you can buy so many different things for the home that are green and eco-friendly now whether that is kitchen accessories as well as bathroom accessories So whatever home furnishings you are looking to change there is always something out there for you to choose.It makes you wonder what they will think of next. Wonderful as technology is, we wonder where it might all end?