Turning your home, and especially the kitchen, into a sustainable space should be a common task nowadays. Many people think that given today’s lifestyle, this is not only a titanic task, but even a utopic idea.

Nothing further from the truth. It takes only 5 steps, plenty of creativity and enough willpower to be able to change your consumption habits and even how you approach purchases.

A step-by-step guide

Step 1. Use natural, sustainable, and recycled materials. If  you  are remodeling or even better, if you are envisioning the kitchen of your dreams with an architect or designer, request that the furniture is manufactured in materials that are natural and don’t include plastic derivatives.

With this little gesture, you will be contributing with the environment. And it’s worth mentioning that you’ll have high quality and durable furniture, which could be recycled when you decide to change it.

Step 2. Install water-saving faucets. Faucets have entered  the revolution of design and technology in the kitchen. So it doesn’t come as a surprise that they now come with innovations such as the incorporation of filtering systems to purify the water or even limit its flow.

Reducing water consumption in the home and the kitchen is just as important as energy consumption. The planet will thank you.

Step 3. Choose highly efficient appliances. Just as you can learn how to read food labels to understand the nutritional value of an item, you should also start paying attention to the energy consumption labels of household appliances. State-of-the-art appliances, even as it may surprise you, spend less energy on their operation, which in turn makes them more efficient.

Now, you need to know that the information label includes a series of letters and colors. The letters range from A to D and the colors from green to red. This means that the energy efficiency of Class A appliances (including 3 additional subclasses: A+, A++, and A+++) is the highest available as these appliances guarantee significant water and electricity savings. This choice will turn your home into a responsible space in terms of consumption.

Step 4. Prefer eco-friendly paints and varnishes. If you are redecorating your home, and especially the kitchen, please do some research about paint and/or varnish brands with less polluting production processes. Also, find out everything about the wide variety of colors and varnishes available with ecological pigments.

Many of these are even composed of up to 80% recycled material. Ecological varnishes represent a significant saving of CO2. Another interesting possibility is to return to the use of lime or paints with this substance as a base. Not only because it’s ecological, but also because it prevents the proliferation of fungi, which is essential in the kitchen.

Step 5. Recycling, reusing, rethinking. These are three particularly important verbs to turn your home into a sustainable place. Recycling and reusing go together, as they invite you to give new use to those plastic ice cream or butter containers for example. This will prevent your kitchen from becoming a great waste generator that, in the end, is the ultimate bet of this trend.

In terms of rethinking, the organization of your waste will make you face the consumption habits of your family. This will help you become aware so you can implement a change in your usual behavior as soon as possible. Also, separating your garbage and classifying it through waste managers will facilitate recycling, and the subsequent use of it as biomass (energy made from waste).

As you can see, it’s not as hard as it seems. These are small steps that can be implemented using your willpower to guarantee we have a healthier planet longer.