Life hacks: Some simple incidental Earth kindness can make a huge difference

Lightening your carbon footprint and protecting the wider environment? Kya deLongchamps says it all starts with some critical thinking about those everyday chores.

EASE up on blithely buying those throw-away plastic bottles, sprinkle some salt on thoseweeds in the paving, and enjoy new and often cheaper, holistic approach to greener, earth-friendly living.

It’s all about everyday life hacks. Practice one or two of these easy earth kindnesses in a week and then see if you can make them regular habits for the whole family throughout the rest of the year.

For smaller gardens, glyphosate-based weedkillers, including Roundup, is a toxic indulgence. Cheap, available and completely biodegradable, plain table salt dehydrates unwanted plants and with a bit of patience will kill them right down to the root.

Don’t be tempted to simply pour dry salt onto weeds unless they are safely isolated in cracks of pavement. The surrounding soil will be affected, so nothing will grow after the application. Dilute the salt in water (3 parts water to one part salt) and pour it accurately onto the leaves and stem.

An olive oil spout bottle is ideal for this. Neat vinegar with a dash of liquid soap to break the surface tension is another lethal, earth-friendly combination.

Clean your house walls rather than paint them

A judicious power wash from ground level can freshen up paintwork without the need to for an expensive, chemical-heavy reapplication of colour. Masonry and bricks should be handled with care to avoid blasting off sections of render or mortar.

If you’re less than half a metre from the surface, you are just too close. For detergent, choose something with high environmental credentials (Karcher are reliable for OECD biodegradables) or add a dash of phosphate-free, green laundry powder/liquid to the first spray and then rinse well.

Ecover non-bio is widely available and won’t pollute groundwater, 1.5l, €9.50.

Avoid single-use plastic

With the ditching of single-use plastics for domestic use coming down the pipeline, plastic straws will be off the shelves within months. New, reusable straws in bamboo, wheat, paper, glass, steel and other reeds are now available in good kitchen shops and online.

Giving the potential for dirt lodging in the straw, we love Klean Kanteen’s pricey put forever, silicone-tipped steel straws, complete with a straw ‘brush’ in palm frond — 4 straws and brush, €12.95, littlegreeneshop.ie.

Or just do without a straw.Reduce your purchasing of plastic bottles as even dedicated divers cleaning the oceans’ surface can’t keep up with the 20,000 bottles being bought every second worldwide.

Charge your phone in Airplane Mode

Switch off the incidental features trilling away on the background of your phone as its charging and it will power up a lot faster, saving you a sliver of power. Who needs bluetooth and GPS while standing in the kitchen?

Use airplane mode regularly as it stops the phone searching for networks you don’t need, saving the battery life. Don’t trust me, check with the tech-geek in your life. The secret’s out.

Respect plastic bags

Any plastic that scrunches up in the hand is environmental public enemy number one, but let’s face it— most of us have stout plastic bags hibernating in legions all over the house.

Brussels wants us to reduce our personal use of plastic bags from 90 to 40 per year by 2026, which seems reasonable.

Treasure the ones you have, re-use them and cut back on the tree-felling and bleaching required to go solely to paper. If you have to buy a plastic shopping bag, fold it, put it away and use it again for everything from filling with distilled white vinegar, and tying around your showerhead to remove soap scum and mildew, to carrying out peelings to the compost.

Buy fruit and vegetables that are seasonally appropriate

If you think about the additional energy and fertilising it takes to bring a tomato to ripeness in winter as opposed to summer, it makes sense to buy food that has ripened naturally in the season that you buy it. Chances are it’s fresher that way too. Continue to buy locally grown produced, but start to question the seasonality of what you’re buying too.

Make up an everyday green cleaning spray

And use for just about every surface. Take a spray bottle (found at any garden shop or pound store), fill it up to half the straight side with tap water. Top to around the ¾ mark with white vinegar.

Add something to cut the smell — lemongrass oil is delicious and just says clean. Add a tiny drop of washing up liquid for glide and additional grease cutting power. Shake well and leave by the sink to use with piece of old cotton t-shirt. Lauder your clothes regularly and hang them out to dry in the sun (a natural bleach and germ killer.

Put a dry towel in the dryer with every load of clothes

Put your cloths in the washer and hang them out to dry in the sun, which acts as a natural bleach and germ killer.

Not quite necessary in a heat wave, but this ridiculously simple trick cuts the drying time of an average load by as much as half an hour.

Ensure you set the cycle to a sensor mode to let the dryer shut off when the moisture has been wicked out and vented or condensed. When the weather allows — take it all out to the line.