Moving to a new home is an exciting adventure, yet it often comes with a significant environmental footprint. From cardboard boxes to bubble wrap, to tape and polystyrene, the moving process can generate a considerable amount of waste.
However, rest easy as there are sustainable practices and alternatives you can adopt to reduce waste and improve sustainability. In this blog, we’ll explore the importance of reducing waste and highlight the options for your moving process, to make it easy and eco-friendly.
The Environmental Impact
So before diving into sustainable moving practices, we should highlight the environmental impact of a typical move. Let’s talk about the process and everything that entails with it. Firstly, you have materials such as bubble wrap, Styrofoam and plastic packing materials that are all used widely but not environmentally friendly. A lot of these materials end up in landfills, taking years to decompose, or the production contributes to deforestation and energy consumption. Then you have fuel consumption. The transportation used to move your belongings to your new home consumes fossil fuels, which contributes to air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Lastly, there are your unwanted items. You’re decluttering for your new chapter which can sometimes lead to the disposal of perfectly usable items.
Sustainable Moving Practices You Should Know
You could even consider using storage boxes and reusable bags for packing and storing your items. Then there are biodegradable packing materials such as packing peanuts made from corn starch and natural materials, after use, they dissolve in water leaving no harmful residue. Using old newspapers, magazines, towels, and linens to cushion fragile items. We all know bubble wrap is always a key material to use with packing, but instead use paper bubble, which is better for the environment and can be reused as well. Paper bubble is available with all our BYPAK packs.
Packing Your Boxes
Think about all the space you’re using up with your items, assess your belongings, and donate or sell items you no longer need. This will ensure your perfectly usable items can have another life. It will reduce the volume of items you’re moving, making the transition a lot more stress-free, as well as minimising your waste and reducing fuel consumption during transportation. Additionally, there are many communities that have recycling programmes for cardboard, paper and plastics; this can be used with all your used materials when you unpack.
Also consider the materials you use when you seal your boxes, instead of using plastic tape, use paper tape, which can be easily recycled and leaves less of an environmental impact. Every BYPAK pack contains a roll of paper tape.
Eco-Friendly Transportation
You can investigate renting a large vehicle or moving a truck to transport your belongings. This will allow more storage for your packed items equalling fewer trips on the vehicle. If you have a car yourself, you can pack it up to save even more space and time!
The bottom line is, we know moving is stressful and you don’t want the added stress of an environmental impact. Following these tips will allow you to leave a smaller carbon footprint and have a clear conscious when moving into your new home.
For all our recyclable moving boxes and materials shop with us at bypak.co.uk
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