How to make your Kid’s Room Eco-Friendly
Your kid’s room is one of the most important areas of your house.
Thus, it is crucial to improve it as much as possible.
However, apart from individual preferences, this should also include making sure that the kid’s room will be eco-friendly in order to protect our environment.
In this article, several tips on how you can make your nursery more eco-friendly are examined.
18 proven ways to make your kid’s room more eco-friendly
- Use furniture made of renewable materials
- Toys made of renewable materials
- Toys that raise the awareness on environmental topics
- LED lights
- Replace your windows
- Eco-friendly paint
- Don’t exaggerate with material things
- Organic bed & slatted frame
- Eco-friendly mattress and mattress cover
- Bedding from natural materials
- Carpet from eco-friendly materials
- Eco-friendly pajamas
- Environmentally-friendly curtains
- Wash your kid’s bedding with natural detergents
- Plants for decoration and to improve air quality
- Decoration from recycled materials
- Use natural materials for flooring
- Always think long-term
Use furniture made of renewable materials
If you consider replacing or initially choosing the furniture for your kid’s room, keep in mind to do so in an eco-friendly manner.
You should choose natural sustainable resources over synthetic materials.
One of the best materials from an ecological standpoint is bamboo.
It grows quite fast and is also quite durable, which makes it the perfect material for cupboards, shelves and other furniture in your kid’s room.
If you are technically talented, you could also try to make some of the furniture for your child’s nursery by yourself.
This could be quite a lot of fun, especially if your kids help you.
By working with your kids and making furniture by yourself, you will be quite proud afterward when you see the end result.
Moreover, you will be able to show your kids how important it is to save our environment.
By leading by example, your kids will also be more likely to adopt this eco-friendly attitude.
Not only can you improve your ecological footprint, but you can also teach your children who are more likely to adopt this eco-friendly behavior into adulthood, which further increases your positive contribution to saving our planet.
Toys made of renewable materials
There are plenty of toys out there.
However, the majority of those toys is still made out of synthetic materials like plastic, since it is quite convenient and cheap for companies to produce plastic toys.
However, this leads to enormous levels of plastic pollution, which can now be regarded as one of our biggest environmental problems.
Thus, it is crucial that you avoid buying plastic toys or that you at least reduce the number of plastic toys you give to your children.
Instead, try to buy versions of toys that are made out of wood or other renewable and eco-friendly materials.
Since toys are often produced under quite poor working conditions in third world countries, make sure that your toys are made with fair labor.
Many companies that support fair labor are certified.
Watch out for those labels before you buy toys for your kids to assure fair working conditions.
Toys that raise the awareness on environmental topics
Apart from relying on eco-friendly materials for your toys, you can further increase your efforts to save our environment by buying toys that raise the awareness of your children on environmental topics.
This could mean that you buy your kids’ books with topics regarding our environmental problems and how to solve them.
There are many other ways how you can achieve this educational goal.
Just ask yourself how your presents can positively impact your child’s behavior.
LED lights
Your lighting can be a big source of energy consumption.
However, it is quite easy to reduce the energy demand in your kid’s room significantly.
All you need to do is to replace your conventional lights with LEDs.
This simple trick allows you to save large amounts of energy and also money in the long run.
For sure, this is not only true for your kid’s room, but also for all other rooms in your home.
Make sure to replace all old lights by energy-efficient lighting systems in order to improve your ecological footprint and to save plenty of money at the same time.
Replace your windows
Especially in winter, we often excessively heat our homes. However, part of this heat will vanish since our windows are often not well-isolated.
This is especially true if you still use old windows.
Check out the energy-efficiency of your home to find out if there is a need to improve it and to replace your windows with new ones.
The replacement costs of windows can be quite high, however, compared to the energy savings in the long run, it is often worth it since you can save plenty of energy and also money.
This is not only true for your kid’s nursery, but also for all other rooms in your home.
Eco-friendly paint
As your kid gets older, his or her preferences may change.
This may also include the wall colors of the kid’s room.
If you come to the conclusion that it is time to paint the wall of your kid’s room, make sure that you use eco-friendly paint instead of conventional paint.
Conventional paint often contains large amounts of VOCs (volatile organic compounds), which can be quite harmful to the environment since these kinds of chemicals contribute to ozone layer depletion and can also be harmful to your health under certain circumstances.
Thus, in order to assure your kid’s health and to improve your ecological footprint, make sure that you rely on eco-friendly paint with low levels or even no VOCs at all.
Don’t exaggerate with material things
The level of happiness, especially in our Western world, seems to rely solely on materials things.
However, this is a kind of pretty flawed thinking which may lead to unhappiness rather than happiness in the long run.
If you raise your kids with the belief that material things lead to happiness, your kids will be quite unhappy if they are not able to have financial success in the future.
If you teach your kids that material things are not important, they are much more likely to be happy, even without all this material stuff.
Our level of happiness heavily depends on our expectations.
Thus, always make sure not to exaggerate the amounts of presents you give to your children in order to prevent them to become dependent on material things.
Organic bed & slatted frame
It is also important that you think about our environment when it comes to buying a new bed or slatted frame.
Make sure that the frame of your child’s bed is made out of organic materials rather than synthetic ones.
Moreover, also make sure that the organic materials are sustainable.
Once again, bamboo is the way to go when it comes to organic materials that are also sustainable.
Also make sure that your bed frame is made with the help of fair labor.
The same criteria should apply to your slatted frame.
Eco-friendly mattress and mattress cover
Also, for choosing a mattress for your children, you should make sure that your mattress is made out of natural materials.
Not only will you improve your ecological footprint, you may also be able to improve your health level since natural materials are often much better for your skin compared to synthetic ones.
This is especially true for people with quite sensitive skin.
Natural materials are often also much better in terms of breathability.
Thus, it is crucial to take those factors into account when it comes to buying decisions regarding mattresses.
The same criteria should also be applied to the mattress cover, since it is in direct contact with your skin.
Bedding from natural materials
You can improve your ecological footprint further by choosing eco-friendly materials for bedding instead of synthetic ones.
A good way to go is cotton bedding produced under fair labor conditions.
This should be a quick win in terms of eco-friendliness, since organic bedding is also not much more costly compared to synthetic bedding.
Thus, it should be an easy decision for you and your children to buy bedding made out of natural and sustainable materials.
Carpet from eco-friendly materials
For your carpet, you should also make sure to buy versions made out of natural materials.
Moreover, make sure that no animals had to die for your carpet.
Instead of carpets made out of animal skin, choose carpets made out of sustainable plant materials like cotton.
By doing so, you can not only improve your ecological footprint, but also save our animals from endangerment or even extinction.
In addition, you also don’t have to worry that your children ask you if an animal has been killed for this carpet if you avoid buying carpets made out of animal skin.
Eco-friendly pajamas
When it comes to buying a new pajama for your kid, make sure that this pajama is made out of organic fabrics like cotton.
Also make sure that it has been produced with the help of fair labor.
Look out for labels that relate to fair labor in order to make sure people in poor third world countries get a fair wage and are able to provide for their families.
Environmentally-friendly curtains
If your children want to have curtains in their kid’s room, make sure that also those curtains are made out of sustainable and organic materials like cotton.
The fair labor criterium should also be important when it comes to buying decisions regarding curtains.
Needless to say, the fair labor criterium should be applied to all items you buy for your kid’s room.
Wash your kid’s bedding with natural detergents
There are many detergents out there.
However, most of the conventional detergents contain components that can have adverse effects on our environment and can also have negative health effects.
Switching from conventional to more eco-friendly detergents can improve your ecological footprint and may also improve your overall health level.
We are quite lucky that we live in a time where we can order those detergents conveniently over the internet.
Thus, there should be no excuse that it is too difficult to find natural detergents.
Plants for decoration and to improve air quality
Instead of decoration made of plastic, try to use plants instead.
There is a variety of plants out there and I bet your kids will be fine with one of those.
These plants also often increase the air quality in a room, which may also be beneficial to the health of your kids.
Moreover, plants are usually quite cheap, which may be an additional argument to choose them over conventional synthetic decoration.
Decoration from recycled materials
If your kids do not like plants at all for some reason, you could also buy decoration from recycled materials.
Thus, by doing so, you can at least reduce the amount of plastic waste you produce since part of the components of the decoration comes from recycled materials.
However, it would be more beneficial for our planet if you make the decoration by yourself.
You can also include your kids in this activity.
This may bring a lot of fun for you and your kids and may also be useful to our environment.
However, make sure to use wood instead of plastic to improve your environmental footprint even further.
Use natural materials for flooring
Even though your flooring may be quite durable, from time to time, it needs to be changed.
Make sure to use parquet from sustainable woods instead of synthetic materials like laminate.
By doing so, you can reduce plastic waste.
Even if laminate is often cheaper, parquet is usually more durable and will therefore be cheaper in the long run.
Always think long-term
For all your buying decisions, it is crucial to always have a long-term perspective.
You should evaluate the impact of your actions in the long run, not in the short run.
For instance, using parquet instead of laminate may be more expensive in the short run, however, since parquet is much more durable, it might even be cheaper in the long run compared to laminate. The same principle applies to many other things.
Just make sure to access the long-term benefits and costs for our environment as well as financially in order to make profound buying decisions so that you can be proud of making these decisions in the long run.
Conclusion
There are various ways how you can make your kid’s room more eco-friendly.
Apart from relying on natural, sustainable and energy-efficient materials, it is also crucial that you include your kid’s opinion in the buying decisions.
By doing so, the awareness of your kid regarding the protection of our environment will increase, which makes it more likely that your kid will behave in an eco-friendly manner once he or she turns into a grownup.
About the author
My name is Andreas and my mission is to educate people of all ages about our environmental problems and how everyone can make a contribution to mitigate these issues.
As I went to university and got my Master’s degree in Economics, I did plenty of research in the field of Development Economics.
After finishing university, I traveled around the world. From this time on, I wanted to make a contribution to ensure a livable future for the next generations in every part of our beautiful planet.
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