Just like inside your home and even at work, you might want to reduce your carbon footprint in the garden. Well, it’s not as hard as you think, and you only need to make a few small changes.
Use Sustainable Materials Throughout
If you want your garden to be a peaceful place for people and animals, you will need to use a lot of different things. In a modern garden, you can often find wood, stone, and even metal. But you can have less of an effect on the environment if you use sustainable materials like composite Trex decking for your floors. Or, you can use old brick linings to build up your garden and keep the dirt out. Almost anything can be used again and will work well in your garden.
Learn How to Compost
The use of compost is essential in gardening. However, producing your own can reduce your carbon footprint significantly compared to going to a garden centre. For every kilogramme of home compost produced, carbon emissions are reduced by an amount equal to almost two miles travelled in a car. As opposed to purchasing bagged retail compost. A typical home gardener might save more than 5 kg of carbon annually by using handmade compost.
Reduce Your Carbon Footprint with Electric Tools
Power tools are a great investment if you have trouble moving around or just want to make your gardening tasks easier. But a typical gasoline-powered power tool, on the other hand, gives off about 1 kg of carbon dioxide for every litre of petrol it uses. So if you use petrol power tools and switch to electric-based tools, you will save as much carbon as it would take to drive around the whole world in a car. Brands like Ryobi offer excellent chargeable tools for any gardening task.
Use Rainwater Instead of a Hose
Change your gardening water supply from mains hose pipes to rainwater tanks to save carbon. You can use a water butt that collects the water from your drainage system rather than a tap. Or you can use a watering can to use less water. Collecting rainwater is more challenging in some areas. But countries like Britain have ample amounts of rain that you can collect and severely reduce your mains usage if you do it properly. You can reduce water use by around 60%.
Help Out the Bees
Pollinators like bees essentially keep the world alive. So we need to help them out. One of the main reasons we don’t see as many bees, butterflies, and other insects in our gardens is that they have less space to live these days. You can help stop and even turn around the decline of these essential creatures by growing a wide range of plants. You can begin with plants native to your country. But encourage more action with near-native and even exotic plants.
Summary
There are tons of ways you can reduce your carbon footprint in the garden. Some of the easiest is to use materials that don’t harm the environment, electric tools, and encourage pollination.
