What does it mean to the environment if your home is clean or dirty? How are our cleaning choices affecting the wider world and our particular piece of it?
This is a part of the environmental puzzle that is often overlooked and not represented in mainstream media, but our personal cleanliness choices in the home have an impact on the environment, even if that impact seems small. Let’s look at some of those impactful choices so that we can better understand the relationship between a clean home and a healthy environment.
Our Health is Directly Affected by Cleanliness
Most of us were told all through childhood to wash our hands often- after we eat, before we eat, after we play outside, after we touch anything dirty, after we play with animals, etc. This is good advice, and that is because if we touch something dirty and then put our germ-covered hands to our face for whatever reason, we can easily allow germs to get inside our bodies and make us sick.
If we live in a dirty environment inside our own home, then germs will be more prevalent and the risk of illness will be elevated. A clean home makes for a safer environment. There is less risk for contamination, illness, and disease. There is less risk of setting off our allergies as well.
What does that have to do with the environment? Well, if we become sick, we will need to use more resources. We will need to go to the doctor perhaps, or drive to the pharmacy. We may miss work time, which can result in inefficient methods of covering our work by people who are less skilled at it. All of these things burn through resources, and those resources are often finite.
Sickness of any kind is harmful to the environment, as it can spread to animals and can cause a breakdown in normal operations that are costly and resource draining. It is good for the environment if we are healthy, and by keeping a clean home, we can reduce our risk of unhealthiness. This is why environmentally conscious people will use professional cleaning services like condo cleaning and deep cleaning to ensure a tidy, sanitary environment.
Cleanliness Means Less Wastage
It can take a lot of resources to keep a house dirty. We often think the other way around- that a clean house takes lots of work. It does, but it uses fewer resources.
Consider this – if we do not keep a clean house, then we will have to expend more resources to fight pests. That is just one problem that comes with a dirty house. You will have more pests and have to deal with the health problems they cause if you have an untidy house.
If the house is dirty, then that causes the items in the house to break down faster and need replacement. If our clothes get dirty and stay dirty for long periods of time, they may become unusable. We may be tempted to toss out items that have mold growth, pest droppings or other damage that is caused by a dirty house. Items that are kept clean will last longer and not need replacement as soon.
Cleanliness promotes conservation, and people who keep a tidy house will be less likely to waste what they have. If they can find the items they are looking for, they don’t have to go out and buy new ones. If we always put away the possessions in our house and keep them clean and tidy, then that will help with environmental pollution. Fewer resources will be wasted, and there will be less damage to things we own.
Keeping a Tidy Home Promotes Environmentalism
There are likely many environmentally conscious people who have untidy homes but are concerned about the environment outside. This kind of lifestyle creates a juxtaposition that will cause conflict. If we are neat at home, we are likely to care about things being neat outside the home.
So, if we keep a clean home, then it will bother us more to see bottles and other trash strewn about the neighborhood. We will want to do more to clean up rivers and other waterways of garbage if we are cleaning up our own houses. It is tough to be consistently concerned about a clean environment on Earth when we are not concerned about a clean environment in our home.
If we can promote cleanliness at home, then environmental protection will naturally flow from that. We should encourage our children to be tidy and make sure that we too keep things clean at home, and that will cause a natural reaction to clean outside the home as well.
People who are neat at home will always pick up any trash or debris lying around in their house or in their yard. That is natural for them. Then, when they go to the beach or the park, they may pick up items that are out of place. This natural extension of what they do at home could benefit the entire world, and we will do more to protect the environment if we all develop this same characteristic.
Closing Thoughts
It is easy to separate our home life from our outside life, but that can lead to a divide between how we feel and how we act. If we are going to be always environmentally conscious and do our part to protect the environment at home and outside the home, then we should develop a habit of tidiness. Cleaning up after ourselves, keeping our house clean, and eliminating waste will all start at home. If we can nourish these characteristics in our own homes, we will create more environmentally conscious people in our family and among our friends.
Look for ways to be cleaner and neater at home and see if that doesn’t translate to a cleaner environment. We think you will find that it does.
