Eco-Friendly Spring Cleaning Pro Tips

Cleaning our home, the garage, the basement, and the attic is cathartic, frees up space and allows fresh new energy to flow through your home. It may seem odd, but, spring cleaning doesn’t have to produce a bunch of waste. Before you go tossing everything in a container and sending it off to the dump, here are our eco-friendly spring-cleaning pro tips to help you minimize waste.

Minimizing spring cleaning waste

How can you minimize waste when you are spring cleaning your house? By organizing the items you no longer want or need into categories. Just because you don’t want it doesn’t mean that it can’t be resold, reused, recycled, or repurposed. Don’t let your spring cleaning efforts create problems for the planet by creating more waste.

Minimize spring cleaning waste
A garage sale is the first step to minimizing spring cleaning waste.

Garage sale

The first step to minimizing waste is to find a new home for things you no longer want. Toys, clothing, and exercise/sporting equipment are typical items that have taken up too much space in our homes. You and your kids may have outgrown everything, but we bet there’s someone in your neighborhood or circle of friends that would welcome some hand-me-downs. Who knows, one of your neighbors may want to give all of those free-weights a try. Before you decide if something is trash, see if you can’t sell it by having a garage sale.

Donate

Not everything is going to sell at a garage sale. Items that are still perfectly good can be donated. There are plenty of organizations that would welcome donations. Clothing, furniture, books, equipment, household items, etc. should be donated. That way you ensure that they get a second life and don’t go straight to the landfill.

Recycle

Eco-friendly spring cleaning pro tips
Reusable clothing can be sold, donated, or handed down to someone else.

In the end, you’ll be left with things that can’t be donated or sold. Sort those items into two piles: trash and recyclable. Depending on the materials, many of your broken or damaged items can be recycled or repurposed. Some things may not work as originally intended, but the materials may be perfectly good.

Once you’ve gone through your spring cleaning pile and accounted for all the things that can be reused, recycled, repurposed, sold, or donated, then you can toss the rest in the garbage. If the pile is more significant than your normal trash service allows, talk to us about extra garbage service and dropping off containers for large items.

Sunrise Sanitation provides recycling and trash services for your home, business, and job-site in West Virginia and Maryland.

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