Community Corner

Living Green Owner Gives Eco-Friendly Home Tips

Ellen Strickland provides simple solutions for those looking to make their homes more green.

Combine a quickly approaching Earth Day and all of the local buzz on sustainability, and you have many Culver City residents looking for easy ways to make their home more green. Patch sat down with Ellen Strickland, owner of Culver City’s Living Green to get her take on how to make a home more eco-friendly: “Part of it is about personal health and part of it about the environment. It has to not only impact earth’s health but also ours as well,” she said.

Strickland lounged on a couch made of recycled materials as she advised residents on how to do a green sweep: 

  1. Touch points: Anything we come in contact with is a good place to start. Look at your bath water, dishwater, clothing, cleaning solutions, she said. For clothing, clean your favorites with all-natural plant-based cleaners or use safe synthetic materials for garb if you have chemically sensitive skin. Strickland likes AFM Safecoat, Kiss Clean and Mrs. Myers to both clean your home and your clothing.
  2. Use less energy: When you need to cool off on a hot Culver City day, instead of cranking up the air conditioner, create a cross breeze by opening two windows. Before you head out the door in the morning for your commute, be sure that all the windows are shut tight so that the heat is trapped within the home, thereby decreasing the need to hike up the thermostat on cool nights.
  3. Extreme bedroom makeover: “If you think about it, you spend eight hours a day face down in your bedroom,” she says. Strickland recommends a complete bed makeover: change out your pillow, mattress and sheets. Replace them with bedding that doesn’t include flame retardant or synthetic treatment and go for organic cotton sheets without silicone coating.
  4. Label check: Be sure to read the labels on your cleaning materials, she says. Skip anything that contains phthalates, formaldehyde, ammonia or bleach. For those who love using bleach for deep cleaning, try hydrogen peroxide or oxygenated bleach.

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