Why Your Homewares Should Be Sustainable, Versatile, and Decorative
Does a home without decoration even look like a home? The decorative homewares you choose make a statement, but what sort of statement do they make? Yes, your homewares reflect your style and tastes, but this isn't the only statement they can (or perhaps should) make.
Your Personal Ideology
The very idea of decorative homeware is very broad, encompassing things like designer homewares, inherited from a family member, and knick-knacks you've picked up at a discount shop. There's no right or wrong way to choose homewares, and yet they can also indicate your personal ideology.
Versatility and Sustainability
You should select homewares with an eye to versatility and sustainability. But why is this? Put simply, you should avoid your homeware becoming junk when your tastes change to the point that you no longer want the item in question for its decorative qualities, since, as far as you're now concerned, that quality no longer exists.
The Peril of Plastic
How should you incorporate sustainability when selecting decorative objects for your home? Firstly, think carefully before purchasing plastic homeware of any description. You might think that if you should no longer want the item, you can just dispose of it in the recycling bin. It's not quite so simple. Plastic production has far outpaced plastic recycling, and it's statistically likely that your discarded plastic homeware will be amongst the 91% of plastic that is not recycled. It might be incinerated (which isn't great for the environment), but can easily end up in landfill, where it will remain for centuries. A plastic drinking bottle will take 450 years to decompose, which means your plastic homewares will almost certainly outlast the home they were purchased for.
Repurposing
Sustainability can be addressed by purchasing homewares made largely of glass, wood, or metal. These materials can be easily recycled, and the ease of the process means it's far more likely to actually happen when you're done with them. They're also more durable, which brings versatility into the equation. You might have purchased some decorative glass containers for your home, but when they no longer suit your tastes, they can easily be pressed into service as storage in other parts of your home where the need for decoration isn't a concern.
Nobody is saying that your home should be devoid of decorative homeware, but you should start to consider what will happen to these items when they're no longer of decorative value.
