The Low-Impact Home: A Sourcebook for Stylish, Eco-Conscious Living offers up advice for both more sustainable renovations and more eco-friendly everyday habits. With recommendations for every single room in the house, it’s the ideas for the kitchen—ranging from eco-friendly countertop materials to a wool dish-drying mat—that are sparking our next home makeovers big and small. Read on for the sage kitchen tips from The Low-Impact Home. When remodeling the hardest-working room in the house, prioritize green materials and energy-efficient parts. And if you’re in maintenance mode, consider impactful tweaks, from swapping out plastics to clearing indoor pollution. For inspiration, here’s the kitchen that architects Ruth Mandl and Bobby Johnston of CO Adaptive designed for their Brooklyn passive house (pictured, above). 6. Swap in a low-flow faucet. Choose one with a flow rate that doesn’t exceed 2.2 gallons (8.3 liters) per minute, such as this one by Vola, a pull-out spray model for ease when cleaning the sink. To make an existing faucet much more efficient, simply screw on an aerator: they cost less than $20 and don’t require a plumber to install. 7. Borrow from the laundry room. Drying racks come in handy in the kitchen for dish towels, rags, beeswax food wraps, and more. The standing version shown here is Skagerak’s portable Dryp rack in solid oak. 8. Meet the wool dish-drying mat. Wool is an absorbent and naturally mold- and mildewresistant material that makes a presentable gathering spot for drying pots, pans, delicate stemware, and other items that can’t go in the dishwasher. This durable mat, from the Sonoma Wool Company, is made of undyed, 100 percent American wool. 9. Integrate the compost pail. Compost receptacles needn’t hog counter space; here, a bucket with a cover stands in a tall drawer right under the counter. Its contents are dumped into a Subpod composter in the backyard for use in the family’s small garden. Excerpted from Remodelista: The Low-Impact Home by Margot Guralnick and Fan Winston with the editors of Remodelista (Artisan Books). Copyright © 2022. Photographs by Matthew Williams.
