Decluttering your home is also a lesson in how to be more sustainable. Pro tip: a checklist will help.
Let’s be real. The easiest way to deal with your clutter is to chuck it in the trash and move on with your junk-free life. However, this only makes more clutter for the planet. It is not the most sustainable decision, even if it brings peace of mind at home. When it comes to sorting through unwanted possessions in your home, there are a few different measures you can take that are more eco-friendly. Most important: declutter your declutter process with a simple checklist. Every item should fall into a category: keep, repurpose, donate, sell, or recycle.
The most challenging part of decluttering can be the process. A scattered approach leads to scattered piles throughout the house. It’s not good. Make a game plan. Which room is most in need of a refresh? Start there. This could mean one room a week or month or even longer — and it gives you time to spend time really figuring out what makes the most sense to part with. Some rooms will require more or less of your time so it’s often helpful to alternate heavy and light rooms. Maybe start with the cluttered kids room and move onto the less-cluttered dining room, then back to a cluttered office, etc.
The single biggest decluttering mistake most people make is trying to do it all at once. “It’s actually easier to take small bites over a long period of time, instead of delay, delay, delay, and trying to do it all in one weekend,” Mindy Godding, a certified professional organizer and owner of Abundance Organizing in Richmond, Virginia, told CNBC. The room-by-room approach — focusing on one space before moving to the next — transforms an overwhelming project into something that actually gets finished, and it starts with choosing the right room first.
Start where the decisions come easiest
Sentimental spaces are not the place to begin. Sorting through photographs, keepsakes, or childhood mementos requires an emotional bandwidth that should be reserved for later in the process, once the editing habit is already built. Godding recommends lower-stakes starting points: the medicine cabinet, underneath the bathroom sink, the linen closet, the entryway closet, the junk drawer, the pantry, “places where it’s going to be a lot easier to make those decisions,” she said. “You don’t want to go to your photo collection right out of the gate. That’s a recipe for disaster.”
The bathroom is a natural entry point — pull everything out of the medicine cabinet and from under the sink, sort by category, and toss anything expired or rarely touched. The pantry follows the same logic: clear it out completely, discard duplicates and expired goods, and return only what actually sees regular use.
Kitchen and bedroom, tackled with purpose
In the kitchen, organizational expert Peter Walsh has a practical test for the perennially cluttered utensils drawer: “Empty the contents of your kitchen utensils drawer into a cardboard box. For one month, put a utensil back into the drawer only if you take it out of the box to use it. If it’s still in the box after four weeks — you don’t need it,” Walsh shared on Oprah.com. The approach applies equally to countertops and cabinets, where every item should earn its space through regular use.
In the bedroom, each area works best when evaluated through the lens of its function. The closet exists for getting dressed — anything that doesn’t support that, from misplaced paperwork to off-season décor, needs a proper home or needs to go.
Long-term maintenance comes down to consistent habits built into the daily routine. Godding recommends a designated bin or bag placed somewhere accessible in the home: “Every time you’re going about your regular routine, and you get that item where you’re like, ‘I don’t really think I need this anymore,’ instead of just putting it back where it was, and waiting until the big clean out, walk over to your spot and put it in the bag or bin. Then the rule is when that bag or bin gets full, you just drive it to your favorite charitable organization.”
How to declutter your home checklist
Here’s an honest question: do you need to learn how to declutter or how to organize? It’s easy to see items that don’t have a home within your home as clutter or junk when the reality may be that you just haven’t spent the time to designate a space for these things. This is a very Konmari method of organization — find a home for everything in your home and clutter will be a thing of the past.
Assign your piles
One of the most effective ways to manage a decluttering system is to assign a destiny to every item you’re sorting through: typically, that’s a system of keep, repurpose, donate, sell, or recycle. But for a deeper declutter, you may turn the keep and repurpose pile into keep as-is, repurpose with an idea (and maybe write that down!), repurpose potential, or store it for later. It may also help to sort your sell piles by platform, and sort your hard-to-recycle items by category.
Repurpose
Some items may no longer be fit for their original intended use, but there may be ways to repurpose them in your home. Old t-shirts and plastic bottles could be turned into DIY items or cleaning rags, while old wooden tables and cupboards may be possible to break down and turn into shelves.
But be judicious in this process. Don’t keep a broken old television just because you can use it to prop open a door or window. Repurpose items where you can create real value and decrease the need to buy new items. Look at ways to use old electronics as art or planters. Can you turn a piece of furniture into a shelf or find another use for it?
Donate
Donating should be on every decluttering checklist. Certain items may not be valuable enough to make selling them worthwhile. But that doesn’t mean they should go to the landfill, either.
In fact, they could still be in good enough condition to donate. When you’re looking for easy ways to declutter, a donation site should be at the top of the list.
Donating items extends their life and reduces waste. You could donate items to friends or family who need them, or you could donate to charities or different drives to help those in need of household items.
Sell items
Selling items to people who want them could be a way of extending their life, instead of letting them end up in a landfill site prematurely. It’s also a great way of making some extra money.
When it comes to choosing eco-friendly places to sell your clutter, try to stick to local places such as local secondhand shops, local flea markets, or local selling sites.
Delivering items over long distances creates lots of emissions and is not the best way to deal with your clutter. But some resellers offset shipping emissions if that’s the best option for your declutter plan.
Use recycling services
You may be able to take items cluttering up your space to local recycling centers. This increases the chance that they will go to recycling plants and be turned into new products rather than being sent to a landfill site.
There may also be services like Ridwell that will take hard-to-recycle items for you. These services typically only take items your local recycling service doesn’t. In some cases, you may even be able to get paid for recycling items.
There are many people out there willing to buy electronics so that they can upcycle parts. Explore your options by looking into local services online. Platforms like Declutter will take your old smartphones and other devices, and your municipality services may have links to battery or appliance recycling as well.
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