Cohousing can help you to reduce your carbon footprint and live more sustainably, by sharing resources and consuming less.
As well as providing a greater sense of community and a safer place to live, many people choose to live in cohousing neighbourhoods so they can tread more lightly on the planet and play their part in combatting climate change.
Cohousing can help to reduce your carbon footprint in many ways. Here’s are some of the ways that Angel Yard’s future residents are planning to make a difference.
Sustainable buildings
Whilst our plans are still being confirmed, we’re determined that our homes and shared buildings will be built to the highest sustainability criteria possible. We plan to use sustainably-sourced materials to create highly energy-efficient homes with a low environmental footprint.
Shared spaces and resources
As well as private homes, Angel Yard will have some shared spaces and resources. The central area will be a common house and kitchen, where we can share meals and host celebrations together. This will also have multipurpose spaces within it, where homeworkers can hot desk and children can play.
In addition, we’re planning to include a shared laundry room, to save every household owning a washing machine; a workshop, fitted out with communal tools; and guest rooms, which we can book if we have overnight guests, to reduce floor space and save energy.
Regular group meals
By sharing meals once or twice throughout the week, we not only have a chance to socialise and relax together, but we can reduce costs by buying in bulk or using homegrown produce. Plus, whilst we’re all in the common house, we’ll save on energy bills in our homes!
Greener transport
We’ll be keeping the number of cars at Angel Yard to a minimum by signing up to a car share scheme, to reduce our emissions. Norwich is an easy city to travel around by bike, so we’ll have a shared cycle store to encourage more people to use two wheels.
Less waste
Reduce, reuse, recycle! It’s a great mantra for cohousing. By having smaller homes, sharing resources and helping one another to fix or reuse things that break, we hope we’ll be able to consume less and cut down on our waste.
Growing our own
We’re already hard at work on Angel Yard’s allotment, close to our site. Eventually, we’ll share our homegrown produce with all our residents, to use in group meals. Part of our allotment is being turned into a permaculture-led Forest Garden, to increase productivity and biodiversity.
Our Project
Want to find out more about our plans for Angel Yard? Head on over to our Project page.