I love a tidy house, yet I am not the tidiest person in the world. My solution consists of having less stuff so there less to tidy. I set a rule up to help me organise a room; if it can’t be tidy within 5 minutes (10 minutes with a dust and a vacuum) some stuff has to go. This is all well and good, but what effect does my aversion to clutter have on the planet? Maybe this article on the Unclutterer Blog will help me answer my question.

Unclutterers are tree-huggers

A person who abhors clutter — and knows that it saps energy and detracts from the more important things in life — already has the first and most important of the three “R”s down pat. Reducing your personal consumption also reduces the amount of “stuff” you’re contributing to the waste stream. Without all that excess baggage, maybe you won’t need to move into a power-guzzling McMansion to house your worldly goods.

It also leads on to give you 5 good rules to live by so you can lead an uncluttered, sustainable life.

1. Get your money’s worth. By choosing quality over quantity, as well as longevity over novelty, we’ll not only be able to spend more for something that is better-constructed and long-lived, but our purchasing habits will also have less of an impact on the environment.

2. Live virtually. Avoid creating something in meatspace if you have a digital option available. You can upload files instead of burning them to discs for distribution, for instance, or use tree-free online faxing. With electronic signatures, you can even send contracts through the digital ether, without having to print a thing.

3. Be Zen. As previous guest poster Zen Habits wisely preaches, less is more. To live minimally means being satisfied with just meeting your essential needs — everything else is just “stuff.” In other words, simplify, simplify, simplify.

4. Just say no. While this mantra applies to accumulating items we want but don’t need, it’s the little things that we need to be aware of, as well. Most of us ask for a printed confirmation, almost by rote, for example, when we withdraw money from an ATM, or purchase a ticket from a subway machine. More often than not, the receipt vanishes into the folds of our already-overstuffed wallets. Multiply that by 8 billion, which is how many ATM transactions happen each year in America, and that’s a lot of unnecessary waste. Review your ATM transaction at your bank’s Web site, instead.

5. Get rid of it. Taking inventory of your possessions, and culling what you don’t need by selling or donating those various odds and ends, means that someone else gets to make use of something that was only collecting dust at your home. And, because the recipient of your preloved goods purchased used, no new resources were expended to create something entirely new.

So when designing your next interior think less stuff = more environment.