Other than the laundry room or closet, it's hard to name a more purely functional room in the house than the bathroom. No wonder it's easy to forget all the ways we can reduce our footprint here.

Take the shower: We use, on average, up to 20 gallons of water during an eight-minute shower, according to the EPA1. That means a tiny tweak like shaving off just two minutes can actually help reduce our water footprint quite significantly over time. What reduces it even more is swapping in a water-saving showerhead with the EPA-approved Water Sense label2. Another big example is our TP: Consider making the switch over to 100% recycled toilet paper, which avoids harming our boreal forests—the most carbon-dense forest ecosystem on earth (aka a major solution for global climate change).