Make Your Titan Tidy Storage Locker Environmentally Friendly With These Tips

Keeping your Titan Tidy Storage Locker ‘green’ won’t just help your garden and the environment around you. It will also quite often save you money, look good, and provide a flourishing ecosystem in your backyard, without costing too much in the way of time, money, or effort.

There’s a million ways to keep it eco-friendly in the backyard; so many that you might be stuck for choice. You can always be reducing, reusing, and recycling, but there’s a few more proactive ideas that we’ve thrown together to help you on your path for a ‘green’ Titan Tidy!

Remember that all these tips aren’t just for your benefit, they also benefit the environment at large. Even if you don’t particularly care for the neighbours or the world outside of your garden or toolshed at all, you’ll still be doing your part in helping maintain it for future generations.

Solar panelling

A great place to start is in the electrical supply. Keeping a shed powered can be a drain on electricity for the house, and becoming self-sufficient with solar panelling will pay for itself over time in the form of you lessened power bills.

Solar panelling isn’t particularly expensive, and it can provide a renewable, socially-conscious method of energy. Even if your shed doesn’t need powering, putting solar panels on it can provide a portion of the energy for your main house, dramatically reducing your bills. Place some panels up on your Titan Tidy’s roof if it hits the sunlight, even the smallest bit, and you should have enough to power some lights and electrical outlets.

The only time this might be an issue is if you live somewhere very cold, use your shed a lot, and need internal heating within it to keep you warm while you work. Fortunately, this applies to a very small amount of people in Australia, where we’re fortunate enough to be comparatively sunny and pleasant enough, even through the winter months.

Green roof

A second choice for those with a bare roof, is a ‘green’ roof.

Green roofs are a relatively new trend, and have taken off hugely in the last couple of years in both backyard projects and industrial developments. Simply put, it’s a cultivated garden that you place on your roof.

In the business and architectural world, we’re seeing a huge resurgence in conscious effort to meld the human and natural world, and in backyards across the world we’re seeing the same thing.

You’ll need a few things to help you get sorted with a green-roofed Titan Tidy. Firstly, before you begin, you’re going to need to have access to water to maintain it, and secondly, you’re going to need to make sure that it can bear the extra load (and that water won’t seep down into the shed proper). Titan Tidy Storage Lockers are extremely secure and strong, so will be able to hold plants on the roof.

From there, you simply need to build a containment box for your plants out of hardwood (easy to do, as the Titan Tidy Storage Locker has a flat roof), and then treat it like a regular semi-accessible garden. Plant low maintenance plants if you can help it, and remember to add sufficient filtration and moisture trapping for plant growth.

We’d recommend grasses for this; in Australia, we have plenty of natural Spinifex and similar plans that can survive in adverse conditions and look good while doing so. Anything harder to keep than this should only really be attempted by a gardener with some experience behind them.

Try a sustainable base

Concrete based sheds are perfectly fine, but if they’re not maintained over time they can lead to excess carbon monoxide in the atmosphere, and the act of filling a concrete base can additionally release pollutants if not done correctly.

Instead, we’ve created the Titan Tidy Storage Locker to have a sturdy steel frame and a wooden floor; either of these are much more environmentally conscious, and you won’t be sacrificing quality, longevity, or much in the way of costs to do so.

The only real downside with wood is that weeds can worm their way up inside more easily than through a concrete base. This is easily fixable with another environmentally friendly idea: simply throw down some sustainable mulch such as compost, leaf mould, scallop shells (ground), pine needles, hay, or certain barks and eucalypts around the outside of your shed. This will stop weeds from growing close, while also giving you a barrier of plant growth to stop creepers and other close growth.

Pick your space correctly

When first installing your storage locker, it can be incredibly destructive for the environment around your backyard to uproot trees or remove growths and objects in order to make room. Unless you’re really fighting for space, it’s a good idea to try and place your shed somewhere that it won’t be uprooting or moving other things. Trees are the obvious choice here, which you’ll probably have to destroy entirely if they aren’t small and heavily cultivated, however rocky outcrops can provide space for animal life, and shrubs or flowering plants are a feeding place for bees and birds.

Keep your location somewhere that, at most, you’ll have to remove some easily regrown grass, and make sure that the shadow of the shed isn’t going to also cause plants within the radius to shrivel up and die. Luckily, the Titan Tidy Storage Locker comes in a three sided option that can be placed up against the side of your house, making it easy, accessible and compact.

Using your shed to help the environment

It’s important to make sure your storage locker melds with the natural environment, rather than destroying or invading it. You’ll find that following these tips, and generally adopting this approach with all your gardening, landscape and house projects, will mean your property melds beautifully with the natural landscape, rather than overpowering it.