Multiple small actions by individuals can make a POWERFUL difference…
- Turning off the water while you brush your teeth can save 1,800 gallons of water per year.
- A low flow shower head will use 10 gallons of water during a 5 minute shower; a regular flow shower head uses up 25 gallons in 5 minutes. It requires fifty gallons of water to fill a tub.
- Turning down your thermostat by one degree will cut your heating bill (and energy use) by 3%… but don’t stop there.
- There are 5 trillion non-biodegradable cigarette butts thrown out of car windows, worldwide, each year.
- Institute a mug (and a metal utensil) policy in your office. Americans throw away 25 billion non-biodegradable polystyrene cups per year.
- Use re-usable mesh coffee filters at work.
- If all U.S. households would pay their bills online, it would save 19 million trees and over 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide and almost 2 billion pounds of trash.
- Most electrical appliances (and chargers) move to standby mode when turned off, requiring them to continue to use 40% of their full running power. Plug them into power strips and turn the strip off when they are not in use. If all Americans did this, it would save the amount of power annually that is generated by 26 power plants.
- There are 180,000 tons of small batteries thrown away each year in the U.S. alone. Rechargable batteries are the answer.
- Attach a rain barrel to your downspout.
- A trigger nozzle on your garden hose will save as much as 6 gallons of water per minute.
- Recycling all newspapers in the U.S. would save 130 million trees per year.
- Use natural pesticides to save the birds and the bees. (When I was a child there were birds singing constantly and everywhere… my grandchildren will never experience that.)
- One bat will eat up 1,000 mosquitoes per night; put up a “bat box.”
- Get a bike… walk… use your legs… burn a calorie.
- Drive your car until it dies and then buy a hybrid.
- Re-gift gift wrap.
- A lawnmower actually uses as much fuel as a car… go electric.
- Switch to flourescent lightbulbs. If every American household replaced one regular bulb with one flourescent bulb, the pollution reduction would be equivalent to removing one million cars from the road. Flourescents last 12x longer. LED lights are great too. Recessed lighting is the worst and most hardware stores have solutions to this problem.
- Avoid plastic bags… take your own cloth bags to the grocery store.
- Skipping the pre-washing of dishes, before putting them in your dishwasher, would save each household 7,300 gallons of water per year plus the energy that it takes to heat the water.
- Pre-heating ovens (except when baking pastries) is a complete waste of energy.
- Buy a whole-grain breadmaker.
- Recycling all glass containers would save Americans from burying 13 million tons of glass waste per year. Glass takes one million years to decompose.
- When an appliance breaks, replace it with an Energy Star appliance. If everyone in America replaced all of their applicances, it would save literally trillions of dollars of wasted fuel per year.
- Learn what the words “peak oil” mean.
- Get a clothesline.
- Use green materials when building.
- To produce only one pound of meat requires 2,500 gallons of water. Rainforests are being cut down at record rates in order to raise beef cattle. Cattle produce 20% of the methane that is released into the atmosphere. Methane is the worst of the greenhouse gases. Go veggie.
- Buy organic local produce in season to reduce oil consumption by 40%.
- Fix leaky plumbing. A faucet drip can waste 20 gallons of water per day.
- Insulate your house. Heating and cooling makes up 70% of the energy use in most homes.
- Grow some of your own food, even if it is one plant in one pot.
- Walk through nature and feel the life all around you… and within you.
- Buy recycled products.
- Skip the coffee stirrer to save 138 billion plastic straws per year.
- Take a train instead of a plane. Warren Buffett understands that trains are the future of America.
- Recycle your own printing paper by using both sides of the paper.
- Diapers add 3.5 million tons of waste to landfills each year… use cloth or environmentally friendly disposable diapers instead.
- Re-use a cloth napkin instead of paper. Landfills receive one billion pounds of napkins per year.
- Re-use water bottles and buy a water filter for your home to save huge amounts of money and a million tons of trash.
- Using cruise control gives 15% better mileage.
- Batch errands. Take a friend.
- Turn off lights. If you’re not in the room, the light isn’t helping you anyway.
- Keep your fireplace damper closed or warm house air will be rapidly sucked out.
- Let your fingers do the walking.
- Donate rather than throw away.
- Teach one other person that it is okay to enjoy the natural world and that it is our responsibility to be its guardian.
