courtesy of The Green Book http://www.amazon.com/
Recycle - if everyone in America separated paper, plastic, glass and aluminum products from the trash and tossed in the recycling bin, we could decrease the amount of waste that we send to landfills by 75%. Currently, it takes an area the size of Pennsylvania to dump all our waste each year!
Reusable shopping bags - use them for all shopping trips- groceries, Target, mall, etc. Help cut down on the 100 billion plastic bags that US households dispose of, annually. If you don't have your own bag and have to choose paper vs plastic, choose paper. If only 5% of US households would reuse the paper bag at least three times before recycling, you could save a forest the size of Manhattan NY.
Water bottles - 1.5 million tons of plastic is used in bottling the 89 billion liters of drinking water each year. You can save a lot of money over time by installing a water filter for tap, and the tons of plastic we could save each year if all Americans did this could make two water filters for every household on the planet – one billion people around the world lack access to clean drinking water.
Flush less - you can save 4.5 gallons of water if you just flushed the toilet one less time a day. The average person in Africa uses 4.5 gallons of water for a whole day of drinking, cooking, bathing and cleaning.
Brushing teeth - turn off the water while you brush and save 5 gallons of water. Throughout the US, the DAILY savings could add up to 1.5 billion gallons of water saved.
Shower - take a shorter shower. 10 gallons of water is used in every 2 min of showering. If everyone in US saved just one gallon from daily shower, over the course of a yr it would equal twice the amount of freshwater taken from the Great Lakes every day – the world’s largest source of freshwater.
Washing dishes - turn the water off while you scrub. The water going down the kitchen drain is not reusable and if often carries toxins from food and cleaning products that ends up in the ocean, polluting the environment for our ocean wildlife. We get our fresh water from the mountains and Great Lakes, so the water we use in our homes is simply waste.
Lights - change to CFL (compact flourescent lightbulb) when your regular bulbs run out. If every American home changed just five regular lightbulbs with more energy-efficient compact fluorescent ones, we would keep 1 TRILLION pounds of greenhouse gas out of the air.
Washing machine - wash all of your clothes on cold...they will be just as clean as if you wash on warm or hot. Together, if all US households washed their clothes just on the cold cycle (instead of warm or hot), we could save the energy equivalent of 100,000 barrels of oil a day, and would save 90% of the energy used.
Napkins & papertowels - buy recycled napkins and papertowels, and simply use less. On average, each American consumes 2,200 standard two-ply napkins per year. If everyone in US used an average of one fewer napkin per day, more than a billion pounds of napkins could be saved from landfills each year.
Electicity/energy - turn off the lights when they are not in use. Also, 10% of electricity used in your home is burned my communication devices and appliances, when they are turned off! If every US household unplugged computers, cell phone chargers, coffee makers, toasters and TVs when they are not being used, we would save over $100 million a year – enough to provide free health care to every low-income child under the age of 5 in CA.
Kitchen appliances -the fridge is the biggest energy consuming appliance in the kitchen and it accounts for between $30 to $60 of a typical family's electricity bill each year. Keep the door closed!!! Also, save up to 7,300 gallons of water a year, per household, by only running dishwasher when it has a full load, and not doing heavy rinse prior to putting in dishes in washer.
The bottom line - please just do your best to be less wasteful. Be consious of the water, paper, plastic, electronics and energy that you use...help Mother Earth get healthy again!! For more green tips, please refer to my other blog with my close friends - www.collectivelyforacause.blogspot.com.
xoxo