Living Green Tips
Use cold water when doing laundry. It’s just as efficient as using warm and will also lessen your power bill.
Purchase organic products when possible. Conventional cotton is one of the world’s most chemically dependent crops. Organic cotton is easier on the soil and ground water.
Each high quality reusable bag you use has the potential to eliminate an average of 1,000 plastic bags over its lifetime. The bag will pay for itself if your grocery store offers a $.05 or $.10 credit per bag for bringing your own bags. ***
The world seems like a big place but believe it or not, one person, one family can make a big difference. Read below to see how!
Buy fresh local produce and products. Benefits include: less emissions produced in travel time, reduced packaging, and better flavor.
A leaky faucet can waste up to 20 gallons a day.
Buy a high quality stainless steel water bottle. By not using bottled water, we reduce green house gas emissions used to deliver the product and we reduce oil dependency used in making the bottles. It takes 2.7 TONS of plastic to bottle water and 86% becomes garbage or litter. *
Make your own baby food. Buying jars of food is sure convenient, but as an adult you don't live out of jars, so why should your baby? Puree what you’ve made for dinner and store in the freezer. Ice cube trays make a perfect portion for baby. **
Baking soda and vinegar can clean almost anything. Sprinkle baking soda to soak up odors and vacuum away.
Bring your own “doggie bag” to the restaurant. Many places still use styrofoam containers which aren’t recyclable. You don’t have to feel silly about bringing your own container either, keep it in a purse or shopping bag until you need it. Who knows, you may inspire someone else to do the same.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. goes through 100 billion plastic shopping bags annually. An estimated 12 million barrels of oil is required to make that many plastic bags. ***
Each year, Americans throw away 25 billion Styrofoam cups, enough every year to circle the earth 436 times. Styrofoam is not recyclable—don’t use it!
The junk mail Americans receive in one day could produce enough energy to heat 250,000 homes. Visit www.optout.com.
If every American household recycled just one out of every ten HDPE bottles they used, we’d keep 200 million pounds of the plastic out of landfills every year.
If you need to warm up or defrost small amounts of food, use a microwave instead of the stove. Microwave ovens use around 50% less energy than conventional ovens do.
Recycling paper instead of making it from new material generates 74% less air pollution and uses 50% less water.
We save enough energy by recycling one aluminum can to run a TV set for three hours.
Reduce
Re-use
Recycle
Statistics
Shop at thrift and consignment stores to reduce consumption, emissions, and waste.
Recycled cotton is made from pre-consumer cotton manufacturing. Using recycled cotton diverts millions of tons of textiles from landfills each year.
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