Tips on living GREEN?

Question

Tips on living GREEN?

Answer 1

Go to your local library and check out Green Living by the Editors of E/The Environmental Magazine.  Many resources! You can also buy it on eBay for about $4.00 plus shipping, which is what I did after I returned my loaned out copy to the library. WWW.ecos.com for green cleaning supplies.

Answer 2

http://www.gomestic.com/Personal-Finance...

this link will help you live green.. and keep some green (money)

Answer 3

How to save energy around the house: http://greenhome.huddler.com/wiki/how-to...

1.  Replace your incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs). CFLs will save you up to 75% of lighting costs and will save the environment from approximately 1,3000 pounds of carbon dioxide over the course of its lifetime. This is because CFLs use one-quarter to one-third as much electricity as incandescent bulbs and last up to ten times longer.

2.  Turn off lights when you leave a room. Turn off lights that you don’t need (for example, if you are sitting at a desk reading, use a desk lamp instead of the overhead light).

3.  Unplug electronics and battery chargers when you are not using them. Even when these items are turned off, they still draw electricity. This is called vampire power and all your small household electronics can draw power as your refrigerator.

3.  Get an energy audit. Hire someone to come find the "weak spots" in your home and figure out how to improve them to save energy and save money on your energy bills. Try RESNET to locate a rater (NHER if you’re in the UK) or U.S. Department of Energy for instructions on how to perform a DIY energy audit.

4.  Install low-flow showerheads, faucet aerators, and high efficiency toilets. This will of course save water, but it will also save energy in the pumping, transporting, and treating of your water.

5.  Lower your thermostat a few degrees in the winter. An ideal temperature for a home is 68 degrees. If you leave the house for a prolonged period of time in the winter, turn the thermostat down more. This can save you between $10 and $30 per month on your heating bill. By turning your thermostat down 10 to 15 degrees for 8 hours, you can save about 5 to 15% a year on heating bills. If you have an air-conditioning system, turn your thermostat up in summer (78 degrees when you’re home, 85 when you’re not). Install a programmable thermostat to schedule changes in temperature according to your schedule. These can save up to $115 annually on your energy bills.

How to save water around the house: http://greenhome.huddler.com/wiki/how-to...

1. Don’t leave the tap running while you brush your teeth (or shave, wash your face, etc). Turning off the water during teeth-brushing can save up to two gallons of water every time you brush.

2. Fix leaks – this can save up to 10 gallons of water a day from one faucet. Fixing a leaky toilet can save about 200 gallons of water daily.

3.  Install low-flow showerheads and faucet aerators. This can save both hot and cold water (aerators can save up to 40%).

4.  Take showers instead of baths. A bath typically requires 70 gallons of water, while a five-minute shower uses 10 to 25 gallons.

5.  When you need to run the washing machine or dishwasher, make sure the machines are full (and when you need to replace them, go for high efficiency).

How to green your clothing: http://greenhome.huddler.com/wiki/how-to...

1.  Choose wisely. Even though that great shirt may look cool on the rack, if it doesn’t fit in your wardrobe, think twice.

2. Take care of your clothes. There’s no need to wash your car in your new work suit. By taking care of your garments, you can extend their useful lives.

3. Get clothes repaired or altered instead of buying something new.

4. Think long and hard about clothes that need to be dry cleaned. Dry cleaning processes frequently involve the use of perc (also known as tetrachloroethylene), which is a known carcinogen. Silk, wool, and linen can often be washed by hand instead of dry cleaned. If professional cleaning is necessary, try finding a green cleaner that uses either liquid carbon dioxide or water (know as wet cleaning). Use Earth 911 to find local wet cleaners. In the San Francisco Bay Area, try Elephant Pharm. In New York, try Green Apple Cleaners.

5.  Wash your clothes with care. Use the lowest temperature setting. Turn garments inside out. Use biodegradable laundry detergent and line dry when you can. Use nontoxic stain removers. Look for Energy Star washing machines.

(all of those articles are wikis too, so if you get any other great suggestions, you should add them!)

Answer 4

in warmer weather, don't use a clothes dryer. hang clothes outside! they'll smell fresher even. plus dryers emit high amounts of negative ions which make you depressed

Don't use an Air Conditioner at night, put a small fan in the window and leave it running, it'll get downright cold!

Unplug small appliances when not in use. most of them draw electricity even when shut off.

Drive less! plan trips. do grocery shopping on the way home from work rather than taking an extra trip on the weekend

Buy green products that were not tested on animals or are vegetarion. Toms is a good brand

Answer 5

Here are some great blogs and articles on how to green your life:

How to green your bathroom:

http://www.greenstudentu.com/eco_lifesty...

How to green your work area:

http://www.greenstudentu.com/eco_lifesty...

How to green your lunch:

http://www.greenstudentu.com/eco_lifesty...

How to conserve energy:

http://www.greenstudentu.com/Energy_Cons...

I hope these help!

Answer 6

I am a vegitarian and I work on making my town green. I changed styraphoam to earth friendly. Hera are some things you should do...

- Turn off water to make sure you dont waste it

- take less or shorter showers

- go to go green websites

- turn off lights and change them to energystar

-change all the electric things in your house energy star

-and MUCH MORE!

Answer 7

I think u could start by recycling the bottles and paper at ur house, watch TV no more than 1 1/2 hours a day, drive less, shower shorter, take public transportations, write letter to Congress on stricter laws for pollutant gas omission, and eat less beef! =)

Answer 8

These are from seventeen.com

Ways to go green

Unplug your power. Ten percent of the electricity used in your home is burned by communication devices and appliances when they are turned off! If every U.S. household just unplugged their computers and cell phone chargers when they were not being used, collectively we'd save over $100 million — enough to provide free health care to every low-income child under the age of five in the state of California.

If you can, send a text message or e-mail from a handheld device or cell phone, instead of from a computer, especially for quick, one-line notes. You’ll save yourself time and conserve energy. Compared to sending a text message, e-mailing and instant messaging from a computer uses more than 30 times the electricity per message.

Use both sides of your plain paper, and recycle. Paper is the biggest form of waste that comes from schools. Every ton, or 220,000 sheets, of paper that is recycled saves approximately 17 trees. The average school tosses 38 tons of paper per year, or more than 8 million sheets!

Buy clothes made from organic cotton. The purchase of one T-shirt and a pair of jeans made from 100 percent organic cotton eliminates at least 150 grams of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides from the environment. If one out of every five Americans purchased a 100 percent organic T-shirt instead of one made from conventionally grown U.S. cotton, nearly 50,000 tons of agrochemicals would be prevented from polluting U.S. freshwater bodies, ecosystems, and wardrobes.

17 Tip: To really stay green, wash your organic threads in Arm & Hammer's Essential laundry detergent. It's the first detergent made of 100% plant-based soaps, and its concentrated formula and packaging make it more sensible for the environment.

Gift cards, concert tickets, restaurant certificates, and movie vouchers can be great alternatives to heavily packaged and wrapped holiday presents. If you buy these items online, you'll not only save between five and 10 pounds of packaging waste, but you'll also reduce the time, stress, and energy associated with traffic, crowds, and long check-out lines. If 50 percent of households replaced just two packaged presents with gifts that could slide inside an envelope, 50 million pounds or more of waste could be saved.

If you're planning to buy a new computer, consider getting a laptop or notebook instead of a desktop. Laptops require less materials and energy to produce than desktops and use a fraction of the electricity to run. If you choose a laptop over a desktop, you'll save an average of 220 kilowatt hours per year and about $20 on your annual electricity bill. If one in 23 households made their next computer purchase a laptop instead of a desktop, the energy saved could keep the lights on for every household in Silicon Valley.

Try to limit the frequency with which you replace your cell phone, and make sure you e-cycle (dispose of it through an electronic waste-management company) or donate your old one. If you keep each mobile phone you buy for three years instead of just 18 months, you'll effectively cut the resources needed to make a new one. If just 10 percent of cell phone users kept their next phone for three years before replacing it, an average of 5.2 million phones could be saved from disposal each year.

Instead of buying a disposable plastic bottle of water every time you go to the gym, consider bringing your own reusable water bottle filled with filtered water from home. You could save an average of $200 per year, as well as 14 pounds of plastic. If one in 20 gym members who generally buy a bottle of water before each workout brought a reusable water bottle from home, the total plastic saved annually would total nearly 29 million pounds, a weight that would take 200,000 people each bench-pressing 150 pounds to lift.

Buy a quality razor with refillable blades. Disposable plastic razors are neither recyclable nor biodegradable, and they take significantly more energy to produce. If for the next year you replaced your purchases of disposable razors with refill cartridges, the amount of energy saved by not manufacturing the extra plastic could brew you five pots of coffee. If half of the disposable razors sold per year were replaced with refills, the energy saved could fly 26,000 San Diego java lovers to pick their own Kona coffee on the Big Island of Hawaii.

Try to do your cardio workouts on equipment that doesn't require an external power supply. Choose, for example, a stationary bike or elliptical machine over a treadmill or stair-stepper. For a 40-minute workout, you could save 0.8 kilowatt hours of energy — the amount of energy you'd burn if you ran seven miles. If, for a whole year, you stayed off the treadmill and rode the bike five times per week instead, you'd save 160 kilowatt hours of energy — roughly the energy you'd expend by running the length of Interstate 5 from Mexico to the Canadian border.

Bring your own workout towel instead of using one that your gym provides. You'll not only reduce your exposure to harsh detergents, bleaches, and other disinfectants, but you'll also help save water and energy as well. If just 1 percent of fitness club members in the U.S. were to start bringing their own workout towels, 4,000 less load of laundry would have to be washed per day — an annual savings of more than 36 million gallons of water.

If you buy bath salts or bubble bath, try to buy concentrated varieties. For example, bubble bath brands that recommend one tablespoon (one-half ounce, or one capful) per bath will last twice as long as those that suggest one ounce (two capfuls) per bath. If you buy a 16-ounce plastic bottle of bubble bath every other month and switched to a more concentrated version, you could save a total of about one-quarter pound of plastic and $10 to $20 per year or more. If one in 100 households decreased their bubble bath purchases in this way, the savings would total 250,000 pounds of plastic. This much plastic could build a wading pool the size of Wrigley Field.

You can minimize waste by buying eyeliner pencils encased in wood instead of pencils or liquids contained within plastic. Wood shavings have the potential to biodegrade, whereas plastics do not. If one in 20 eyeliner users switched from using plastic-encased pencils to wooden ones, nearly 10,000 pounds of plastic could be saved.

If you use pressed eye shadow, choose a brand that provides a reusable compact with slots for refills. Each time you buy a refill instead of an entirely new container you'll reduce your costs, the amount of energy used to produce and ship the hard plastic, glass, or chrome packaging (some of which come with mirrors), and the amount of waste you discard when it's empty. If one in 25 women chose refillable eye shadow, more than 350,000 pounds of wasted cosmetics containers could be saved each year.

If the lotion you usually buy comes with a pump dispenser, you can avoid sending another hand pump to the landfill by purchasing a refill container with a flip-top and just reusing your empty bottle. If 10 percent of U.S. households made a onetime purchase of a lotion bottle without an attached pump, the plastic saved would be an estimated 250,000 pounds — enough lotion pumps to fill nearly 1,200 tanning booths from floor to ceiling.

Use bars of soap versus liquid wash. It's less expensive, and it saves packaging waste. The average bar of soap lasts for about 20 showers, whereas a 16-ounce bottle of body wash lasts for an average of 80 showers. But body wash costs on average more than four times as much as soap. If every U.S. household replaced a bottle of body wash with a bar of soap, roughly 2.5 million pounds of plastic containers could be diverted from the waste stream.

Given that the average woman may inadvertently ingest more than four pounds of lipstick in her lifetime, you'll want to look for lip color made from plant-derived ingredients instead of from synthetic oils, paraffin waxes, and toxic coal tar dyes (look for FD&C or D&C followed by a color and number). If one in five lipstick wearers began demanding plant-based options, total petroleum product consumption would decrease by more than 825,000 pounds per year.

Hope I helped!

-the deviate