Whether or not you’ve been a stickler for your resolutions, have already fallen off the band wagon, or are holding out to kick them off in February, I’ve found three little changes that can make a HUGE impact for your home and the planet.
3 Earth-Friendly Resolutions
1. Get Trashy
Obviously we’re all sporting reusable totes at the grocery store like “Captain Canvasbag” to my right? Wink, wink. But even green minded folk may forget and leave them on a pile stacked next to the door where they specifically left them so they’d remember them for the Costco run…. Just sayin’. So if perhaps you find yourself answering the ‘paper or plastic’ question, use the leftovers as liners in your trash cans instead of buying new. “The average cost of twenty trash bags is $5,” admonishes “The Green Book.” “When one ton of plastic bags in reused, the energy equivalent of eleven barrels of oil is saved. When one ton of paper bags is reused, up to seventeen trees are spared.”
2. Switch to Warm or Cold
Supreme greenie Rene Loux (endorsed by Owen Wilson, Alice Cooper and Mike Meyers #socool) notes in her book “Easy Green Living” that “about 90 percent of the energy used to wash a load of laundry is for heating the water. Using warm water instead of hot to wash just two loads of laundry a week over a year will save 500 pounds of carbon dioxide that an electric water heater would produce or 150 pounds of CO2, that a gas heater would produce.” That’s saving the planet and your wallet.
3. Time to Upgrade
If you haven’t already made the switch to high-speed internet, have I got an excuse for you to make the switch now! As “The Green Book” also notes that “High-speed access users, on average, accomplish more than double the number of tasks online compared with dial-up users…Based on a full day’s use, you could save more than $30 per year in energy costs by increasing your Internet efficiency and turning off your computer when it’s not in use.” Obviously that statistic was released before the invention of Pinterest.
There you have it — just a few ideas that are small changes, but leave a big impact.
Sounds like resolutions worth keeping to me.
photo credit Martin Kníže
