Five (simple and inexpensive) Ways To Go Green

Everyone is thinking about being green these days; but beyond recycling, canvas tote bags for shopping, and compact fluorescent bulbs (all wonderful things to invest your time and money in) what can the average person do to help cut down on our collective carbon footprint? My mother recently asked me this very question on a long car drive together. She wants to do her part to live more sustainably but, as she pointed out, she stays pretty busy working a full time job and carting around my little brother. She doesn't have the time or energy to devote to extreme lifestyle changes like growing all her own food. She also lives in the suburbs so she can't give up her car for public transit (as there isn't any.)

I was the child who always ran around the house telling everyone to turn off the water while they brushed their teeth, and worrying about acid rain, so she was turning to me for other ways she could change her habits without moving to a farm or giving up her career. As we talked, It occurred to me that her dilemma is a common one. So here is a list of five ideas I gave her to become a few shades greener. Some of them might sound hard at first, but all of these things can easily become second nature to you if you give them a chance. They are not going to change the world all by themselves--but they are an excellent step in the right direction--and any one of these changes will help you cut back on your own personal waste output.

This one is generally greeted with the most resistance. When I first agreed to try this I was VERY sceptical, but I have not bought paper towels in over a year. Instead, buy some extra cloth dish towels for drying your hands and dishes. Next buy a big pack of vegetable cellulose sponges (they are made of biodegradable material, not petroleum or plastics,) for kitchen spills and counter clean up. (FYI: you can sanitize dingy sponges by boiling them.) If you do a lot of frying, you can use brown paper bags or thin pieces of clean cardboard (from grocery packaging) to drain the grease from your food. Finally, invest in a set of nice cloth napkins. They look more classy at the dinner table anyway. Just try it--next time you run out of paper towels, don't buy more for a few weeks--I'm betting you'll be surprised at how much you don't miss them...but if at the end of that time you find you absolutely can't live without them, then do the next best thing and buy recycled content paper towels and try to use them for only 20% of your kitchen and clean-up needs.

Composting is one of those things that sounds like it should be really complicated--but it's actually easy. At its most basic, you just need a bin to throw all your kitchen scraps into. If you want to get fancy you can buy a commercial compost bin or tumbler. You may even want to try vermicomposting (which uses worms to compost the food. This method is a little more work intensive, but yields much faster results.) Here are some very basic pointers to get you started, and some links to composting information and resources on the web.

1. You will need a large bin to store your compost in, and a smaller one you can keep on the kitchen counter to collect the food scraps.
2. Start throwing all your fruit, vegetable, and bread scraps into the small bin in your kitchen. You can also collect egg shells, coffee grounds and tea bags. Just avoid anything that can go rancid (no dairy, oil, fish, or meat.)
3. When your small counter bin fills up, empty it into the bigger compost bin. I use a simple Tupperware storage bin (the kind popular with college students) for mine.
4. Make sure your compost bin gets plenty of air. The difference between smelly, rotting garbage and surprisingly odorless, decomposing compost is oxygen flow. If you don't seal it up, it won't stink.
5. Make sure you stir your compost relatively regularly...but again, if you forget for a week (or even two) you don't have to start over or give up. The more you stir your compost, the faster it will biodegrade, but it will all eventually turn back into dirt anyway.
6. Try to maintain an equal ratio of carbon vs. nitrogen waste in your compost bin. This will make sure it doesn't get too wet or too dry. This just means that for every load of kitchen scraps you dump in your bin (nitrogen) you should add a load of shredded newspaper, junk mail, or cut up cardboard or egg cartons (carbon.)
7. When you notice a layer of rich, dark compost on the bottom of your bin, scoop it out and use as desired on flower beds, container gardens, etc.
8. Enjoy the satisfaction you get from turning something that would have been rotting in a landfill into a useful, environmentally friendly commodity.

Invest in a good bicycle, a snazzy helmet, and maybe a basket and a bell. Then start biking your errands instead of driving whenever you can! If you live in a city odds are excellent that there will be bike lanes on almost every city street, as well as lots of bike paths. You'll be surprised at how quickly and easily you can get where you need to go.

Even in the suburbs, where streets may not be as bicycle friendly, your bound to find outings that can be biked instead of walked. And many suburban areas do have bike paths that follow local roads. Don't drive to the corner store or your friend's house four blocks away! Hop on your bike instead. This isn't only environmentally friendly, but easier on the wallet and flattering to your behind. Be warned, however, the exposure to the open air, the exercise, and the feeling of freedom can become addictive!

Take a look under your sink and odds are you'll see a whole arsenal of poisonous, toxic cleaning supplies. It's funny when you stop and think that the very products you buy in order to make your home a cleaner, healthier place to live are among the most unhealthy things you own. And these are water soluble toxins we flush down our drains and toilets every day (along with coating our counters, floors, mirrors, and windows with them.) The joke gets more amusing when you compare the effectiveness of these products with the cleaning power of several time tested all natural alternatives. Namely lemons, baking soda, and vinegar.

I actually became a natural cleanser convert during my battle with (insert ominous music here) The Brown Spot. The Brown Spot was a stain on my white porcelain kitchen sink that refused to fade away. I attacked it with 409, Comet, bleach, dish soap, Fantastic, and any other cleanser I owned I thought might be effective. Nothing. Then one day I decided to try some of the natural cleaning agents I had been reading about. I dumped a load of baking soda on the stain, and then poured some vinegar over it to make a paste. It was very satisfying to watch the bubbling reaction when the vinegar hit the baking soda. I threw on some salt for good measure (it works as an abrasive agent for scrubbing.) I let the whole mess sit for 10 minutes, and when I scrubbed it away, The Brown Spot had gone. I also found these three cleaning agents to be more effective in all my bathroom cleaning. My tub has never looked so sparkly and clean.

Below are some links to websites and blogs with more detailed information on uses for these natural cleansers, along with explanations of why they work, recipes for mixing up your own all purpose spray cleansers, and other natural cleaning agents that you can find in your grocers aisle.

What does it mean when you start spending less on your gas, water, and electric bills? Well...it means your making yourself greener in two ways. Because along with reducing the amount of the world's natural resources that you personally deplete, your also lining your own pocket with an extra layer of greenbacks. If you have the money to invest, there are a lot of options out there for reducing your utility consumption. Solar panels, reduced flow toilets, insulation and weather proof windows, and energy efficient major appliances to name a few. If these are options you can afford, get out that cell phone and start dialing numbers to put these things into effect in your home. The long term benefits of such purchases certainly out weigh the initial investment they require.

Now: what can the rest of us do? Even if you can't afford to spend a lot of money up front, there are a lot of simple tricks and habits you can cultivate to cut down on your bills and, by extension, your energy consumption. They aren't revolutionary ideas, but they are good ones, and they bare repeating.

• Electric:

1. Turn off the lights. It's really that easy. Make it a habit to only turn on the lights in the room your occupying, and turn them off as you leave. According to the GetEnergyActive organization, "turning off just one 60-watt incandescent bulb that would otherwise be on for 8 hours a day can save about 15 dollars a year." During the day, if you get good sunlight in the home, don't turn them on at all.
2. Invest in some surge protector strips. The kind you probably already have your computers plugged into. When you turn off most appliances like TVs, DVD players, etc. they still use small but steady amounts of electricity all day. They have clock displays (generally eternally declaring the time to be 12 noon) and other lights that stay on when they are supposed to be "off." By plugging them all into a surge strip, you can simply turn off the switch on the strip and eliminate these energy bleeds.
3. Use "task lighting." If you have desk or floor lamps near your bedside, office desk, work bench, etc. you can avoid lighting the entire room for an activity that is contained to one small part of the space.

• Water:

1. Turn off the water while you brush your teeth! Or lather the soap, or let the conditioner sit in your hair for three minutes. Anytime you aren't actively using the water streaming out of your faucet, turn it off. This habit can make a huge difference in the amount of water you consume (and pay to flush down the drain unused.) If your sceptical about how much difference this can make, try an experiment. Next time you're brushing your teeth, stop up the drain and see how quickly the sink fills with water. Time it. Then multiply the time it took for the sink to fill by the time you spend brushing while the water is flowing. How many gallons were just wasted?
2. If it's yellow...come on guys you know the rest. It might seem a little gross, but every time you flush your toilet your flushing away between 4 and 7 gallons of water...and urine is a sterile substance...so you're not incurring any health risks by choosing to flush only, say, every other time you have to pee! You can also put a brick in the toilet tank as an improvised water dam. It will reduce the amount of water used in each flush.
3. Consider replacing at least sections of your lawn with landscaping that uses native plant-life. Every region has a nice variety of attractive native plants that don't require lots of watering (or toxic pesticides and fertilizers for that matter,) as they are naturally adapted to the amount of rain flow and the soil conditions that already exist in your yard. Grass is notoriously high maintenance, and it requires excessive amounts of watering. In fact, according to the Institute of Water Research at Michigan State University, "watering the lawn at 5 to 10 gallons per minute for a half hour equals 300 gallons" of water being consumed.

• Natural Gas:

(For those of you who use gas for cooking, and heating your home.)

1. Cut down on the amount of gas you use when cooking by...

• using a pan or pot that fits the burner size. This will keep heat from escaping around the edges of the pan. Also remember that the bigger the pan, the more energy it takes to heat it: choose a pan size appropriate to the task.
• turning the heat down once the pan or water has reached the desired temperature, and letting food simmer. Cooking with lids will also conserve heat and by extension energy use.
• Don't open the oven to peak at your food. Every time you do the temperature drops by at least 25 degrees, and the stove has to consume extra gas to raise the temp. again.
• Use your microwave instead of your oven when possible, as it uses only a fraction of the energy.

2. Invest in a humidifier. In the winter, dry air feels colder. The humidifier will allow you to feel comfortable with the thermostat set a few degrees lower.

3. In winter time, open the curtains during the day to take advantage of the warmth from the sunlight. Likewise in summer close the drapes during the day to keep the house cooler. This will help reduce the work your heater or air conditioner has to do to maintain the set temperature.

As I stated earlier, these things won't change the environmental tides all by themselves...but they will help make a real difference. At the very least, you will be effecting an extremely positive change on your own household's waste output and resource consumption. Better still, if you start following some of these tips, you may just find that they lead you to seek out even more ways to change your habits and lifestyle. When you tell your friends and family about your new routines, perhaps you'll prompt them to effect change in their own lives. I am proud to report that my mom just called me the other day to tell me about her new compost bin, and several of my friends have taken the plunge and agreed to go sans paper towels in their kitchens. It's a great feeling to know you've started your own tiny grassroots campaign among family and friends.

If each person who I have influenced to try these lifestyle changes influences one more friend, and so on, imagine the change that can be effected. If everyone in the country followed these five tips, how many tons of water, electricity, and gas could be saved? How many trees? How much waste, pollution, and toxins eliminated from our land, air, and oceans? They really are such small things: ride a bike, use a (cellulose) sponge, learn about natural cleaning agents, throw your kitchen scraps in a compost bin instead of a garbage can, and turn off the lights and water when you aren't using them. These are habits anyone, no matter how busy, can adapt. So take the plunge, pick one of these five, and get started...and please, please, please, if you don't already: start recycling, buy compact fluorescent bulbs, and bring a tote bag with you to the grocery store!