The Top 5 Ways to Help Save the World

With the current economic crisis in the United States, rising oil prices, global warming and ozone depletion; humanity in most respects, has become aware of the abuse and neglect that we are imposing on planet earth. In recent years, major attempts have been made to educate people on how we should live FOR the environment and not just IN the environment. Tracking your carbon footprints, reducing, and offsetting works great but what else can we do to help the environment?

I’ve put together a short list of the top 5 ways to help save the world. If the majority of the world (at least in modern countries) would follow these 5 easy steps, we could solve global warming, repair economies (no more dependence on foreign oil, or oil at all for that matter!), and bring about peace to most of the world.

1) Reform Your Home Energy Usage

- Simply setting your air conditioner thermostat to 78 in the warm months and turning it off completely in the cold months will not only save you tons of money on your electric bill, but it will also reduce the amount of energy that you use on a daily basis. If you’re warm natured and can’t handle your house being 78 degrees in the summer, try using your ceiling fans to their full potential. Eventually, your body will get used to the change.

- Instead of using regular incandescent bulbs, install compact fluorescent light bulbs (or CFLs for short). They use 75% less energy than normal light bulbs and last around 7 years before they need to be replaced.

- Believe it or not, your TV and other regular appliances use just as much power when they are turned off. Obviously, I’m sure you don’t want to unplug your TV each time you’re done watching it, that's why there are new “smart” power strips out there that know when your TV or other appliances are turned off and will cut out the phantom energy use.

- If you’re like my wife, who washes a couple loads a day of clothes, you’re probably using your dryer a couple of times a day too. In fact, you’re probably using warm water on several of your loads a week. When we wash clothes with warm water, 85% of the energy used to wash the clothes is used to warm the water!

Also, there is no need to dry everything that you wash… in the dryer! Fabric that takes longer to dry like jeans, heavy towels, blankets, etc. can all be hung up to dry in your house under a ceiling fan or outside on a clothes line.

- Generate your own clean electricity to run your appliances, or even your entire household. You can actually do this for less than a few hundred dollars by building and installing your own wind powered and/or solar powered systems. There are a few places online that explain how to do this, but the place I used was Earth4Energy, who gives you access to a few GREAT guides on how to build various clean, safe electric systems that will actually give power back to your electric company and they will PAY you for the power you produce! Check out: how to build a windmill and how to build a solar panel.

2) Reform Your Water Usage

- Take shorter showers and fewer baths. I know; we all love hot showers, and most of us enjoy dipping in a nice hot bath every once in a while. Those of us who have kids know that the young ones take baths daily. But, if we can reduce those 20+ minute showers (some people shower even longer) to 10 minutes or less, then you will not only reduce your monthly water usage by hundreds and hundreds of gallons, but you will also reduce the energy needed to heat the water.

- Try taking a day out of every other week to designate your “bath day.” If you reduce your showers to 10 minutes or less, you will have enough offset to enjoy taking a deep hot bath at least twice a month.

If you give your little ones a bath every evening, try to remember that the water only needs to be up to their waist line if they are in a sitting position. Any more than that is a waste.

- Instead of buying loads of bottled water, invest in a water filter that you can install on your kitchen faucet, or better yet, on your well system (if you have one). Not only is bottled water extremely expensive in comparison to the free or cheap water you can get from home, but it also produces tons of plastic waste that is harmful to the environment.

- If you need water on the go, put your water in a non-plastic container like aluminum, which leaves no container after taste, and uses less energy during the recycle process.

3) Electronics, Electronics, Electronics

- When you have old electronics that you want to throw away, remember to never chunk them in the garbage can or dumpster. Electronic waste contains mercury, which is extremely harmful to our atmosphere. It’s estimated that over 4,500 tons of mercury is released into the atmosphere and soil every year from electronic waste alone. Mercury from electronic waste has been known to contaminate the food chain and poison lakes and rivers.

- You can donate your electronics like cell phones and computers to recycling centers and “green” startups all over the country. There are some companies that will pay you cash to recycle cell phones, even if they no longer work!

4) Reduce Your Dependency On Oil

- Probably one of the most important things that I could educate people on is reducing their dependency on oil. If you live close to work or school you can try biking or walking instead of burning oil. This obviously saves gas and it also improves your cardiovascular health.

- Buy gasoline during the coolest time of the day. Early morning or late evening is best. During these times the fuel is denser, giving you more fuel for your dollar (or 4, or 5, eek!).

- Never fill the gas tank past the first “click” when pumping. Pumping past this point causes overflow and sloshing OUT of the tank.

- Never exceed the legal speed limit. Not only is this good for your safety, but it’s also good for your fuel economy. Traveling at 55mph in comparison to traveling more than 65mph will save up to 21% on your gas mileage.

- Make sure your tire pressure on all tires are at the maximum and make sure you don’t have any extra weight in the trunk than needed.

- Install a water/gas conversion kit that will virtually run your car on water and will increase your overall fuel economy by 30-50%. The easy to install system converts water into HHO using your car battery and is delivered into your intake producing a more efficient combustion. I installed a kit on my 2003 Honda Civic and increased my gas mileage from 30mpg to 55mpg (in addition to the above steps)!

5) Eat Less, Control Your Diet

- This step may not seem like an ingredient to save the world, but if you look into the aftermath and effects of eating healthy, and staying thin and fit, you’d be surprised at the environmental results and benefits. Eating less (no more than you need to) reduces waste (plastics, containers, napkins, etc), it reduces energy consumption (producing the food in the factory, at home), it reduces atmospheric pollutants, and much more.

- You don’t have to follow a strict diet to lose weight. You can actually lose weight without dieting. Simple things like learning how to read food labels, watching your calorie intake, eating more grains and produce, drinking plenty of water and walking daily will keep you stay skinny, healthy, and fit. A rule of thumb on calorie intake is to eat no more than 10 times your body weight in calories per day. So if you weigh 160lbs, you should keep your calorie intake at around 1600 calories a day or less.