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1. Don’t buy any packaged food one day a week.
Select one day you buy fresh fruit, raw vegetables, consume leftovers, or use all recycled bags or re-use cellophane or Ziploc bags to brown bag it. Fast food packaging is ecological death, try to skip wrappers, liners, or serving papers. Try to go an entire day without packaged coffee cups, fast food wrappers, or grocery store shopping.
2. Turn Your Computer Off.
Computers left on cost money. Rather than leaving your computer on all day, work online in bursts between hard disk boots. Skip aimless surfing and electrical use by setting a cutoff point. Then substitute recreational browsing for a purposeful garden raking, a recycling plastic run, or walk around the block.
3. Use Draft Printing
Draft printing is the way to print items from your computer using less ink. Find the way to do this from the print menu. This uses less ink and gives you a chance to reconsider whether you need print anything at all. Keep a scratch pad of used paper turned upside down for quick jottings, passwords, and order numbers. This eliminates printing extraneous things like website design features and ads. Use the print preview function to find your necessary data item, and print ONLY selected material and spot print pages of several page print jobs to get only the pages you need. Use an email forward for a tickler instead of a paper printout.
4. Print on flyers, notices, and other flat possible papers.
Recycle your notices, colored flyers, community reminders and other papers by using them to spot print notices, emails, and light printing. This will save on using “new” paper and give each notice or paper object one more re-use before getting thrown out.
5. Make Your Own Re-usable Grocery Bag
Can’t sew? Staple two placemats together with a plastic grocery bag woven through the top edges. Sew or duct tape two plastic or vinyl placemats together at the edges, puncturing the “handle” holes with scissors or folded target points. Bring this into the grocery store. Walk to the store!
6. Make a Washable Laundry Bag
Re-use tablecloths and linens before throwing them out by making a laundry bag that can take the place of garbage bags or expensive plastic hampers. Smaller loads means less energy use and water consumption. This bag can also store things in your car without extra bags or cleaning. If you put small amounts of light washing in the bag and hang in the draining bath or let it shower with you, the pre-wash cycle just got eliminated from your wash routine.
7. Let Nature Do the Rinse Cycle
If you have a pillowcase or disposable fabric laundry bag, hang the bag in the rain and see if Nature can give you a free rinse. If heavy rains are expected, let the rain pelt your washables through the first rinse cycle. Paired with a hand wash, and using a tub of fresh caught rain water for the cold last final rinse, nature just paid your laundry bill. Drain the bag over a particularly parched dry area of the grass or garden.
8. Turn off the Tap
We all do it. The habitual overuse of water whether washing dishes, brushing teeth, or even overfilling cooking bowls or pans, occurs daily. Try brushing teeth then spitting, and watering only by hand, not with excess water overrun sprinklers. Overfilling cooking pans stops today in your household. Start measuring cooking water, using a teeth rinse cup, and get a standing rinse pan or large bowl of lightly detergent-added water in the sink to catch grubby dishes all day. Final rinse equal quick clean.
9. Return Unused Prescription Medication
Unused Prescription medication is a waste. Sitting on the medicine shelf, it won’t help anybody. Locate a qualified re-use program for redistributing prescription medication. Likely someone in the local shelter or medical plan pool can’t afford it but needs it.
10. Rideshare your errands
Find a Rideshare listing that rides along your errand route. Take turns collecting other errand riders in your local errand loop. One less car on the freeway or highway to the same place at the same time cuts down on noise pollution, gas emissions, and energy waste. Imagine if everywhere you went, one half the vehicle numbers were the norm.
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