1. Vegetarian Night: One pound of beef requires 2,500 gallons of water to produce. Eliminate even one night of red meat per week and you’ll be doing your part. It’s heart healthy, too.
2. Recycle Hangers: While the average recycling center doesn’t want steel — the metal in many hangers — most dry cleaners will happily take hangers back and reuse them.
3. Use Matches: Over 1.5 billion plastic disposable lighters crowd landfills annually. When it comes to matches, the cheaper cardboard ones are often made from recycled paper. Wood matches come from trees.
4. Paper Napkins: Don’t grab that stack of paper napkins. The average person uses 6 paper napkins per day for a total of 2,200 per year. One less per person per day adds up.
5. Stir-less Coffee: This country tosses approximately 138 billion, yes billion, coffee stirrers annually. Put in sweetener, then cream, then add coffee last to mix it all together.
6. Don’t Rinse: You bought a robust dishwasher so just load it. Skipping the hand rinsing saves time, effort and around 20 gallons of water per year, plus the heat required.
7. One Degree: One thermostat degree up in the summer and one degree down on our rare cool winter nights can reduce energy consumption up to 10%. Bet you won’t notice the difference.
8. Organize Errands: As you write your seemingly endless to-do lists, plan out multi-stop routes, instead of individual errands. You’ll not only save time, but a significant amount of gasoline if your hectic schedule is anything like most Americans.
9. Work from home: Try to convince your boss that you’re not trying to shirk work by telecommuting. Working from home a few days a week saves fuel and lessens road congestion. It might even make you all the more productive when it comes to completing tasks!
