10 easy and fun ways to rent and live green!
One person CAN make a difference!
 

1. Replace standard light bulbs with energy saving fluorescent bulbs.
Replacing just 3 frequently used light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs can save approximately 300 lbs. of carbon dioxide and $60 per year.

2. Put your home on a diet!
Turn lights and computers off when they are not in use & use power strips to avoid “Phantom Load.”  A phantom load is the energy sapped by appliances when they are plugged in but not turned on.  In an average home, this accounts for 40% of the energy bill!  Plug your appliances into power strips to turn off your TV, DVD, stereo, and cell phone chargers in one fell swoop.  If only 10,000 people plug their cable boxes into power strips that are turned off when not watching TV, we’ll save about $300,000 per year.

3. Adjust your thermostat.
Conserve fuel by setting the air-conditioning thermostat in your home to 76 degrees.  This will dramatically reduce your electricity bill and you'll do your bit to save energy and the environment.

4. Turn off water while brushing your teeth and shaving.
This simple act can save 9 gallons of water every time you brush.  Installing a simple aerator is one of the most cost-effective ways to save water, you can double the faucet's efficiency without sacrificing performance.  Bathrooms are where over half of all water use inside a house takes place.

5. Take shorter showers to conserve hot water.
If a family of four takes 5-minute showers each day, they will use more than 700 gallons of water every week; the equivalent of a three-year supply of drinking water for one person.  Try installing low-flow showerheads and take shorter showers to save water and the energy used to heat it.  If each U.S. household installed one low-flow sink faucet or aerator, it would save more than 60 billion gallons of water annually. 

6. Wash clothes in cold or warm cycle, not hot.  And wash only full loads.
As much as 90% of the energy consumed by washing machines and 80% of the energy used by dishwashers goes to heating the water.  Wash clothes in cold water whenever possible and use a drying rack or clothesline.  Use the appropriate water level or load size selection on the washing machine.

7. Kick the bottled water habit.
Americans use 4 million plastic bottles every hour - but only 1 in 4 are recycled. Instead of reaching for bottled water, use a water filter and fill up a reusable water bottle with filtered tap water.  If 10,000 people gave up their daily bottled water habit for a year we’d keep the weight of a small elephant in empties out of the waste stream.

8. Use reusable shopping bags instead of plastic or paper bags.
Each year, an estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide.  That comes out to over one million per minute.  Billions end up as litter each year.  According to the EPA, over 380 billion plastic bags, sacks and wraps are consumed in the U.S. each year.  If every household reused a paper grocery bag for one shopping trip, about 60,000 trees would be saved.  In a landfill, plastic bags take up to 1,000 years to degrade

Hundreds of thousands of sea turtles, whales and other marine mammals die every year from eating discarded plastic bags mistaken for food.  Turtles think the bags are jellyfish, their primary food source. Once swallowed, plastic bags choke animals or block their intestines, leading to an agonizing death.  Facts and figures regarding the true cost of plastic bags.

9. Recycle all paper, plastic, glass and aluminum.
Paper: Americans throw away 44 million newspapers everyday. That’s the same as dumping 500,000 trees into landfills each week.  We can save 17 trees for each ton of recycled newspaper.  Americans use 50 million tons of paper annually--which means we consume more than 850 million trees. That means the average American uses about 580 pounds of paper each year.  Each year, 27 million acres of tropical rainforests are destroyed. That’s an area the size of Ohio, and translates to 74,000 acres per day...3,000 acres per hour...50 acres per minute.
 
Plastic:  Americans use 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour and throw away 25 million plastic beverage bottles every hour.  If every American household recycled just one out of every ten bottles they used, we’d keep 200 million pounds of the plastic out of landfills every year
 
Glass:  Americans throw away enough glass bottles and jars every two weeks to fill the 1,350-foot towers of the former World Trade Center.  Glass never wears out so it can be recycled forever.  We can save over a ton of resources for every ton of glass recycled; 1,330 pounds of sand, 433 pounds of soda ash, 433 pounds of limestone, and 151 pounds of feldspar.
 
Aluminum:  More than 50% of a new aluminum can is made from recycled aluminum.  350,000 aluminum cans are produced every minute and we use over 80,000,000,000 aluminum pop cans every year.  The 36 billion aluminum cans landfilled last year had a scrap value of more than $600 million. (Some day we'll may be mining our landfills for the resources we've buried.)

10. Buy organic and recycled whenever possible.
There are several ways that we can leave a lighter footprint.  Organic farms respect our water resources and build healthy soil.  Many EPA-approved pesticides were registered long before extensive research linked these chemicals to cancer and other diseases. Organic agriculture is one way to prevent any more of these chemicals from getting into the air, earth and water that sustain us.

FAST FACTS
                   DID YOU KNOW...

Much of the world gets by on 2.5 gallons of water per day. The average American uses 400 gallons per day, 30% of which is for outdoor uses and half for watering lawns- 7 billion gallons per day (EPA).

Worldwide, 70% of water is used for farming and most of it wasted through primitive irrigation systems that are only 40% effective (Wired).

Water expert Peter Gleick provides some numbers on the waste of water in American agriculture: “we use something like 1,430 gallons per capita in the United States. Only 100 gallons of that is household use per person.”

Unicef estimate that unsafe drinking water, inadequate availability of water for hygiene, and lack of access to sanitation together contribute to about 88 percent of deaths from diarrhea, or more than 1.5 million of the 1.9 million children under five who perish from diarrhea each year. This amounts to 18 percent of all under-five deaths and means that more than 4,000 children are dying every day as a result of diarrhoeal diseases.

Making PET bottles for water uses up 1.5 million barrels of crude oil, enough to fuel 100,000 American cars for a year. 2.7 tons of plastic are used to bottle water. 86% become garbage or litter (Earth Policy Institute).

There are 17,000 petrochemicals available for home use, only 30% of which have been tested for exposure to human health and the environment.

The U.S. EPA estimated that indoor air pollution levels can be 100 times higher than outdoor air pollution levels.

In the U.S., buildings account for approximately 72% of all energy consumption.

The U.S. power grid is 98% non-renewable energy (51.7% coal, 19.8% nuclear, 15.9% natural gas, 7.2% large hydroelectric, 2.8% oil).

For more information on going green and how to live, work and play green visit some of these sites*.

 

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