Green Living Tips

I’ll keep a running list of all my green living tips as I post about them, so you can pick and choose among them for yourself:

• Leave your car at home. Take a bike or walk instead; you’ll get some exercise, and enjoy your trip a bit more.
• Try to buy organic and / or local, and go for bulk items if you can find them. You’ll save on packaging, get better quality (in some cases), and keep pesticides out of the communities that grow our food. I know this is a cost issue in some cases; I can’t always justify spending two times as much for items like flour or cream. But I do what I can with my current budget.
• Turn your thermostat down a few degrees in the winter, and keep it down when you’re not at home. In summer, turn it up a few degrees. Even better: get a programmable thermostat and have it take care of the dirty work for you. You’ll save money and energy — both good things in my book. And if you make the change slowly, you probably won’t even notice.
• Eat less meat. I have nothing against eating meat — I’m not a vegetarian — but it’s pretty difficult to make a “good” choice in terms of the environmental and animal treatment in your everyday supermarket. For an excellent article on the meat industry, see Mark Bittman’s recent piece in the New York Times.
• Switch to CFLs wherever possible. I haven’t posted on this one yet, but I think it’s probably the easiest energy-saving switch you can make. You will see a visible change in your electricity bill, and for those of you who are still not sure the light quality is as good, go to somewhere like Home Depot and get one of each type of CFL. Figure out what you like best. They make so many different types now, with everything from soft light to something that approximates sunlight, that it’s possible to find something that will work for every space in your house.
• Fill a 1/2 gallon plastic milk jug with water and put it in your toilet tank. You’ll save water with every flush.
• Baking soda and distilled white vinegar make cheap and environmentally-friendly cleaning supplies. You can mix baking soda with water and make a cleaning solution you can scrub your sink with, or pour baking soda, then vinegar, down a slow-moving drain. A side bonus: baking soda + vinegar makes a kind of cool chemical reaction, which you can see working.
• Apartment dwellers who live in cold climates can save money on their heating bill with a few simple and affordable tricks for keeping out the cold. Seal off drafts with clear silicon caulk and cover your windows with plastic shrink wrap kits (usually available at hardware stores in the fall). Choose some heavy curtains and line them with insulating fabric. Make or buy cloth snakes to keep drafts from coming in under your doors. Oh — and hope your landlord eventually decides to replace aging windows.
• Ask your landlord if you can set up a compost bin for kitchen scraps somewhere on the property, and throw all your vegetable scraps in there. Mix with fall leaves, and summer grass, and you’ll have a nice compost pile come spring. Plus, you’ll keep those scraps out of the landfill. Sure, kitchen scraps are biodegradable, but only if they get some air, which really doesn’t happen if they’re buried under a mound of other trash.
• For those of you who get takeout on occasion, or even occasionally get leftovers boxed up at your favorite restaurant, you can help reduce the amount of waste we produce by simply bringing your own container. As long as it’s clean, your attempt to help out the environment (and reduce the restaurant’s operating costs) will be welcomed.
• Think about alternatives for any of the disposable products you use on a regular basis. Pads and tampons, for example, come in reusable forms. I’ve ordered from these folks, and am happy to recommend them.
• Pay a little bit extra for wind power. How? Check out this link.  No, the wind power you pay for doesn’t go directly to your house; electricity just doesn’t work that way. Your nominal fee per kilowatt, however, ensures that a wind power plant must supply the amount of electricity you consume to the electricity grid in your state.