
Green Living Tips
Travel
- Cut out short car trips. Cars release the most emissions when cold. Plan out your shopping so you can make fewer trips to the store each week.
- Remove unnecessary weight from your vehicle; this will cut down fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions.
- One of the greatest fuel guzzling issues is caused by improper tire inflations.
- Use public transport wherever possible - if public transport is lacking in your area; make some noise with local officials!
- If you don't need it, switch it off at the wall. Appliances running on standby power consume a great deal of energy, unnecessarily.
- Take shorter showers and use the shower instead of the bath (saves a stack of water too!)
- Turn down the heat or air-conditioning a fraction. Do you really need to get around in summer clothes in winter? Even setting your thermostat up or down a degree or two can make a huge difference in electricity consumption.
- Recycle whatever you can. While recycling glass, paper, cans etc. does require energy to reform new products, it's far less than having to mine, drill or harvest the raw resources.
- See if you can telecommute (work from home) a day a week. This will save you gas and money and your employers a bit of electricity at the office!
- Talk to your employer about carbon emission reduction strategies e.g. a "lights off when not in use" policy. Approach it not only from the warm and fuzzy environmental viewpoint, but the financial benefits. You never know, you may just get a promotion or a salary raise!
- Don't burn leaf litter, mulch or compost it instead - burning vegetation spews great volumes of carbon dioxide and other heat trapping pollutants into the atmosphere.
- Try to source locally, organically grown fruits and vegetables. Some green produce is shipped thousands of miles in refrigerated trucks before it hits your supermarket.
- Cut down a little on red meat - the livestock industry is responsible for millions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas, entering our atmosphere each year.
- Before buying anything, ask yourself - "Do I really need this?" Rampant consumerism plays a huge role in carbon emissions as production cycles are for the most part energy intensive and one of the by-products of the cycle is carbon dioxide - not to mention other toxic chemicals. When purchasing, keep "green" close to mind.
- We can't all buy 100% organically and locally produced items that have been created with renewable energy all the time, so planting trees to offset carbon emissions is a great way to make a positive impact on the environment.
