Make Earth Day Every Day

Every week we make choices that could lighten our impact on the earth. Whether it's preventing waste by using a refillable coffee cup for your morning java or a reusable canvas bags at each trip to the grocery store, being more efficient with appliances or light bulbs that use less energy, eliminating pollution through carpooling or cycling to work or replacing the energy we use every day with clean renewable energy, the choices are abundant.

Here are some additional resources to support your choices that build a more sustainable tomorrow.

Ride by bicycle or carpool to work instead of drive.

Organize your office for Bike to Work Day‚ May 16^th 2008.

Arrange a carpool for your daily commute or for long distance travel.

Replace conventional light bulbs with compact fluorescents.

Check out the EPA estimations that could save you 65%-80% in energy needs.

Join the EPA in a national effort to change light bulbs throughout the country.

Use a refillable, non-disposable coffee cup instead of disposable to-go cups.

Here is an article with some perspective on the Life Cycle Analysis of cups.

Check out this NYC calculator tool encouraging restaurants to make the change.

Use a canvas or other reusable shopping bag instead of disposable plastic or paper bags.

Look at these facts; help to reduce the billions of disposable bags used every year.

Recycle household appliances and replace them with efficient Energy Star options.

Check with your local solid waste service for proper disposal of broken appliances.

Donate appliances you no longer use to your local Goodwill store.

Learn about this project helping to develop better energy standards for appliances.

Find an Energy Star Appliance Dealer with the EPA Store Locator.

Use cold water when washing your clothes.

It’s true - cold water works just as well for washing up your day-to-day clothes.

You’ll save cold, hard cash - like $61 per year per household on average by foregoing the hot for the cold.

Kick the Bottled Water Habit and use tap or filtered water.

Americans use 4 million plastic bottles every hour - but only 1 in 4 is recycled.

Use straight tap water or home water filters instead, because believe it or not, bottled water isn’t always cleaner, and the production, shipment, and disposal of plastic water bottles are taking an enormous toll on the environment.

Pay electronically with online, direct bill pay services.

Say goodbye to the days of writing checks, buying stamps, and licking envelopes.

Use direct bill pay and you’ll save hassle, trees, and energy. Just ask your bank - most major banks have free bill pay services.

If all U.S. households viewed and paid bills electronically, we’d save 18.5 million trees and 15.8 billion gallons of water per year.

Choose to go veggie - one day a week.

Becoming a full-time veg head not your thing? No worries... just pick up a veggie cookbook and try cooking veggie once a week.

Since meat production's so resource-intensive, if 10,000 people gave up eating steak just once every seven days, it would save enough water to fill 22,719 Olympic-sized swimming pools and the weight of more than 9 humpback whales in fertilizer.

Install a programmable thermostat.

Take a big bite out of your energy bill and pollutants by installing a programmable thermostat.

You can set it to use less A/C or heat while you’re sleeping or at work.

Once it’s installed, it will save about 1,800 lbs of air-polluting CO2 per year AND up to $150 per year on your energy bill. Plus, it’s lazy-proof, so you have no excuses!

Ditch the dish drying cycle on your dishwasher.

Give your dishwasher something to steam about by ditching the drying cycle.

Just by flipping this last cycle off you can save 15% - 50% of your dishwasher’s energy usage AND about $25 a year on your energy bill.

Throw a clothes swapping party.

Swapping is the New Shopping. Want free clothes, more closet space and free personal stylists for a night?

Throw a Swap Party where all your friends trade (a.k.a. "recycle") clothes from their closets. Serve organic wine, swap 'til everyone drops and you've got yourself a contender for party of the year.

Use your library card to borrow books, movies and music.

More than 3.1 billion books are purchased in the United States each year, and most are made from nonrecycled paper and petroleum-based inks.

Get your name removed from junk mail lists – go online to fill out the forms.

Junk mail is more than just annoying. If everyone in the US was able to reduce their 10.8 pieces of junk mail received each week, we could save nearly 100 million trees each year.

Search for “junk mail” in Ideal Bite's Tip Library to get the links to online forms to get your name off junk mail lists.

Conserve water at every opportunity – shower with a friend and/or get low-flow showerheads.

Take a friendlier shower, showering with a friend saves water and energy - you're bound to produce plenty of heat naturally. And if sharing isn't your thing, there are still plenty of frisky-free ways to conserve like low-flow showerheads and faucet aerators.

Reduce your environmental impact by choosing carbon offsets.

When you buy carbon offsets you neutralize the pollution that your home, car, and travel create.

So team up on your carbon-heavy habits, and start offsetting through Renewable Choice’s home, car and travel offset options.

If 10,000 people offset their yearly carbon emissions, it'll have the effect of planting 3,538,462 trees.

Thanks for taking the time to educate yourself about how you can make an impact. Here are a few additional links about our general energy life cycle impact and what can be done to work towards solutions!

• Kilowatt Ours
  
• I Love Mountains
  
• Alliance to Save Energy