Who On EARTH Cares?

Well the fact that today is Earth Day, tells me quite a few people do care! As we celebrate Mother Nature today, I thought I’d share a few tips (some with astonishing facts!) I found throughout the net on how to help her… (Very Cool Ideas = Green)

• Turn off the lights when you are not in the room (this is an easy one that is quickly forgotten). Also, unplug your appliances when not in use; even when not in use they can be an "energy sink" just by being plugged in.

• Compost. Think about how much trash you make in a year. Reducing the amount of solid waste you produce in a year means taking up less space in landfills, so your tax dollars can work somewhere else. Plus, compost makes a great natural fertilizer.Composting is easier than you think, USE A GREEN BIN!!!

• Reuse what you can, like boxes for mailing and padded envelopes can have several uses in them. Be sure to black out the previous addresses and remove the used stamps.

• Use refillable bottles for water. Bottled water is a huge culprit to having a clean environment. Stop buying all of those water bottles that fill up our land-fills. If you need special water, buy a water filter.

• Many grocery stores sell reusable bags (usually 99 cents), buy them and use them.

• Walk or ride your bike to work, school and anywhere you can. You can reduce greenhouse gases while burning some calories and improving your health. If you can’t walk or bike, use mass transit or carpool. Every car not on the road makes a difference.

• Put On a Sweater
  By lowering your thermostat by just 2 degrees in the winter, you’ll save up to 4% on your energy bill, and prevent 500 lbs. of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere.

• Lobby Your Hotel
  In a given year, a single hotel room uses more than 80,000 gallons of water and generates 5 tons of garbage.  Given that there are approximately 3.3 million hotel rooms in the U.S., hotels generate a lot of waste, and that’s not even counting the near-continual use of air conditioning in every room.  How do we do our part?  Many hotels now offer guests the option to use one set of linens and towels during their stay.  If one million people used just one set of linens for a week, it would save 1.5 million gallons of water.

• Drive a Frybrid
  For between $500 and $1000, you can convert the engine your old Mercedes diesel sedan to run on used french-fry grease (aka vegetable oil).  According to David, more than one million gallons of fuel could be made from waste vegetable oil collected from restaurants in San Francisco alone.

• Harvest the Sun
  If one million homes installed solar panels on their roof and switched to solar power, we could reduce C02 emissions by 4.3 million tons a year.  Currently, it is an expensive investment, costing over $20,000 to install solar panels on the roof of your home.  However, homeowners can save potentially hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year in electricity costs; most people will still be connected to the power grid, and will simply use the traditional electricity as auxiliary power.

• Install a Windmill
  If 100,000 homes installed and relied on wind power, C02 production could be reduced by 900,000 tons.  The cost of installing a wind turbine starts at $7,000, and an average wind speed of 10mph is required to generate an adequate amount of power.

Have any other tips? Add them in the comments!

Tips taken from: eHow – How to Help Save Our Earth (10 tips to saving the planet); msnbc – 9 quick, easy tips to help save Mother Earth; How Stuff Works – 10 Things You Can Do to Help Save the Earth.