There are many ways to go green and many of them are quite easy to do:
1. Use Bill pay
Bill-pay is now available in many banks. By using online bill pay service and bill-pay, we should be able to reduce paper waste. This could also help us save paper used by typical mail service, which regularly delivers our bills. By paying our bills online, it would be very easy to save energy, because our bills don’t need to go through the usual sorting process, in the post office.
2. Use Water Filter
we can buy water filters in local stores and use them to refill our own bottles. In this case, we no longer need to buy bottled water. We can refill these bottles a few times before discarding them. However, we need to make sure to put them in proper recycling bins for immediate delivery to local processing centers. Each year, people could use more than 150 disposable plastic bottles and tons of plastics are added to our national landfills each day.
3. Donate our “Junks”
Our junks could be others’ gold. Instead of throwing our unused produces away, we could donate them to others. This will put less pressure on current recycling centers and prevent adding more garbage into our landfills. Some of these people are skilled enough to repair our old, broken items and turn them into something useful.
4. Use Public transportation whenever possible
It is a good idea to choose public transportation services at least a few times a week. In fact, many people are able to become car-less for years. This is especially true in urban areas with adequate public transportation facilities. For special occasions, we could also rent cars for family trips and others.
5. Use proper tire pressure
This could be one of the easiest things we do. By adjusting the tire pressure properly, we could make reduce overall fuel consumption. Cars with under inflated tires need more energy to move and this uses up more fuel.
6. Clean or replace AC filter
After months of use, AC filter could eventually be full of lint and dust. We could save a lot of money by changing our AC and furnace filters. New filters cost only about $10, but they could equal to a few hundreds of dollar of saving after years of use.
7. Use proper sprinkler systems
Many homes use specific underground sprinkler system, but it won’t work well if one of the sprinklers don’t function properly or are leaking. We should spend a few minutes each week to check our sprinkler system and repair any holes. If we use regular sprinklers, we should check hose connections. Hose ends could leak after we hook and unhook them many times. In some cases, we also need to buy some new gaskets.
8. Choose reusable plates
With reusable plates, we don’t need to dispose paper plates that require thousands of additional trees each year. Instead of using dishwasher, we could wash our plates manually and divert the used, “grey” water for our garden and lawn.