| No styrofoam
| Be sure to cross styrofoam cups off your shopping list. With the amount of foam cups we use each year, we could circle the earth 436 times.
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| Buy in bulk
| Buy products with less packaging or buy in bulk. And always choose paper or cardboard, which biodegrade, over plastic.
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| Home water filter
| Instead of loading up on bottled water, install a water filter on your home faucet. That $5 filter will give you 40, 000 8-ounce glasses of purified tap water.
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| Low-flow showerhead
| Save water by taking shorter showers and installing a low-flow showerhead. Low-flow showerheads can reduce the water flow up to 50 percent.
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| Low-flow toilet
| Don't flush money down the toilet. A low-flush toilet uses half the water but still does the job.
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| Support local farmers
| On average, your food has traveled 1200 miles just to get to your plate. Shopping at farmers' markets, co-ops and CSAs allows you to buy directly from the people who grow the food. (See 100 mile diet)
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| Reduce your junk mail
| An estimated 4 million tons (34 pounds per person) of paper junk mail are sent each year in the U. S. and nearly half of it is never opened. If 100, 000 people stopped their junk mail, we could save up to 150, 000 trees each year.
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| Make your office green
| We use so much office paper that we could build a 12-foot-high paper wall from New York to Los Angeles every year. Make your office greener by making double sided copies, sending office memos over e-mail and shredding waste paper for packing material.
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| Limit your brochures
| When you consider the number of visitors hosted at popular tourists’ attractions every year, you can see what a waste of paper one brochure per person really is. Don't take a brochure unless you really need one. Then return it so someone else can use it.
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Eliminate pesticides
| Home gardeners use up to 10 times more toxic chemicals per acre than farmers. Use organic alternatives and beneficial insects instead.
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| Use natural cleaners
| Replace chemical cleaners with non-toxic products. Most ingredients can already be found in your kitchen.
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| Build a greener home
| Ensure your family's health while living in a beautiful home that sustains the environment.
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| Switch to solar energy
| In one day, the sun provides more energy than our population could use in 27 years. Make the switch to sunlight — it doesn't pollute and it's free.
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| Plant shade trees
| Shade trees outside your home can reduce the temperature inside by 10 to 20 degrees, and save you $100 to $250 a year in electricity.
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| Buy a mulching lawnmower
| To take care of your yard without bagging or burning leaves and lawn clippings, get a mulching lawnmower that spreads the grass clippings back on the lawn, where they decompose and feed the soil.
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| Share a ride
| Most cars on U. S. roads carry only one person, leaving enough room in our cars for everyone in western Europe to ride with us. Consider car-pooling and public transportation.
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| Keep your car tuned
| Keeping your car in good working condition will not only make your car last longer, it will make it more fuel-efficient.
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| Drive a hybrid
| When in the market for a new vehicle, consider buying a hybrid. A hybrid can reduce smog pollution by 90 percent compared with the cleanest vehicles on the road today.
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| Use compact fluorescent bulbs
| They last 10 times longer and use only one-fourth of the energy compared to incandescent light bulbs.
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| Turn ups, turn downs
| Turn your thermostat down three degrees in the winter and up three degrees in the summer. You can prevent the emission of nearly 1100 pounds of carbon dioxide a year.
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| Use a notebook computer
| Save energy in your home office by switching to a laptop. Notebook computers are 90 percent more energy-efficient than desktop computers. They run on rechargeable batteries, and have energy-saving features like low-energy display screens and automatic sleep modes.
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| Get unplugged
| TVs and VCRs that are turned " off" cost us nearly a billion dollars a year in electricity. Unplugging them is the only way to ensure that they are not using any energy.
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| Wash in cold water
| When it comes time to do the laundry, you can cut your energy use and washing costs in half by switching to cold water.
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| Front-loading dryers
| You'll save even more money using front-loading dryers.
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| Buy reusable products
| Every year, we throw away 2 billion disposable razors and blades and we could circle the planet from end to end with the amount of disposable cameras we use yearly. Buy reusable items rather than single-use products.
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| Reusable coffee filters
| One cloth filter can replace over 300 paper filters, which means that fewer trees will be cut down.
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| Clean spills with cloth
| Twenty-seven million trees a year are destroyed to support our paper towel addiction. Clean up your spills with cotton kitchen towels or old clothes.
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| Rechargeable batteries
| We buy 5 billion batteries every year. Trouble is, they're not biodegradable and they're full of toxic heavy metals that could leak into landfills. What's the answer? Rechargeable batteries. Each rechargeable battery can replace between 50 and 300 throwaway batteries.
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| Reuse greeting cards
| Even greeting cards can be reused. Cut off the fronts and use them as postcards, or send the fronts to St. Jude's Ranch for Children. The kids re-mount greeting cards and sell them to raise money for college.
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| Recycle your cans
| Every month, we throw away enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet. Recycled, that aluminum would be worth $600 million by year's end.
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| Recycle the news
| Americans throw away 44 million newspapers every day. That's 500, 000 trees a week, which is a good reason to recycle your paper or read it online.
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