Save Money--Save the World--5 Tips

Home is Where the Heart is---but What About All That Extra Stuff ?

There are roughly 1.6 billion homes in the world, with about 100 million of them living in the United States. You spend most of your time there. It's where you use the most water and energy and make the most trash.
On average, a person creates 4.5 pounds of trash every day. Over the course of your life, that will total six hundred times your average adult weight.... in garbage. In the end we will each leave a ninety-thousand pound legacy of trash to our grandchildren.
But if that isn't enough we leave an even bigger impact in other ways. Americans use at least twice the water and energy per person as anyone else in the world. And both of these resources are becoming more precious every day.
By the year 2025, the world must increase its water supply by 22 percent in order to meet the needs. Meanwhile 40 percent of the drinking water supplied each home is flushed down the toilet.
As far as our energy use, most is used for heating and cooling.

Here are some simple steps to make the biggest positive planetary impact with the least possible effort.

1. Take shorter showers. Every minute you save on your shower can conserve more than ten gallons of water. And that can add up: If everyone in the country saved just one gallon from their daily shower, over the course of a year it would equal twice the amount of fresh water withdrawn from the Great Lakes every day. The Great Lakes are the world's largest source of freshwater.
   
2. Set your thermostat a degree higher for air-conditioning and a degree lower for heating, and you could save $100 per year on your utility bill. Keep adjusting and you'll save even more. If every home in America turned the dial, we could save more than $10 billion per year on energy costs, enough to provide a year's worth of gasoline, electricity, and natural gas to every person in Iowa.
   
3. Recycle. If everyone in America simply separated the paper, plastic, glass, and aluminum products from the trash and tossed them into a recycling bin, we could decrease the amount of waste sent to landfills by 75percent. Currently it takes an area the size of Pennsylvania t dump all our waste each year.
   
4. In the Kitchen:Composting. Keep your kitchen scraps from fruits, vegetables, and coffee grounds in a composting bin or container. Try adding them to your garden or starting a compost site in the yard. You'll grow a better garden, create deeper topsoil, recycle nutrients, and save landfill space. If, over the course of a year, everyone in the United States composted their kitchen scraps instead of sending them away with the trash, the organic waste diverted from landfills could make a three-foot-high compost pile to cover the city of San Francisco.
   
5. Dishwasher. Run full loads in your dishwasher and save energy, and don't pre-rinse your dishes before putting them in. do both and you'll save up to 20 gallons of water per dish load, or 7,300 gallons over a year. That's as much water as the average person drinks in a lifetime. (If you must handwash, turn off the tap while you scrub.)
   

Hope these tips help us all save money and save the world. These hints are from The Green Book by Elizabeth Rogers and Thomas M. Kostigen. Everyone please buy this book. It is full of tips to cut down on waste and save energy and water. And visit their website www.readthegreenbook.com.