10 Things You Can Do Right Now

1)  Use a travel mug – save a tree
    It might not seem like a big deal, but paper coffee cups add up – fast. One national chain, Starbucks, estimates that customers who brought their own mugs prevented 30 tons of paper from going into landfills. That’s a lot of trees, and a lot of CO2.
2)  Disposable chopsticks
    Next time you’re in an Asian restaurant, think about the more than 100 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks used every year, the millions of trees cut down to make them, and the carbon released when they are burned or land-filled. There’s a growing movement to bring your own chopsticks – you could be a part of it.
3)  American Idle
    With fuel injectors, it’s no longer true that it takes more gas to restart a car than to idle the engine – restarting uses about three seconds’ worth. So while you’re waiting to pick up the kids, or in line at the drive-through, you can shut off the engine and save – if we all did, the EPA figures we could save the equivalent of taking 12 million cars off the road a year.
4)  Goodnight PC
    Most of us leave our computer running overnight – shutting down and restarting takes time, right? But each of us could reduce 600 lbs. of CO2 a year by powering down, and that really adds up.
5)  Vampire power
    Lots of appliances draw power even when you’re not using them. TVs are the worst offenders, and plasma screens are worst of all. Putting them on a power strip with an on/off switch saves hundreds of pounds of CO2 per year (or the EcoStrip, which plugs into USB and takes care of the shutdown for you). Also, don’t leave cell phone and battery chargers plugged in, as they waste power too.
6)  Cold comfort
    Over the past 20 years, power use for refrigerators has fallen by two-thirds. How big a difference does that make? Replacing 10 old refrigerators is like taking an entire house off the grid.
7)  Nix the bottle
    Americans use - and dump - 30 million plastic water bottles every day. All of those bottles were manufactured (using power and 63 million gallons of petroleum per year), packed into cardboard boxes (millions of trees cut down), then trucked around the country (more oil). Use an inline filter on your tap, and a reusable sports bottle when you’re on the road.   
8)  Planting carbon
      While conventional farming typically depletes soil, organic farming puts organic matter – full of carbon - back in through the use of composted animal manures and cover crops. In the next few years, organic farms will be leaders in removing carbon from the atmosphere.
10)  Wrap it up
      More than 4 million tons of wrapping paper goes into US landfills every year. Use newsprint, color comics or magazine pages instead.