Green Living Ideas
EnergyDo & Don'ts for Green Living
While certain eco-friendly choices are fairly obvious, sometimes there's a sort of environmental catch you may not have thought off. In one's quest to live greener, it's easy to inadvertently worsen what you were trying to make better. Here are just a few of the green living Dos and Don'ts to help us help the earth.
Your heart is definitely in the right place if you're planning to run out and replace your old light bulbs with compact fluorescent energy-saving light bulbs. This is a good green living step. On the other hand, it does not save energy overall to replace your perfectly good old bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs before they've actually burnt out. It almost certainly takes more energy to produce either a regular or compact fluorescent light bulb than the amount of energy you would save by switching to the compact fluorescent bulb. The green living choice is to move to compact fluorescent light bulbs, one burnt out old bulb at a time.
It's a good green living idea to turn off your computer to save energy when you're not using it. The mistake people often make in an effort to be more eco-friendly is to turn off the computer when you're only going to be away from it for a few minutes. Go ahead of turn the computer off before going to bed at night, but not just for the 20 minutes it takes you to eat lunch.
Speaking of computers and green living, always set your computer to go to sleep when it has been idle for more than 10 minutes or so. Screensavers may be pretty, but they do not save energy! They used to be necessary to save your computer's screen, but this is no longer true. Support green living by setting your computer to sleep instead.
It's fabulous if you're making the eco-friendly choice to buy a hybrid car- conserving fuel and reducing pollution. These are all positive tenets of green living. However, buying a hybrid SUV, while better than a regular SUV, is not a great way to support green living. You'd be better off with a smaller non-hybrid car in almost every case.
Growing trees and plants in your yard is a wonderful way to literally live greener (pun intended). However, unless you're set on it, skip the traditional grass lawn. Green grass as we know it requires so many pesticides, herbicides, and so forth that it's not the best way to be eco-friendly, growing plant or not.
Recycling is one of the basic practices of green living. What's even better than recycling though is reusing! If you can reuse or donate an item instead of recycling it, they'll be less total waste and less energy wasted to produce a new item altogether!
