A Lighter Shade of Green

Tips to living Light Green 

1. Use LED lights around your home or office. LED stands for Light-Emitting Diode. This little bit of technology lights up things using very little energy, approximately 90% less electricity than your traditional holiday lights.
2. Look into more non-material "experience" gifts for any special occasion. Less stuff, less waste and an experience to remember. A few ideas; tickets to a sporting event or concert, a trip to a museum or art gallery, even a movie night - sure beats another knit sweater that will gather dust in the closet.
3. Take better care of your car. Get regular tune-ups. Maintenance, and having clean air filters will help you burn less gas, pollute less, and prevent car trouble down the line.
4. With hand washing, the friction and the soap are what really get your hands clean. As far as water temp goes, you'd have to rinse your paws in boiling water to actually kill germs. Consider using cold water instead of hot to wash your hands, since the cold, hard truth is that cold is usually just as effective.
5. Maximizing daylight through skylights, open shades, and south-facing windows substitutes electrical lighting with the natural light of the sun. Therefore saving money and preventing the emission of air pollutants and greenhouse gasses.
6. Take a few extra seconds to shut down your computer and printer instead of keeping them in sleep mode, and-annoying as it sounds-make morning a routine of unplugging TVs, fans and stereos before leaving for work. Like any routine, you'll get used to doing it in no time flat.
7. Plant a tree. You get exercise, immediate visual stimulation, and some serious self-satisfaction. Your tree will convert nasty pollutants to pure oxygen and offer a welcome to wildlife -- and tree roots can help stay erosion.
8. Buy Locally! Products travel fewer miles to their end destination, therefore resulting in less air and global warming pollution from transportation.
9. Pay your bills online. It's usually free. Never miss another payment and eliminate paper waste and postage. If all U.S. households viewed and paid bills electronically, we'd save 18.5 million trees and 15.8 billion gallons of water per year.
10. Tap water is just as good as bottled. In most first-world countries, the tap water is provided by a government utility and is tested regularly. Bottled water is not as well regulated and studies have shown that it is not even particularly pure. Not only is it more expensive per gallon than gasoline, bottled water incurs a huge carbon footprint from its transportation.