Taking Baby Steps to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint
by Lauren Evans
While most people are starting to take notice of the need to conserve energy and live a “greener” lifestyle, not everyone is prepared to take huge leaps and bounds and change the entire way they live in order to reduce their carbon footprint. As it turns out (and as our mothers always told us) every little bit helps. Here are some baby steps you can take to get yourself going down a greener path.
Avoid preheating your oven… unless you’re baking.
Most foods that you make in the oven, from meats to frozen dishes to lasagna, aren’t much affected by the slow change in temperature. The only time you need to preheat your oven is when you’re baking, as the reactions that take place in baked goods require pretty precise temperatures. Preheating for foods that don’t need this just wastes energy.
Along those same lines, try to avoid opening the oven more than once when you’re using it (try not to open it at all if you can stand it). When you open the oven door you lose a considerable amount of heat, causing the oven to expend more energy as it tries to heat itself back up to the proper temperature. Obviously, the more you open the oven while cooking, the harder the oven will have to work to reheat itself.
Trick your toilet.
This is much easier to accomplish than it might sound. By placing a brick (or a milk jug filled with water) in your toilet tank, you are effectively tricking your toilet into believing that it has filled itself completely with water, while it has really only filled the tank with a portion of the water it normally would. The density displacement caused by the brick causes the water to rise and reduces the amount of water you use on every flush.
When you drive, avoid hard starts.
Sometimes it’s tempting to try and accelerate past that slow car on the onramp of the freeway, but you’re expending a lot more gas and energy to do so than you would if you slowly accelerated to the proper freeway speed. Not only will this reduce your carbon footprint, but it will reduce the amount of money you spend on gas each year, too.
Slay vampire gadgets.
Even when your gadgets are turned off (your computer, cell phone charger, printer and even your kitchen appliances) they are still sucking energy from your home. It may be a pain to walk around your home and unplug everything that’s not currently in use, but if you utilize power strips it makes the task a lot easier. Instead of unplugging fifteen appliances, you’re switching off only two power strips.
Recycle, reduce, reuse and close that darn loop.
Some of the best advice available for reducing your carbon footprint is simply to do as the song says. Recycle everything you can, from your papers at work, your weekly newspaper, your cans and bottles and even your yard clippings. Most cities offer to pick up your recycling bins along with your garbage, only requiring you to remember that the soda bottle goes into the recycle bin and the cap goes into the trash.
Work on reducing the amount of trash you produce. Go back to using real dishes instead of paper plates. Take a piece of fruit with you to work instead of that granola bar and avoid the necessity of throwing away the wrapper. Try also to cut down on your one-use items. Switch from paper towels to cloth dishrags, or use that water bottle a couple of times before recycling. (Don’t use it more than twice, though, as bacteria tends to grow after too many uses.)
Most importantly, remember that small changes really do make a difference. It may not seem like much, but even small efforts help out in the long term. And who knows? Maybe it will inspire you to move onward to even higher (or greener?) heights.
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