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Fixin' Facts

Fixin’ Tips for Livin’ Green

Buy Energy Star! The EPA started the Energy Star program in 1992 as a voluntary market-based partnership to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through increased energy efficiency. The Energy Star program offers consumers energy efficient solutions to save energy and money, and protect the environment for future generations.

Allow grass clippings to stay on your lawn, instead of bagging them. The cut grass will decompose and return to the soil naturally.

“eCycle” Take your old computers or other electronics to a local recycling center. This helps keep lead, cadmium, and other substances out of the landfill. Find eCycling centers near you.
Check out: http://www.epa.gov/ecycling/live.htm

Recycle your cell phone. Less than 20 percent of unwanted cell phones are recycled each year. Recycling old phones helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce waste, save energy, and conserve natural resources.

Change a light; change the world with Energy Star. If every U.S. household changed just one light bulb or fixture to an Energy Star bulb, each year our country would save $600 million in energy costs –enough energy to light 3 million homes, and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions from more than 800,000 cars. One Energy Star qualified bulb can save about $30 or more in energy costs over its lifetime.

Change out your five most used bulbs for Compact Fluorescent Lights (CFLs). They generate 70% less heat than standard incandescents, and they last longer. You can save up-to $60 a year. Light-green advice: change out all your basement, garage, laundry room and closet lighting. Your décor won’t suffer, and you’ll reduce your carbon footprint.

Use WaterSense-labeled faucets, toilets and showerheads. WaterSense labeled faucets not only save water, but the have the added benefit of saving energy used to treat, pump, and heat water. In fact, letting your faucet run for 5 minutes uses about as much energy as letting a 60-watt light bulb run for 14 hours.

Reduce, reuse, recycle! Recycling offers opportunities for everyone to help reduce climate change, save energy, and conserve natural resources. For example, recycling just one ton of aluminum cans saves the energy equivalent of 36 barrels of oil or 1,655 gallons of gasoline. Furthermore, using recycled materials instead of new materials saves energy and reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Using recycled glass instead of new materials consumes 40 percent less energy.

Here are some oldie but goodies: turn off the lights when you are not in a room; turn down the heat when you go to bed or you aren’t home; unplug electronics not in use: believe it or not, they still draw power, even when they are turned off; wash in cold water.

Did you know about 40 percent of all battery sales occur during the holiday season? Buy rechargeable batteries to accompany your electronic gifts, and consider giving a battery charger as well. Rechargeable batteries reduce the amount of potentially harmful materials thrown away, and can save money in the long run.

Speaking of holidays, each year after Christmas, millions of trees end up in landfills or illegally dumped on public property. With a little effort, some communities have instituted programs that make sure the trees are recycled in an environmentally friendly way. Visit www.Earth911.org to find your communities recycling program.

Instead of wrapping paper for gifts, buy reusable decorated bags and boxes and use them again and again.

Fix a Leak. According to the EPA, leaky faucets dripping at one drop per second can waste up to 2,700 gallons of water a year. If you're unsure whether you have a leak, read your water meter before and after a two-hour period when no water is being used. If the meter does not read exactly the same, you probably have a leak. Sometimes a quick turn of a wrench or a simple washer change is all it takes to stop a drip.
A leaky toilet can waste about 200 gallons of water every day. To tell if your toilet has a leak, place a drop of food coloring in the tank. If the color shows in the bowl without flushing, you have a leak.

Conserve water by switching to powdered laundry and dish detergents. The main ingredient in both liquid forms is water! And you are paying for it.
The average washing machine uses 40.9 gallons of water per load. Wash only full loads of laundry, or use the appropriate load size selection on the washing machine. When you are ready for new, choose a high-efficiency machine, which uses less than 27 gallons of water per load.

The average bathroom faucet flows at a rate of two gallons per minute. Turning off the tap while brushing your teeth can save up to eight gallons of water per day, which equals 240 gallons a month!

The typical single-family suburban household uses at least 30 percent of their water outdoors for irrigation. Some experts estimate that more than 50 percent of landscape water use goes to waste due to evaporation or runoff caused by over-watering!

Brew your own non-toxic cleaning solutions. Click on the Fixie Chick’s blog on the Home Page for ingredients and instructions.

Cut down on paper towels and napkins. Invest in some good quality micro-fiber cloths for a better and reusable cleaning experience. Cloth napkins make a meal much nicer and cut down on landfill waste.

Beauty: keep toxic chemicals off your body and out of waterways and landfills using at-home recipes or products made from natural ingredients. Click on the Fixie Chick’s blog on the Home Page for ingredients and instructions.

BYOB. Bring Your Own BAG. Reusable shopping bags are inexpensive, trendy, and have a huge impact on the environment. Plastic grocery bags are being banned all over the place, and for a good reason. San Francisco has passed a law banning plastic sacks at groceries and pharmacies. And China plans to ban plastic bags all together!

Become an Eco-pioneer. Garage-salers, antique-ers, flea market-ers – Our Grandparents started the movement, keep it up by shopping salvage, vintage, and slightly used furniture and other goods.

Think before you throw. Is the thing you are throwing out something another eco-pioneer might find useful? You know what they say: One man’s junk is another man’s treasure. Before you throw it in the garbage, consider donating it to Goodwill. Someone else may need or want it.

Hang the laundry on the line. Laundry Lines are making a come back. Makes sense, sunlight is a natural “bleach”. Combined with the energy savings of not running your dryer while the air conditioner is on. Whew, that’s impact!

Idling your car gets you zero miles to the gallon. The best way to warm up your car is to drive it.

Check your tire pressure regularly and rotate tires every 6,000 for maximum fuel efficiency.

Increased weight in your vehicle reduces fuel economy. Shovel off the snow & ice in the winter, unload those bags of mulch in the summer.

Save your newspapers and use as a weed barrier.

Speaking of newspapers, are you recycling? It is tempting to throw everything in the trash, but you are doing the planet and future generations a disservice if you aren’t sorting your bottles, cans, plastics and papers. There are a lot of everyday items being made from the goodies you pop into your recycling box every week. It doesn’t take much effort, and the results are meaningful.

Buy your mulch in bulk, not bagged, save all that plastic from landing up in the dump. If you do buy your mulch in plastic, use the bags as a weed barrier. Don’t throw them in the trash.

Select native and drought tolerant plants for your garden. They require much less water and much less attention too.

Capture rainwater in a barrel or trough in your yard to water your plants, instead of using the hose.

Use natural recipes to deter bugs and critters. For instructions and ingredients visit click on the Fixie Chick’s blog on the Home Page.

Make the switch to e-Billing. It’s mail you won’t miss! Paper products make up the largest percentage of municipal solid waste, and hard copy bills alone generate almost 700,000 tons of waste and almost two million tons of carbon dioxide. Contact your creditors and sign up for paperless billing.

Get off of junk mail lists. Don’t waste your valuable time sorting through mail you didn’t ask for. You can put a note in your mailbox requesting “no junk mail”. Go to Greendimes.com. For $3 per month they automate the process of removing your name from junk mail lists.

Caulk, weather-strip and insulate your home. If you rely on natural gas heating, you'll stop 639 pounds of CO2 from entering the atmosphere (472 pounds for electric heating). And this summer, you'll save 226 pounds from AC use.

Use bag-less vacuum cleaners. If building a new home, invest in a central vacuum system. Better for you, better for the environment!

Install foam draft blockers behind cover plates on outside walls. The result: lowered energy bills, more comfortable indoor air temperatures.

Put a lid on your saucepan to contain heat and warm food faster.

For every degree your lower your heat, you can save 3 percent in energy costs. Install a programmable thermostat, and set to 68 degrees in winter and 55 degrees at night.

Monthly furnace filter changes will maximize your furnace efficiency. Even better, wash a reusable filter!

Use non-chlorinated bleaches containing hydrogen peroxide, sodium percarbonate, or sodium perborate.

Reuse, refill, refill. Lotion, soap, and eggs are good examples of how easy it is to keep containers out of landfills. You can also buy in bulk, (large containers). You’ll be giving back to the globe, plus you’ll always have back up.

Fill up your freezer. A freezer operates most efficiently when full.

Think before you print. When the 80’s heralded the PC environment and the predictions of the “paperless office”, we envisioned storing everything electronically. No more filing cabinets, no more manila folders. Has it happened? Next time you press print take a minute to think…do I really need to use a piece of paper for this, or will it just get thrown out anyway. Save a tree whenever you can.

Leave the plastic water bottles in the glass cooler at the store. It takes about 10 minutes to drink, and about a million years (relationally, not scientifically, speaking) to decompose. If you need water, bring it from home in your own reusable container.

Spay or neuter your pets. Although this may seem a little off the topic, it is relevant. There are many, many animals roaming around without homes, and worse, many which are abused or put to sleep because they are dropped off at shelters without resources to care for them. Take responsibility for the pets you adopt. Make sure you get them the medical treatment they need and deserve,

Think bamboo when replacing your floors. It’s a rapidly regenerating grass, not a wood, thus it eliminates deforestation. It is beautiful and durable when used as flooring. And bamboo does not need to be replanted because it forms new shoots continuously.

Bamboo is also made into fabric for clothing. It is silk-like in texture, reportedly anti-bacterial and has UV protectant qualities. Plus it is moisture repellant with good thermal qualities. Because bamboo is so fast growing – one of the fastest growing plants in the world at up to three feet per day – it provides a great source of oxygen to the planet while absorbing carbon dioxide during photosynthesis.

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