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Top 10 tips for living "greener" in 2007

msnbc.msn.com — You don't have to ditch leather or sell your car to help the environment. We've gathered 10 simple tips for living greener in 2007. Hey, it's a lot easier than losing those 15 pounds, and it may be a new year's resolution you can actually live up to.

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  • steve03, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6if more people would follow these easy tips that could really make an impact.

    I especially like tip #9 "Turn On the Tap".
    Piers Fawkes wrote on this topic just a couple days ago:
    http://www.clubofpioneers.com/blog/blog-from-piers-fawkes/11/stories/19/
    • Otto, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Yeah, I don't get why people are so down on tap water. It's often cleaner than most bottled waters, really.
    • jeremy66158, on 10/12/2007, -11/+3No it could not "really make an impact" Besides the lighting tip (#6) it under emphasizes the over consumption of energy. Capitalism is the reason we are going to kill the earth as it is only is happy when people over consume.
    • catalysis, on 10/12/2007, -6/+4I have lived in 2 seperate places where the tap water was contaminated with radon. Now where i live, a major city, the TDS is sometimes >400 ppm. God only knows what is in it. Ill stick to RO water. It wastes 6 gal to make 1 gal, but its healthy and thats all i care about. You guys can go ahead and put that fertilizer/fecal matter contaminated, fluorine-loaded crap through your body.
    • dvddesign, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I wish I could drink the tap water more, since my water bill, plus the cost of filtering that much drinking water is kinda expensive...

      But in my neighborhood, the water reservoir is over chlorinated, to the point to where if you're running hot water for 3-4 minutes, you smell chlorine.
    • ngmcs8203, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I second catalysis statement. In farming areas where well water is a main source we can't drink the water. Just throwing away the bottle is the biggest part. Buy bottled water and reuse the bottle through out the day is my way of being greener.
    • 31337Noob, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0Tap water is considered cleaner because it has more chemicals, a trade off if you ask me.
    • CBTF, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Im taking it you havent seen the tests showing that many bottled waters have higher levels of bacteria than tap water... not that i'm one to talk, since im drinking a bottle of water now, but you should at least be aware of that.
  • tinker123, on 10/12/2007, -3/+15The three most effective tips for preventing more environmental damage:

    1. Have smaller families

    2. Eat less animal derived food.

    3. Drive an alternatively fueled vehicle if you can. Drive a smaller vehicle. Plan out and consolidate your trips.

    • postapoc, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Live in a city.

      Take public transit or ride a bike a few times a week.
    • fmaxwell, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Amen to having smaller families. It's terrifying when you look at the population growth worldwide in the last hundred years.

      But let's be blunt: Stop buying stupid vehicles. If you have a wife and two kids, you don't need a Chevy Suburban or a Ford Expedition. If your idea of off-roading is a gravel driveway, you don't need a Humvee. If your penis is small or you suffer from erectile dysfunction, your problem isn't going to be solved. If, like me, you have a need to occasionally tow a boat, transport a motorcycle, etc., then buy a vehicle for that (like a full-size pickup truck) and drive something smaller, more practical, and more fun, for commuting and errands.
    • mapkinase, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1"Kill yourself" replaces 1-2-3.
  • tinker123, on 10/12/2007, -1/+84. Get in the habit of turning things off when you are not using them.
    • dvddesign, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9But then how will I know if my RSS feeds have updated?
    • nofxjunkee, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2My girlfriend would object to that.... ;-)
  • mazerrackham, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Swap out the "guinea pig on a wheel" powering your computer with two opposite-sex gerbils. Gerbils eat less and have more babies, thus providing more power for the next generation of computers.
  • dpcdomino, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16Just some I can think of.

    1) Walk places (saves on gas) So many people live in the "city" yet take their car to go places only a few miles away
    2) Take the stairs (saves electricity on elevator and sheds pounds too)
    3) Run on a treadmill? Try running outside. Same with bikes. If you think it is too cold just remember that your body burns more calories when it is colder.
    4) Set your toilet tank to shut off sooner and use less water.
    5) Use grocery bags at trash can bags. Why buy specific kitchen bags when you can use Target or Giant bags just as easily?
    6) Fill your tires on your car to the proper pressure. It is usually located on the door frame of the driver side. Properly filled tires saves gas and air is normally free.
    7) Install ceiling fans and turn down the AC in the summer unless you need to cool every room in your house at once. Plus the breeze feels nice.
    8) Turn down the heat and wear more layers at home. Do you really need to wear shorts inside in the winter?
    9) Turn off the "background TV." If you are on the computer or cleaning up, does the TV really have to be on in the background? Do you really need to watch Simpson's reruns?
    10) Unplug, or put them on a power strip that you can turn off, unused appliances. Stand by power can add up. Do you really need the blinking 12:00 on the VCR you never use?
    • CBTF, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Good points- especially the walking. So many people take their cars everywhere. Not only is walking better for the environment, its great exercise and gives you some quiet time >:D
    • 955701, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1You can make the electricity use points moot by installing solar panels.
  • duckyfresh, on 10/12/2007, -4/+12It's not that easy being green
    Having to spend each day the color of the leaves
    When I think it could be nicer being red, or yellow or gold
    Or something much more colorful like that
    • republick, on 10/12/2007, -8/+2do you sell acid?
    • dellis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4digg for the muppets/kermit the frog reference.

      (No acid involved by duckyfresh, but possibly taken by Jim Henson 30 yrs. ago though...)
  • dmron, on 10/12/2007, -10/+2Every year it's the same crap. "Oh you pathetic human, can't even keep your new year's resolutions, well, here's some other crap to try instead."

    Am I the only one who gets sick of this? :)

    Not that the tips in the article are bad, but why is January 1 different from any other day? You want to be more environmentally friendly, or healthier, or whatever, you don't need a new year to accomplish that.
  • CraigB12, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2How many of these lists are going to come out and make it to the front page?

    We already know we shouldn't drive more than necessary, buy energy star, use energy saving light bulbs, turn ***** off when we're not using it, adjust the heat to the season, use less water. These all say the same *****, and yet we're still ***** as far as energy goes. Perhaps large corperations should use low voltage servers in their server farms, or turn the ***** AC down. Households doing this ***** is just a drop in the bucket, until energy conservation catches on at the industrial level we're still going to have problems.

    • fmaxwell, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11Corporations do a lot more to reduce energy usage than people do. Corporations that had fluorescent fixtures years before consumers thought of them as anything other than shop lights. While the average homeowner was using incandescent carport and garage lights, corporations were using sodium, mercury vapor, and metal halide lights to efficiently illuminate parking garages and lots, warehouses, manufacturing facilities, and so on. Corporations run diesel-powered truck fleets (rather than much-less-efficient gasoline vehicles). They are the ones that recycle paper and buy recycled paper. Every business I've worked at for the last decade has had aluminum recycling. They are the ones that have building lights on timers. Hell, my office has a motion sensing light switch, so, if I leave and forget to turn off the light, it will be turned off automatically.

      Everyone needs to do their part. Rationalizing energy waste and environmentally harmful practices by asking 'what difference can I make when {fill in the blank: people in China, people in India, big business, other} are contributing more pollution than I do?' is just a cop-out.
    • thesparrowband, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2i appreciated the anti-junk mail links, they were helpful
    • CraigB12, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I stand corrected. Thank you sir.
    • fmaxwell, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2You're a gentlemen -- an all-too-rare type of person on the Internet. Thanks.
    • 955701, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0@fmaxwell

      Are you serious?!?! Me thinks you need a calculator with a - sign on it somewhere. A corp that's in a hole taking 3 or four steps towards getting out of it is NOT doing more for the environment.

      I can just imagine your response - "Yeah, but they're spending MILLIONS while you only spend $20 bucks". Ugh!

    • fmaxwell, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@955701

      I pointed out specific things that corporations do to save energy -- things which are, far and away, more than the average citizen does, and you reply like that? Yeah, let's blame business for all of the pollution. It's not the fault of the person who commutes in a 12mpg SUV. It's the fault of the business that he works at. It's not the fault of the person who has 300W and 500W halogen lights on all night for "security" outside his home. It's the fault of his office, which lights its parking lots with high-efficiency sodium vapor lights and has interior lights on motion sensors.

      If you think that your company is environmentally irresponsible, stop working there. If you think that the grocery stores near your home waste too much energy, don't shop there. If you think that your ISP is wasting electricity, stop using their service. In fact, do us all a favor: Save electricity by just turning off your computer.


  • selrahc, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Hanging clothes out to dry is a good idea, but if done in close proximity to where bees or hornets are it can make for a very unpleasant experience some morning. Hornets like to hide in pantlegs...
  • central183, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5We just replaced the shower head with a 2.6 gpm head. We also replaced the faucets with 1.6 gpm aerators. That has saved us around $5 to $10 per month in hot water. We also replaced all the bulbs in the house with Compact Florescent Bulbs. That saved us another $5 to $10.

    It's easy to save the environment when you save money too.
    • szembek, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1In bathrooms and other rooms where you turn lights on and off regularly I will continue to use incandescent bulbs because they reach full brightness immediately. The florescent ones take about 15-20 seconds. I use them in rooms like the living room where the lights are turned on and stay on for a while, but not in some place.
    • rossmcd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Slow on time is also a pet peeve of mine. But I found a way around it. Different brands of fluorescent bulbs come to full brightness at different speeds, depending on the type and quality of ballast used. More info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_fluorescent_lightbulb

      I've trid about 5 different brands and found Maxlite to be the fastest by far.
  • goostoff, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I think MSNBC needs to check some of their sources before they start copying and pasting links to websites across the Internet.

    From WaterFilterComaprisons.net:

    "Cancer is not natural, it's a man made disease, and for the most part... completely preventable."
  • ROFLance, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I thought this was going to be an article on smoking pot.
  • veganpa, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5One thing we can all do to reduce the amount of suffering in the world is to stop eating factory-farmed animals.
    • hiPpymIck, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1http://www.themeatrix.com/
      all about intensive farmin....

      posted this link on the hosp infection as well....
      (overuse of antibiotics in intensive farmin causes superbugs)
  • Jist, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I mean honestly, bangin an ecosexual is good for the environment!

    The rest of them are good though.
    • inmatarian, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Heh, who invented that term, Ecosexual?
  • TB65, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6FTA: "Save a Tree According to the folks at stop globalwarming.org, the paper industry is the third largest contributor to global warming. If every U.S. household replaced one toilet-paper roll with a roll made from recycled paper, 424,000 trees would be saved. If every household in the United States bought recycled napkins instead of virgin-fiber napkins, we could save a million trees."

    As counterintuitive as it sounds, using non-recycled paper creates more trees. With most of the trees used in paper production grown on tree farms, any increase in demand will be met with more trees planted. Switching to recycled toilet paper would actually decrease the number of trees. Then there's the amount of chemicals, processing, collection, distribution and other costs associated with recycling. Plus, who wants to use used toilet paper? ;)

    • sonofagunn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I've always thought that too. If we take away the paper industry, then who's going to maintain all those pine forests in the South? I bet the paper/lumber industry plants more trees and preserves more forests than anything else. It seems like we'd want to keep them in business. Tree farms support a lot of life - they are great places to hunt :)
    • 955701, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1yeah, nevermind cutting down old growth and replacing them with pine trees is a net of zero. They don't repond to a decrease in demand by paving what was a timber forest fools!
    • Wetzilla, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The point is that the trees that are being used for paper were planted and grown for the sole purpose of being cut down and made into paper. If the demand for fresh paper wasn't there, those trees never would have been planted in the first place. There are more trees in America now than in the 1920's. Also, it takes more energy and resources to recycle paper than to turn fresh trees into paper, and recycled paper also creates a lot more pollutants during the recycling process, from the extra fuel being burned to recycle the paper, to the chemicals that are used to remove the ink from the paper, not to mention the ink itself.
    • sonofagunn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@955701 - So, who's going to buy the land from the paper companies if they go out of business? Good samaritans who will restore and preserve the forests or developers who will eventually turn the land into something worse...

      I'm not an industry expert, but I believe most paper comes from pine forests in the South in a region called the "Pine Belt" because the native forests are mostly pine. Having tree farms of pine trees and an economic incentive to keep them isn't really a bad thing in that area.
  • cubeeggs, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Lisa: Hey, if a boar can survive here, there must be a source of food! Look,
    he's licking slime off that rock! That's what he's been eating --
    slime! And there's enough slime for all of us! We're saved!
    [Cut to the kids roasting the boar over a fire, and eating parts of
    it.]
    Nelson: Mmm, all that slime made the boar extra tender!
    Martin: More snout anyone?
    Bart: How's your dinner, Lis!
    [Lisa is licking slime from a rock.]
    Lisa: Ah, shut up... savages...
  • bobnoxious, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3How 20th century. Not a peep about telecommuting. The single biggest change one can make to be "greener" is to park their car and use a browser to span distances and time via electronic interchange if at all possible. Not even 20 percent of people who can telecommute actually do. Most SMBs are generally awful about telecommuting policy, and people/managers feel they must have to have face time. What an arcane, resource intensive way to work!

    I've been cubicle-free and car-free for over 10 years working as a technologist. What have I learned? You cannot take the high road on the environment unless you live and walk on it. And it's not near as easy or attainable as MSNBC purports, especially if you're sucking the petroleum teat everyday like all the other commuters, including the boss you work for. Just try telling him that you've decided to call in well and work from home. Good luck.
    • 955701, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Agreed - this article doesn't go nearly far enough. Something like, if you change jobs often, rent instead of buying a home so you can relocate near your next office each time. The energy of one moving truck is less that an extended commute. Now that's a commitment with a huge impact..
  • bobnoxious, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0deleted, sorry for multiple post
  • 31337Noob, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Excellent article with very relevant exmples of how doing a little can make a huge difference.
  • 955701, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Here's one that will get you strange looks from the cashier but will save a tremendous amount of trash -

    bring your own containers and utensils when you go to lunch if you hit a fast food joint. Have the staff put the food in your own reusable containers instead of yet another cup destined for the garbage. I bring my own coffee mug (good for cold or hot drinks), a tupperware container and a fork, knife and napkin. I create *no* waste when I eat out.

    I've had one woman behind me in line make a snide remark about my bring-your-own-dishes effort "You brought your own bowl? That's a little strange isn't it?" - to which I answered "You're 40 years old and still eating lunch with a plastic fork and knife, then throwing them away each time? That's not just strange, it's crazy". I think she was probably 35. :)

    My point is, some of these ideas in the article aren't so great - the laundry issue would be moot if you just buy your power companies green energy option. Or put solar panels on your house or another piece of property that's tied to your home power bill (power company buys power from your panels and applies it against your home bill). Do something significant - if you aren't risking embarassing yourself, you aren't going far enough...

  • hiPpymIck, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1green video podcast on Digg.......
    http://digg.com/podcasts/daryl_hannah_s_love_life
  • ferrarif1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1When i read the title "Top 10 tips for living "greener" in 2007" i thought it referred to making more money!!!!!
  • humbled, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1To: WebEditors@newsweek.com

    I am writing about the January issue article in the Environment section, "Easy to be Green" by Joan Raymond. It is an excellent article overall, but I have one issue with it: the part about water filters. Joan recommends waterfiltercomparisons.net, however this site is owned and operated by DOSS Holdings, which in turn is owned by the President/CEO of Aquasana. As it turns out, Aquasana is the most favorably reviewed filter in the comparison chart. You can check the whois information for the websites and see that DOSS Holdings and Aquasana are within commuter distance of each other, one in a residential neighborhood and the other in a business area. In addition to that, others have already done some homework and posted their results online:

    This person has made the same discoveries as myself:
    http://www.triptronix.net/ishbadiddle/archives/2006/02/24/11.09.27/

    And this person has actually challenged Aquasana, who freely admit their involvement in the fake review websites (at least 10 fake sites, in total):
    http://lists.samurai.com/pipermail/trawlers-and-trawlering/2006-March/102542.html

    It is unfortunate that this is the case. This shady behavior makes the information untrustworthy, and even if it is completely true, I would not purchase a product from a company that engages in such tactics.
  • Doofy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Humans cannot function without religion, environmentalism simply being the newest. (created especially for atheists)

    Ten Commandments: See this list
    Eden: "Mother Earth" before man (sinners)
    Sin: Driving an SUV (Humans are all polluters/sinners)
    Rituals: Reducing your carbon footprint.
    Prophets: Al Gore
    Born Again Zealots: Ed Begley Jr
    Apocalypse: Global Warming (formerly Global Cooling in the '70s, but that didn't work out so well)
    Heretics: Global Warming Unbelievers!
    Demons: Big Oil
    Antichrist: Bush

    And like all religions, it's all about controlling the masses through fear.
    Oldest formula in the book.
  • mapkinase, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1[Burping in satisfaction] I can keep my Hammer and be greener. Good!
  • fmaxwell, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@955701

    "Are you serious?!?!"

    Not only am I serious, I'm also right.

    "Me thinks you need a calculator with a - sign on it somewhere. A corp that's in a hole taking 3 or four steps towards getting out of it is NOT doing more for the environment."

    What the hell does "in a hole" mean? That the company operates underground?

    "Me thinks you need" to form a rational argument. If the steps that I cited are not good for environment, then explain why. Most companies spend a lot of time and money looking for ways to reduce energy consumption, increase recycling, and otherwise be environmentally "friendly." Sure, most of them do it because it reduces their costs and/or because it's good PR, but their motives are not the point.

    Does your house have motion-sensors that automatically turn off the lights when no one is in the room? My office does. Are large portions of your home lit with high-efficiency sodium vapor lights? The cleanrooms, warehouses, and environmental test labs at my office are. Do you have high-efficiency, electronic ballast fluorescent lighting for your living spaces? All of the offices and cubicles in my building are lit that way. Do you recycle all of your toner cartridges and use recycled paper? The companies I've worked for do.

    If you don't want to be environmentally responsible, that's you're call, but don't try to rationalize it by claiming (falsely) that corporations are worse than you are.
  • search4health, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Watergiants.com World best marketplace of aquasana drinking water system & shower water filters get discount all kinds of filter systems.
  •  

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