Green living tips

Gift Wrapping
Use fabric for wrapping gifts! Inexpensive remnants can be bought for any season or occasion. Tie the fabric with colored yarn.

Skip Your Dishwasher's Dry Cycle
Doing this saves tons of energy, and all you have to do is give them a quick dry with a dishtowel as you put them away.

Boost Your Fridge's Efficiency by filling it up!
Keeping your refrigerator full, but not to the point of overstuffing, will allow it to run at max capacity. To help retain cold temperatures when the fridge and freezer are less full, place glass or ceramic pitchers of water in their compartments. Like using ice in a picnic cooler, this will insulate the interior and keep it cold.
Refrigerators and freezers account for about a sixth of all electricity use in a typical American home, and they use more electricity than any other single household appliance.
Over- or under-crowding makes the fridge work harder to maintain its optimal internal temp (37 degrees F).

Have your Own Bags at the car
There’s always something we forgot to buy, or some little grocery shopping. For these days, avoid using plastic bags, and when doing a big supermarket shopping that might not fit in one or two recycled/ reusable bags, ask them for a paper bag!
Each year the United States consumes 30 billion plastic and 10 billion paper grocery bags, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. That translates to about 14 million trees and 12 million barrels of oil. And then there's what happens after the bags are used -- they clog landfills, contaminate recycling and composting facilities, and litter the landscape.

Avoid Overnight Shipping
Select ground transportation, instead of rush delivery, for your mailing needs and cut down on fossil fuel use and pollution.
Try to avoid overnight shipping, which burns the most fossil fuels per item. In fact, ground shipping tends to be six times more energy efficient than air.
Also, because airplanes release their greenhouse gases way up in the atmosphere, they tend to do more damage than gases emitted at ground level, at least as far as global warming is concerned.
Avoiding overnight delivery will also save you a bundle of money, since companies add a hefty price for the service.



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