11/30/13

The United States Postal Service has a simple green tip when sending holiday presents through the mail this year: Reuse what you have. Yes, you can use the perfectly sturdy cardboard box your new shoes came in as a gift box to send through the mail. You can run old magazines, direct mailers and old mail through a paper shredder to use as packing material to protect fragile items. And instead of driving to the post office, save fuel and print out postage online at USPS.com and schedule a pickup at your home; the post office comes to your home six days a week anyway, so why not have them pick up your packages free of charge?

11/29/13

More than one-third of a public school’s energy usage occurs at night, when no one is in the building. One way to divert wasted funds paying for utility bills that could be used for school programs is to ask your local schools to do an energy audit of their building. By having teachers and caretakers simply turn off room lights at night, raise or lower thermostats depending on the season, unplug large electronics like TVs and photocopiers at the end of the day and powering down computers so they are shut down and not on sleep mode, power usage can be cut down from one-third used at night to as little as 10 percent.

11/28/13

If you use disposable coffee filters to make your morning cup of joe, look for two things in the supermarket aisle to help you make the greenest choice. First, choose natural, undyed brown filters over bleached white ones; the white filters make no difference in quality of the coffee and are whitened using chlorine bleach or other chemical whitening methods. Second, instead of paper coffee filters, which come from trees, look for filters that use bamboo fiber. It has the feel, look and same effect as paper, but it comes from a fast-growing renewable resource that does not have any deforesting effect. But the greenest choice is a reusable filter. Consider investing in one to save money and time and to reduce waste.