With colder temperatures around the corner, many of us will look for firewood to keep our homes warm during the winter months. One way to make your firewood choice more sustainable and better for your home is to source firewood that's local. If you purchase firewood that was logged more than 50 miles away, you risk bringing in invasive insects that can damage your home and the trees around your house. Often, firewood bundles sold at supermarkets or chain stores are from trees cut hundreds of miles away. Buying locally also cuts down on the carbon footprint.

Cardboard is pretty easy to recycle, and it is accepted in most curbside recycling programs. In fact, it's valuable and desirable, generating about $100 per ton for recyclers, so you can rest assured your flattened cardboard boxes are definitely staying out of the landfill. When recycling cardboard boxes, be sure to flatten them; it makes transporting them in recycling trucks much more efficient. Also, there's no need to remove labels and tape -- it gets separated out at the recycling plant. But the most important tip: Don't recycle cardboard boxes on rainy days. Wet cardboard is ruined and tossed in the trash.

Sure, we know eating too much sugar is bad for us, but did you know the sweetener is also bad for the planet? Sugarcane is often grown with chemical insecticides and fertilizers, but it's the way it's harvested that should have you concerned. Since 20 to 25 percent of the leafy part of the sugarcane plant is unnecessary and unproductive, when it comes time to harvest the plant, farmers burn the tops off. This leaves the cane stalk, which is where the sweet sugar is contained. It's bad for you and bad for the planet, so skip sugar.