The next time you're shopping at the grocery store, consider picking up a bottle of castile soap, a liquid soap that's made entirely out of vegetable-based ingredients and is 100 percent biodegradable. The eco-friendly soap has myriad uses beyond hand-washing; because it cuts through grease and dirt (without chemical sudsing agents), you can do a lot with it to keep your house sparkling clean. A few drops in a bucket of water creates an ideal floor cleaner. It also works well to lift stubborn stains set in clothes before washing them in the washing machine; it's great for degreasing pots and pans; and it can even be used to effectively and gently wash fingerprints off almost any surface.

It used to be that the bottle caps on top of plastic juice, milk and water bottles had to be removed and discarded before placing the bottle into the recycling bin. The reason? The plastic caps are a different type of resin (a No. 5 plastic), which is different than the more commonly recycled No. 1 and No. 2-marked plastic bottles. But today's modern recycling technology has made removing the cap obsolete. The bottles and caps are ground up and flaked; when the flakes are placed in water, the Nos. 1 and 2 plastic resins sink, and the No. 5 plastic floats, which makes separation a breeze.

Used office paper is recyclable paper no matter what, right? Wrong. When you use a paper shredder, you are shortening the length of the paper's fiber, which decreases its recyclability. So putting shredded paper into the recycling bin with full sheets of paper can decrease the viability of the entire load getting recycled. The best thing is to tear unimportant documents by hand into smaller pieces. Use a paper shredder only for truly confidential and personal information.