While it’s greenest to stay hydrated with a reusable bottle, sometimes you either forget or you just don’t have a refill option handy. Instead of choosing a plastic bottled water, look for a greener alternative: boxed water. The same paperboard boxes used for milk and juice are now being used to hold water. These boxes are greener because they are 100 percent recyclable, plastic-free and are shipped flat to the facilities that fill them with filtered water, which means less fuel is used to ship more boxes. And many brands that sell boxed water also plant trees to replace the ones used to make the paperboard boxes.

ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION

One-pot cooking is easy, money-saving and an eco-friendly way to prepare a home-cooked meal. If you have a rice cooker at home, you can do more than just cook rice in it. Many rice cookers have different settings for slow and even cooking, which is perfect for stews, oatmeal, soup and lots of other grains in addition to rice. Using a countertop kitchen appliance like a rice cooker, crockpot or pressure cooker can actually save about 70 percent in energy usage compared to conventional ways of cooking!

ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION

Take the time to measure how long you normally shower, then see if you can cut off about two minutes of shower time. Obviously, a shorter shower means less water is used, but simply cutting out two minutes can save 10 gallons of water. Multiply that by 365 days, and that’s over 3,650 gallons of water saved per year. Multiply that by the number of people in your household, and it really adds up to significant savings in water.

ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION