Small and Simple Resource Saving Tips

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Seven Small and Simple Resource Saving Ideas

by John Erwin

Here are some simple things you can start doing right now to reduce your "footprint" on the world. These ideas cost little or nothing to implement and may seem trivial, but consider the collective impact on our planet if one hundred million people started doing them today:

1. Use residual cooking heat in your kitchen. Need to boil some eggs or ears of sweet corn? Put them in the pot and fill with enough water to cover them. Put the lid on the pot and set the burner on high. As soon as the water boils, turn off the burner and leave the pot covered. Your eggs will be hard boiled in about twenty minutes, and your corn will be ready much sooner.

2. If you are leaving town over night or longer, set your hot water heater to its "vacation" setting. It will stay lit while you are gone, but won't waste a lot of gas (or electricity) keeping water hot that you won't be using.

3. Wash your south facing windows every fall so they let in the maximum possible amount of sunshine in the cold winter months (dust and grime buildup on the glass can reduce heat flow into your house by several percent). Use old newspapers to clean your windows instead of new paper towels. Open window coverings during the day to allow solar gain and close them when the sun goes down to keep the heat in.

4. Carry a plastic bag with you when you go for walks around your neighborhood. Pick up trash off of the road and out of the ditch and carry it home with you. Every aluminum can you bring home to recycle saves the world enough electricity to run your television for about three hours.

5. Even if you don't have a garden, build or buy a compost bin (or just make a big pile in your back yard) and compost all of your uncooked kitchen vegetable scraps. Why throw compostable materials into the trash where they will consume fossil fuels being transported to the landfill when they could be better used improving the fertility of your soil? If you don't use it yourself, find a neighbor who gardens and give them your compost once a year.

6. If you wear your clothes until they are so worn out that you would feel bad about giving them to a thrift store, cut them up into rags and keep them in a bin under your kitchen sink. Then use them to clean up minor spills around the house instead of using paper towels. They can be thrown in with the laundry (if they are not made completely gross cleaning up the mess) and used over and over again.

7. The United States alone wastes over ten million barrels of oil a year making one-use throwaway plastic shopping bags. Help reduce this to zero by buying reusable tote bags (available very inexpensively from almost every supermarket these days) and using them any time you shop. Keep them in your car so they are always available for unplanned shopping stops.

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