Project Beauty in Nature...

Lotus is hosting a Project Beauty in Nature today. Sooo... here's what I'm doing. I'm going to post ways that our tiny household is 'green.'

1. We reuse/recycle plastic grocery bags
-We use them to line small bathroom trash cans
-We use them to take cans and bottles in for recycling
-We recycle them inside Walmart after we carry the cans and bottles in them- if we have a big bunch at once, we take them and recycle them too.

2. We use compact florescent bulbs instead of incandescent. We has used a few of them before we moved, but moving to a much bigger place, and having to pay for our electricity, we decided to pay the expense to upgrade our bulbs, and in the same token, downgrade our use of electricity and waste less energy. We have light sensitive LED nightlights (come on only when needed) that won't ever burn out.

3. We recycle cans and bottles. Duh. By this I mean soda/water/etc.

4. We only use the lights, tvs, radios, etc. in the room that we are occupying. We know people that have on a tv in every room of the house and NO ONE is watching any of them, and I mean 24 hours a day. It's a terrible waste of energy. I HAVE gone around and turned them off before. The child of the house was flabbergasted. She couldnt understand why I wanted them off, besides all the NOISE pollution, it is terribly wasteful.

5. Our egg cartons currently go to our niece, who gets extra credit for them from her teacher, who apparently has chickens. Either that, or she has an unhealthy obsession with egg cartons.

6. We pay a lot of our bills online, as well as renewing magazine subscriptions, and we do most of our banking online as well, saving a lot of envelopes and stamps.

7. We keep our furnace turned down to 69/70 in the winter and up to 80ish in the summer, OR we keep it off completely during the day in the summer. Yes, we get cold, but that is what snuggling is for, yes we get hot, but that's what shorts and tank tops are for.

8. We unplug our phone chargers when we're not using them. Devices 'suck' energy even if they're not being used, so we avoid that if we can.

9. We only run laundry with the correct amount of water for the size of the load, the shortest time possible, and at the coolest temperature possible per load. This saves energy for heating the water, if you use mostly cold water, the water heater doesnt have to start up to run your washer.

10. We consolidate trips to the grocery store, post office, etc into one run if at all possible. I shop for a month's worth of groceries at a time. If a second trip is needed, for milk, etc. we try and use that as also a recycling trip, a trip to the parts store, etc.