Top 5 Easiest Ways To Save The Planet
By Jenn Breckenridge
Filed Under Green Living |
1 CARPOOL by Wolf
Sharing a trip with one other person immediately cuts the emissions in half by taking a car off the road. On average a carpool saves 527.8 gallons of gasoline and 4.536 tons of CO2 each year. The average family purchases 1,143 gallons of gas per year.
2 EAT LESS MEAT by DAVEC
Raising meat for food (livestock) is an environmental disaster, contributing more to global warming than transportation, using up 30% of the Earth’s land (yes, that’s right, 30% of the entire land mass of the Earth is used directly or indirectly in livestock production), contributing to significant water pollution, using up tons of energy and water for raising and transporting livestock, etc. For example, it takes 2500 gallons of water to produce 1 lb of meat. The average American eats 185 lbs of meat per year, meaning 462,500 gallons of water can be saved by moving to a vegetarian diet!
3 TUNE YOUR CAR REGULARLY by Argam
Keep your engine tuned properly. Checking spark plugs, oxygen sensors, air filters, hoses and belts are a few examples of maintenance that can save a vehicle owner up to 165 gallons of gas per year, resulting in potential savings of over $600.
4 ELIMINATE JUNK MAIL by karlbach
- Junk mail destroys 100 million trees a year — the equivalent of deforesting all of Rocky Mountain National Park every four months.
- Largely due to deforestation, junk mail manufacturing creates as much greenhouse gas emissions annually as 3.7 million cars.
- Every year, Americans receive 848 pieces of junk mail per household — 44% of which ends up unopened in a landfill
Also, more than half of unsolicited mail is discarded unread or unopened; the response rate is less than 2%. And junk mail creates 4 million tons of unnecessary waste per year! Calculating the weight of the junk mail trash from EPA data, it works out to 13.4% of 1276 lbs per household! So that’s 170 pounds of trash per household per year.
5 DON’T WATER YOUR LAWN EVERY DAY by Ghengis
The amount of water used by a sprinkler in one hour is equal to the daily water needs of a family of four! The average sprinkler will use in excess of 240 gallons of water per hour. If the average person sprinkles every day for a half hour and reduced that to once a week, one could save 37,560 gallons a year!! This is huge!
These Top 5 Creative Solutions were chosen by the folks at CreativeCitizen.com, the freshly launched collaborative website for community-proposed eco tips.
Posted on June 12, 2008 |
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3 Responses to “Top 5 Easiest Ways To Save The Planet”
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I appreciate the straight forward advice on conservation….timely and practical….but do they really warrant the title of the post?
If we all started doing these 5 things…how would we be “saving”the planet?
Perhaps what I am driving at is that the notion that the human race can somehow or other “save” the planet as opposed to “losing” the planet? is coming from the same type of thought processes that have created the problems we are currently facing. (que that Einstein quote about problem solving….)
If the ecosystems which support life as we know it collapse, my guess is that it is WE who will be “lost” long before the planet.
My title suggestion:
“Top 5 Easiest Ways to Save Ourselves from Ourselves”
The title post is oversimplified…”Save The Planet” was definitely tongue in cheek here. Though when it comes to easy ways to make a huge environmental difference, what could be easier than not watering your lawn every day or grabbing a ride to work with someone who lives in the same neighborhood as you? These things save you time, money, and generally improve the quality of life for us all. For those who aren’t quite ready to install solar panels or convert their car to run on waste vegetable oil, these solutions are a way to get started as an environmentalist TODAY. This is what the Creative Citizen community came up with…let’s all collaborate…what do you think belongs in this list?
Re: Become a Vegetarian - has anyone done a study on the correlation between meat production and the growth of vegetarianism? I get it, it requires a LOT of resources (land, water, pollutants) to raise and transport meat, but it’s almost as if the market continues to supply the same quantities irrespective of demand. Would my not eating meat really affect the supply chain?