Tuesday, October 9, 2007

More things I do to be Environmentally Conscious

I missed some items in my earlier post:

  • Dry towels, sheets and clothing on a clothes line instead of in the dryer weather permitting. I think in the past 3 months 50% of the laundry I've washed has been dried outside on a line.
  • Turn off all unused devices/wallwarts using master switches on surge strips.
  • Call catalog companies and ask to be removed from their catalog mailings and address sell lists. This one isn't that hard and generally takes about 3 minutes per catalog. In the past month I've easily called about 80 catalogs. I've never been given any grief or pressured to stay on the list. I just save them up and when there's a small stack, spend a half an hour calling the customer service numbers.
  • Donate unused clothing to Goodwill, or another charity.
  • Reuse non-wearable clothing as rags for cleaning up spills and other projects like bike maintenance.
  • Unused household items offered on FreeCycle, Craiglist, or donated to Goodwill. Even old posters and odd items. One man's trash...
  • Use the library to get most books instead of purchasing new books that will be read ony once from a bookstore or online merchant. If a book has a lasting reread value or seems value in some way, then purchase a personal copy.
  • Use a movie rental service such as Netflix to view DVD's instead of purchasing them, unless they're going to be used repeatedly/frequently. I regret having purchased the B5 series now, because if I want to see them, I suspect that I could get them from Netflix for a very long time to come.
  • Turn off computers at night when they aren't being actively used.
  • Make sure as many electronics as possible that have a sleep mode are set to use it if they aren't plugged into a master switch that gets turned off regularly.

0 comments: