Save the Planet, Save Cash: 25 Best Ways to Green Your Green
Tired of hearing that line? So are we. So let’s bury this assumption once and for all! Here’s how to save a ton of cash.
1. Change to Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs.
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LED lightbulbs will be greener, but right now they’re pricey – while CFLs are usually less than $2 each. And it’s a field of constant innovation.
Between $15 and $50 per bulb over 5 years.
Red-hot innovation. Remember burning holes in paper with a magnifying glass? These appliances focus the sun’s rays onto your food and cook it as thoroughly as a traditional oven – without using a spark of electricity. So simple you can even make them yourself.
These replace the standard convection ovens which use around $0.10 of electricity an hour – and then there’s gas.
There are mineral-salt-powered equivalents to washing powder, like the Ecoballs “flying saucers”. And yes, they work.
$200-$400 per 1000 washes.
Over half of American homes don’t have them: that’s a lot of homes being heated when they don’t need to be. Install one today (say, a Ventstar Flat Stat) and watch your heating bills plummet.
Calculate your exact saving here (Microsoft Excel spreadsheet).
They’re wasteful and polluting – and avoidable. Use one of the newer brand of push reel mower - or, if you have some money to invest, solar-convert!
With a gas-powered lawnmower, an hour’s grass-cutting is around 100 miles in your car.
UPDATE: While any gas savings are money in your pocket, the above statement refers to the pollution created by an hour’s grass-cutting – here’s Science Daily on this.
You use the most fuel at low speeds and when you start your car. So short trips really aren’t worth it – cycle or walk instead. Give yourself longer to shop (you can cut down on gym time to balance things) – and carry less by shopping more often.
With rising fuel prices, you can expect any fuel economy savings to grow and grow.
Make sure everyone’s in before turning the key. And waiting for someone for more than 60 seconds? Kill the engine. You’re more likely to consume more fuel idling than restarting.
It’s been estimated that idling Burger King customers waste 16 million gallons of gas a year.
Prepacked sandwiches: all that plastic, and how much money? So make your own: it’s vastly cheaper and more fun (you get to choose the fillings).
Personal estimate: Making my own – $15 /wk. Shop-bought – $30-50/wk.
Tumble-drying needs huge amounts of energy (see below). So go for a combination of an eco-friendly spin dryer for when it’s raining, and washing lines (standard or fancy) for when the sun’s shining.
Tumble dryers use around 2.5 kwH of electricity per hour. Compared with the rest of your appliances, that’s huge. Dry naturally, and you’ll save $100s a year. Oh, and millions of tons of CO2.
If your room’s a bit gloomy, don’t just reach for the lightswitch. Think about how to get more daylight into your room – whether simply by moving furniture around, or guiding the light in with sunpipes or mirrors.
Banishing the lights for the night will have a significant impact on your electricity bill. Even turning them on an hour later than before will make a difference.
Catch rainwater in water butts or more sophisticated arrangements, and you have a ready supply of water for anything except drinking (you’d need fairly expensive filtration to make it safe).
Up to half your water bill.
We want to see the return of Victory Gardens, using every neglected square inch of everyone’s back yard to grow vegetables. Food miles turn into food inches, and the results taste better than you could have imagined if you’re been eating the mass-produced variety. Also, buy locally produced food – it’s just other people’s Victory Gardens!
Huge savings on grocery bills.
There’s a great deal of concern about energy being invisibly wasted, particularly with modern devices that have a “standby” setting. So when you’ve finished with the electronic marvel of your choice – unplug it.
Anything from $50 a year upwards per household is spent on keeping those little red LEDs glowing.
It’s cutting-edge, so it’s certainly not cheap – but ground source heat pumps are the next big thing in eco-friendly house design. They run some of your water supply through the ground where it picks up natural geothermal energy. Result: toasty-hot water for free!
Your central heating bill will evaporate.
If you can find an alternative to using your electric A/C unit, use it – but remember that it’s much less eco-hostile to cool the house down than it is to heat it up. So when the house gets cold, think layers layers layers.
See it as a challenge – to make your Winter electricity bill lower than the summer one!
UPDATE: Thanks to Dougal for pointing out that despite news reports to the contrary, the claim that air-conditioning is more cost-effective than heating has been repudiated by RealClimate.
As Allison noted a while back, 90% of the energy used to wash clothes goes into heating the water. Wash on a cooler setting, and you save energy…
…and that saves you money on your bill. Couldn’t be easier.
Meat is the most expensive item on the average food bill. It’s therefore ironic that we eat too much of it – and no, I’m not vegetarian (although that’s an excellent argument against meat as well). Meat is a delicacy, not a staple – so don’t be afraid of having a few no-meat days during the week.
500g T-bone steak – $20. Just sayin’.
If you’re the average American, you buy four bags of groceries, and you throw one of them straight in the trash. No, really. So learn to make the most of the food you buy: soups, stews, freezing, composting, you name it.
One quarter (or more specifically, 27%) of your food bill, right there.
With technology, everyone loves shiny and new things – particularly us men (a genetic flaw, perhaps). But if there’s a second-hand, perfectly functioning alternative, we should go with it. So become a retrophiliac, and always try to buy last year’s technology, first- or second-hand.
Regarding full retail price, look at what happened with the iPhone.
There’s no cutting corners on quality clothing – except when a professional tailor is doing it for you. If you want to look fabulous on a budget, trawl your city’s second-hand options and find items that are near your size – then have them adjusted.
A guy’s perspective: in this manner I saved $200 on a suit last year.
The Information Revolution has changed the way we work. Telecommuting is a much cheaper option to spending 3 hours in traffic. Videoconferencing beats the real thing in bucks. So find ways to avoid those costly long hauls to and from work. (Even if the company’s paying!).
Or are you saying that your own time isn’t valuable to you?
Always support your local traders – they’re where you’ll most likely to get the best-quality goods. But when it comes to the harder-to-get items…shop online. You save on packaging and (depending on the items) you save on gas, because it’s delivered to your door by someone who was on the road anyway.
And yes, shopping online is almost always cheaper – if not quite as tactile and fun!
It prevents urban tumbleweed. It’s stylish. And it’s tougher than those flimsy supermarket bags…
…which you’re increasingly being asked to pay for (by companies that lack the nerve to ban them altogether).
Household cleaners are expensive. So don’t buy them. Go for the natural, non-polluting options that are just as effective, available everywhere and cost next to nothing.
Miracle cleaners miraculously wipe out your budget. Lemons, on the other hand, are cheap.
In the bad old days, you paid extra for an eco-conscious lifestyle. Now, eco-friendliness is the norm – and in more and more cases, not choosing green is the way to overspend.
Choose green, save money, help the planet. There is no catch.
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25 Comments
July 5th, 2008 at 9:29 am
1 hour of mowing the lawn is like driving 100 miles? The only way I can see this being equivalent is if you are talking about pollutions (but it seems this article is focusing on saving money also). I can mow my lawn in about two hours and it takes around 1/4 gallon of gas. If my car gets 20 miles per gallon, that would be the same as driving 5 miles. The pollution thing may be different because autos have nicer emissions.
July 5th, 2008 at 10:10 am
Excellent list you’ve developed there! Financial incentive is definitely a boost in helping people make choices based on a smaller carbon footprint.
Interesting how money is directly tied into environmental friendlyness….isn’t it?
dave
July 5th, 2008 at 10:23 am
Great article! I would add one thing, some of these steps might seem like a huge thing, so its a good idea to do the easy ones first and get used to “living greener”. Then when the easy things are a way of life it makes more sense to start making the bigger green changes because really, you are already doing the easy stuff and its not that hard.
July 5th, 2008 at 10:37 am
Wow. So Easy. Now people don’t have an excuse to at least TRY! Good job!!!
July 5th, 2008 at 10:39 am
Great article, except for the serious problem with mercury in CFCs. Not sure the tradeoff in energy efficiency is worth the extra mercury in the environment….
July 5th, 2008 at 11:31 am
If the reasoning for the point about ai conditioning being better than heating is that used by Wired recently, then it has been soundly refuted by the bloggers at Real Climate.
July 5th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
With respect to carrying a tote or reusable grocery/shopping bags, before you forego the free plastic from the store, stop to think about what you’ll use for garbage at home once you don’t have grocery bags to recycle. If you’re going to have to buy plastic bags to line your trash cans and put your garbage out in (most collectors won’t take loose garbage), then maybe it’s not such a good idea. A better idea might be to use fewer plastic bags when shopping, and maybe carry a tote for extra. Plastic bags in landfill is a big problem, it’s true, but right now, we don’t have truly better solutions. So perhaps the best thing we can do is use fewer plastic bags, only as many as we’re sure we’ll be able to reuse and recycle as garbage bags.
July 5th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Good list. Only reservation is the clean cold one. I disagree with using cold water because its expensive to use hot water. Hot water helps keep us healthy.
July 5th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
There’s nothing like getting up in the morning and plucking off a fresh ear of creamy sweet corn. It’s like a bowl of cereal and milk.
July 8th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
great list. it’s really important to compile solutions like these and distribute them if we are to collectively address our environmental crisis. we’re trying to compile a similar, broader resource for solutions to society’s most pressing problems at http://www,brightfuture.us. See what’s been suggested so far and provide your own contribution to the solution.
Peace
July 9th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
These are some really amazing tips. I’m writing a blog about going green with hybrids and other activities. If you don’t mind, I may just use a couple in my blog.
July 9th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Help yourself, Dee! (We would appreciate a link crediting back to EcoSalon, though.) And thanks for stopping by and commenting on posts.
July 10th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
I wouldn’t dream of taking credit for other people’s work. It will be a couple of days before the blog is posted, but you should check it out when it is done. It will be on http://www.motorcarscleveland.com and called Going Green with Everything.
August 21st, 2008 at 2:02 pm
You forgot the most important action individuals can take: HAVE FEWER KIDS. (Or, of course, none at all).
There are 6.5 billion of us on this planet, and that number is still rising at an exponential rate, about a million more people added to our overtaxed planet every week. Yipes.
No amount of ’simple living’ will prevent that kind of unsustainable growth from aggravating just about any environmental problem one can identify (from GHG production to overfishing of our oceans to the loss of tropical rainforest).
I admit that solutions to the problems posed by population are not easy, but for heaven’s sake let’s at least begin by acknowledging the presence of the 8-ton elephant in the middle of the room — you know, the one that continues to grow in size exponentially.
August 23rd, 2008 at 5:21 pm
I did find it.
October 16th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
Love the post! Thanks so much for getting the message that “GREEN can be the less expensive alternative!”
October 31st, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Thank you for the great list. Things like programmable thermostats are so easy to install and are almost effortless to maintain…others, like riding bikes can be challenging but are real lifestyle changers, both environmentally and personally.
anne
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organic coupons.
November 7th, 2008 at 10:24 am
Loved this article! Lots of great ideas – some I’d heard of, but many new ones to try!
January 6th, 2009 at 8:55 pm
Great tips here. Put them to practice at http://www.greengroove.org/.
March 2nd, 2009 at 8:59 am
not only does growing your own save you money on food, but gives you exercise (no gym membership needed!), time outdoors, and connects you with your surroundings, your soil, the weather and the seasons like nothing else can do. After getting hooked on veggie gardening a few years ago, I can’t imagine spending a summer without it!
April 1st, 2009 at 11:52 pm
sweet sweet sweet!
August 5th, 2009 at 11:27 am
Great. Here are some more tips. Every week new cartoon and some tips:
http://tinyurl.com/d6xrkp
October 4th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Number 2 is one advice I really like. I run a blog on solar cookers and I am a fan of these little cooking devices. It is very interesting how much firewood they save, how much energy they save. If you have the possibility, if you live in an area where sun is strong, it is kind of a duty to try and replace your cooking habits and buy or build one of these sun cooking devices. It may look like a small step but it would be huge if more of us would do it.
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