October 9th, 2008 · 1 Comment

By Diane Porter

It waits, patiently, in a corner of the pantry. It knows that it goes out on Tuesdays, doing its good work with a load of diet Coke cans, glass bottles, newspapers and plastics #1 and #2. Salad bar containers make guest appearances, and once in a while a Tide bottle livens things up with its vivid orange and blue, but that’s about as exciting as it gets for the recycling bin.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. It’s the mantra of environmentally concerned people everywhere. Maybe you’ve gotten the third part of the equation conquered: If it’s glass, plastic, metal or paper, it goes in the bin. It saves space in the garbage and it saves resources for the planet. But what about the rest? Are you reducing your carbon footprint? Can you reuse more things than you do?

You can, easily, and here’s the best part: It will also save you money. Frugality gets its own cult-like devotion these days. In economically questionable times, anything that keeps a little more cash in our pocket is welcome. And while we’d all like to go out and buy hybrid vehicles and solar water heaters, it may be more practical right now to concentrate on small things that add up to make a difference. The key is, don’t think you have to overhaul your life. Look around your house, be conscious of your routines, and find small changes that work for you.

“I think the important thing to remember, when trying to go green to save green, is that you shouldn’t try to change too many habits too soon,” said author Leah Ingram, who writes The Lean Green Family, a blog that tells how she (pictured left), her husband and their two pre-teen daughters have adopted a green lifestyle and saved money at the same time.

“Take it slowly, doing one thing at a time, kind of like when you might go on a diet or start a new exercise program,” Ingram said. “Take baby steps. Soon enough it will all seem like second nature.”

How small can a baby step be? Here’s how small: Milk in your cereal. When you’ve finished your cereal, do you drink the milk from the bottom of the bowl, or do you throw it down the drain? If you’re the latter, cut the amount of milk on your cereal tomorrow by about half. Make it a goal to have the cereal and milk end at exactly the same time. Just a fourth of a cup of milk saved daily adds up to close to six gallons of milk in a year. That’s six gallons’ worth of containers that don’t have to be out in the world, and a nifty $20-$30 in your pocket.

Find other little things that save you that much in a year, and you can save hundreds of dollars. Reading through Ingram’s blogs, it’s clear there’s not a lean stone unturned. She finds uses for extra rubber bands (good for helping secure decorations on a front porch), saves wrapping paper from year to year, uses credit-card offer envelopes for her grocery lists (slipping her coupons inside), hangs clothes to dry in the laundry room instead of using the dryer.

She even pulls through parking spaces that are empty on the other side so she can face outward when she leaves. Just that saves half the gas of leaving a parking space. Talk about due diligence driving!

“I would recommend choosing one thing that you want to do differently, try it for a few weeks and then see how you feel. For example, if a family decides to invest in CFLs (compact fluorescent light bulbs), sure it might cost more than traditional bulbs, but I’m confident they will see the payoff pretty quickly. First of all, the bulbs won’t burn out as quickly as the incandescent kind, meaning they’ll spend less in the long run buying replacement bulbs. And secondly, if their experience is anything like mine, they will see their electricity bills go down.”

Here are some other areas where it might be easy to be green and frugal at the same time:

Daily living

• Let’s have a cup of coffee. Do you use paper coffee filters? A permanent coffee filter will cost you about $8 to $10. A common kind of paper filters costs about $2 for 40, so if you drink coffee daily the permanent filter will pay for itself in six months. After that, it’ll save you $18-$20 a year. And while we’re talking about coffee, do you throw out the grounds? They’re useful even if you haven’t (yet!) started a compost pile. Make saving coffee grounds easy on yourself. Put a container in your fridge where you keep used grounds, and then once a week take them out and work them into the soil around rose bushes, hydrangeas (especially if you want them blue!), azaleas, blueberries, laurels, rhododendrons or other acid-loving plants; you can also sprinkle them in bare spots in the lawn, but if you have pets, be sure to work them down into the dirt. Fast-growing vegetables like tomatoes thrive with coffee grounds used as mulch. And a ring of coffee grounds around a tree will deter ants (apparently they don’t crave caffeine like we do!). Not a coffee drinker? You can take home grounds from the office coffee pot. And many coffee houses will give them to you for free. (Like some Starbucks, pictured right.)

• Turn off the computer. “Enable the power management features on your computers,” said Denise Durrett of Communications Support with the EPA’s Energy Star program. Letting a computer hibernate during the hours you aren’t using it can save $12 to $90 a year, Durrett said. When you aren’t using your television or other electronics, unplug them or turn off the power strips. “Your electronics – computer, TV, VCR, even your phone chargers – use energy even when they’re turned off,” says the EPA’s Environment, Health and Safety Online website. “Stand-by power can account for as much as 20% of home energy use.” If you plug your television and other components into a power strip, turning them off just requires one switch, and a good one provides surge protection as well. Power strips aren’t inexpensive, but neither is your electric bill.

• Unplug the cell phone charger. “There are more than 5 power adapters for every person in the United States,” Durrett said. “That’s over 2 billion total. People have a habit of not unplugging the charger from the wall after the phone’s charged.” If every charger was an Energy Star approved charger, or was unplugged when not in use, it would mean a savings nationally of more than 5 billion kilowatt hours a year.

• Can you reuse instead of recycle? You’ve got the habit of tossing recyclables in the bin. Cheers! But are there items you could make better use of? Baby food jars or spice jars, for example, can be washed and reused as containers in school lunches (unless you have a klutz for a kid, in which case re-usable plastic is still probably your best friend). Round plastic plates that came with microwavable entrees can be used as water trays under flowerpots. Old prescription bottles are great change-holders in the car. And if you’ve got a dog, the sacks that newspapers are delivered in can be your constant companion on walks. The point is, take a second and look at what’s in your hand before it goes in the bin. Is it the size or shape of something useful? Can it store something? Stand in for something you would need to buy?

• Bottled water: We love bottled water. We unabashedly adore it. We are especially grateful for it when we’re in a convenience store and don’t want soda. But those bottles add up, both in the landfill and in the budget. Say you buy a case of bottled water once a week for $5. That’s $260 a year. Say you buy a refillable water bottle (be sure to get one labeled BPA-free) and use it. That’s $260 in your pocket.

• Dryer sheets: If you use dryer sheets, most of them will easily work for two loads of laundry; you’ll end up buying half the boxes of dryer sheets you used to buy. And after you’ve dried clothes with them, put the dryer sheet in a container near your cleaning supplies. They make great dust cloths for everything from furniture to computer screens, they hold up to cleaning products, and they’ll even clean glass without smears.

• While we’re in the laundry room: Set the washing machine for the lowest water level you need for each load, or do only full loads as some greenies advise, and wash your clothes in cold. “The best thing anyone could do to start living like a lean, green family would be to stop washing clothes in hot water,” Ingram said. “Your clothes will get just as clean when you wash them in cold water, and you won’t be spending money (or using energy) to heat your water.”

• Green cleaners: We’re lucky today. There have always been green cleaners you can make from scratch, but now there are also manufactured green cleaners on the shelves at the store besides traditional cleaning products. Regular cleaners cost from $3 to $4 each, and you need separate products for tubs, windows, furniture and floors. Most green cleaners are comparably priced, but can clean a variety of areas. However, if you invest in a gallon of white vinegar ($1.50), a pound of baking soda (.75) and a quart of Murphy’s Oil Soap concentrate ($3.45), you’ve got the makings to clean just about every surface in your house, whether wood, tile, granite, porcelain, laminate or vinyl. If this saves you the purchase of just one $4 bottle of cleaner a month, that’s a $48 savings over the year.

• At the store: When you buy a disposable product, ask yourself if a reusable product would work for you too. Paper towels have become ubiquitous in most households, especially those with kids or pets, but cloth kitchen towels will cut down on the volume you use. Keep one or two out on the counter and grab the one that makes the most sense for the job at hand.

• In the car: We’re all happy at the trend of idle-free zones around schools; it keeps a cloud of exhaust from building up where parents are picking up their children, and it keeps extra carbon emissions out of the air. Be sure to realize, though, that you’re saving money at the same time! Try to be conscious of your idling when you are in long drive-through lanes, bank teller lanes, or parking lots after sporting events. Many times the fast-food drive-through is many cars long while there’s no line inside. And while we’re talking about the car, be sure you’ve got it tuned up and the tires inflated correctly. If conscious driving and good maintenance saves you just a gallon of gas a month, that’s more than $50 by the end of a year. And if you could take a bus, ride with a coworker or find an alternate way to work just once a week, you’d save a fifth of your commuting costs.

“When it comes to your car, I realize that not everyone can walk to do errands or leave the car at home on a regular basis,” Ingram said. “But that doesn’t mean that you have to drive to Point A to Point B and Point C, and so on. Figure out a way in your daily life how you can drive less. When you have errands to run, can you park in a central place and walk to the stores? Could you plan a trip to the supermarket or the mall with a friend, so only one of you has to drive? I still use my car and I still have to fill up with gas, but I’m doing both a lot less now that I’ve adapted to my walking lifestyle.”

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