ways to reduce your impact

Use reusable coffee filters instead of the paper ones. You can buy mesh filters that last quite a long time, rather than throwing out paper filters each day. Also, the French Press and theromos are great ways to limit the use of a coffee filter! French press is absolutely delicious.

Try not purchase refillable lighters. Zippos are refillable with Butane, and instead of throwing your empty lighters out, refill them. There are usually some stores in the mall that can refill your lighters. Zippo does not only use butane(They only use butane in Zippo Blu s), the more known Zippo uses Synthetic Isoparaffinic Hydrocarbon Fuel. Thanks CVJX for that tip.

Rent yourself an environmental friendly vehicle. Actually, don t rent one, buy one! Companies are coming out with more and more environment friendly vehicles, that hopefully will make the combustion engine vehicles obsolete.

When your car goes in for service, recycle your air conditioner coolant. Recycling is the environmentally friendly alternative because it keeps ethylene glycol and all the nasty stuff it picks up inside the cooling system out of the environment.

When you can, work from home. If you have a day off, but you need to get something done, work from home. Take client calls from home, do computer work at home, and all that jazz. Take home your materials the day before, and plan ahead. But don t take home a laptop with your clients personal information....that usually turns out bad.

Try to become a 1 car household. Of course this is hard with multiple children and working parents. But for a couple that may be living near the jobs. Trade off with the car a couple days of the week. Have the other walk to school or work.

Recycle your ink jet cartridges when you are finished using them. Throwing them out increases the risk of water pollution, and they are definitely not biodegradable if they sit in a landfall for a large amount of years. Take them to a recycling center, or any other office supply store.

Are you staying in a hotel for a week or so? Request that your towels and linens be washed every other day. If they are going to be used twice a day, why should they be cleaned every single day? You certainly don t do the same at home, so why have the housemaids do it at a hotel? It wastes lots of water and electricity to power the washer machines, so request your linens to be washed every other day. Better yet, every three days.

When you go out walking with your pet, clean up after them. First of all, it is disgusting for a passerby, and second, it can contaminate the local water supply. Try not to let your pets urinate or poop in streams or rivers either. This is even more unsanitary. Especially during the summers where children might be swimming.

As hard as it may be to cremate your loved relatives, and pets, cremation uses less energy than a burial. Burials use backhoes, and digger trucks, and gasoline. Modern cremation utilizes air filtration and produces little in terms of air pollution as compared with excavation equipment.