From your morning shower to your evening's meal, our slideshow will tip you off on greening your routine.
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You bring your own forks and spoons to use at work, replaced your conventional cheese with organic and compost your trash. Now it's time to pull together all the strands in the green year ahead of you and walk through a day in the low-impact life.
7:00 a.m. Read the morning paper online.
Reading a year's worth of newspapers on your computer saves 520 pounds of paper, or about three trees per year.
7:15 a.m. Shower with a low-flow showerhead.
Because low-flow showerheads reduce water consumption, they can save up to 10 percent on water-heating costs.
8:45 a.m. Brew a cup of eco-friendly coffee at home and pour it into a reusable mug.
Because conventional coffee is grown on clear-cut land and requires loads of chemical fertilizers, each household that switches to organic, shade-grown coffee helps protect more than 9,000 square feet of rain forest. Plus, Americans toss out 16 billion disposable paper cups per year
8:50 a.m. Power down before you leave the house.
TVs, stereos, chargers and most appliances with clocks drain energy when they're plugged in—even if they're not on. It's called "standby power," and it accounts for 5 percent of residential energy, costing U.S. consumers over $4 billion per year. Plug them into power strips that you can switch off easily.
9:00 a.m. Carpool to work.
According to the California Air Resources Board, approximately 50 percent of air pollution comes from automobiles.
9:30 a.m. At work, fire up your laptop.
Laptops require much less energy than desktops.
11:00 a.m. Print on both sides of the page, single-space your files and decrease the size of the margins.
Americans use 5.4 million tons of office paper every year. You use four times less paper when you print single-spaced and on both sides. Save even more by shrinking the margins to .75 inches from the standard inch.
5:55 p.m. Plug your computer into a power strip and switch it off at the end of the day.
Over the course of one year, you'll save 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide emissions, and reduce standby power loss.
6:00 p.m. Text your partner to say you're on your way home.
Text messages sent from a cell phone use 30 times less energy than sending an email from a desktop computer.
6:25 p.m. At the ATM, say no to a receipt.
It takes two billion feet of paper to create receipts for the eight billion ATM transactions that occur each year in America—most of which ends up as litter.
7:15 p.m. Before you head to dinner and a movie, print the tickets from your desktop.
Movie tickets printed at home are easier to recycle than the paperboard used to print tickets at the theater.
8:00 p.m. Eat dinner at a restaurant that serves locally grown, organic food.
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