dropps spin cycle

Greening the Holidays!

Treehugger.com has a great article that gives advice on how to cut down on waste during the holidays. They note that Americans increase their amount of garbage between Thanksgiving and Christmas by 25% according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Learn ways to reduce the number of trash bags you take outside each week and how to cut down on your energy bill during this festive season. They give great tips on wrapping paper, holiday cards, switching to energy efficient Christmas lights and more! Check it out: http://www.treehugger.com/giftguide/holiday-tips.php

Calculate your own carbon footprint

There is a lot of talk about carbon footprints. Your personal carbon footprint is the amount of carbon dioxide emitted from your daily routine. Emissions may come from driving your car, flying on an airplane, electric appliances in your home, leaving the lights on and the list continues. We found this nifty and easy to use tool to help you calculate your personal carbon footprint. You may need to get a hold of your last energy bill to accurately assess how much carbon dioxide your are emitting from your electricity use at home.

http://www.safeclimate.net/calculator/index.php

Happy calculating! A cool way to track your emissions is to do an initial calculation and write it down. Then figure out ways to reduce emissions in your daily routine. One or two months later, use this tool again and see if your work has paid off. We hope it does!!!

One of our favorites - Project Laundry List

Project Laundry List is one of our favorites and for good reason. It is a non-profit organization whose goal is to demonstrate through art, education and advocacy how personal choices can make a difference on the environment and on its people. Their main tool - clothes lines. Hanging out clothes on a drying rack or clothes line is one easy way to reduce energy consumption at home. It cuts down on energy use and saves money. What better combo? The average household will save $100 per year by hanging clothes out to dry. Plus, hanging out your clothes leaves them feeling soft and smelling fresh. 

Think about the energy and financial savings if you hung your clothes out to dry and washed your clothes in cold water. Cold water washings use 75% less energy than hot water washings and save the average household $65 in energy bills. Now, all these savings are starting to stack up! The weather is nice everywhere at this time of year, so give it a shot.

Here are two places that offer a wide variety of drying racks and clothes lines for any household type:

www.gaiam.com or www.ikea.com

To learn more about Project Laundry List, visit www.laundrylist.org

gcycle.org - recycle your old gadgets

We are on a cleaning kick now that it is officially Spring. www.gcycle.org is a great site we recently stumbled upon. It lets you enter in your zip code, select a gadget (cell phones, batteries, computers, TV's, ect) and find nearby locations that will accept and recycle the gadgets for you. An incredibly convenient and quarky site that gives a second life to your gadgets instead of sending them straight to a landfill.