Go Green for Gratis - 20 Top Tips!

When I first started to think about this post it was supposed to be a short list of things that I (or anyone else) could do to help reduce my carbon footprint. But, as I did more and more research the focus changed a little. I have now decided it’s going to be a list of things you can do that will, if not reduce carbon footprint have a positive impact on the environment, with the add proviso that it must be free to do! This list is by no means exhaustive, and may sometimes seem a little whacky, but none the less things I thought anyone should be able to replicate:

1. Take a shower - Instead of having a bath, have a shower. By taking a 3 minute shower you can save about 50 litres of precious water.

2. Share your power tools - In the UK the average power drill gets used about 30 minutes (25 of which probably changing drill bits!) a year. If you share your tools with friends and neighbours this saves energy and money!

3. Eco-concious cooking - Make sure you use the correct pan size on the correct hob size. this can stop as much as 50% of the energy from escaping making cooking alot more efficient.

4. Turn Lights Off - Make sure you turn off unnecessary lights, either at home or at work.

5. Use an environmental washing powder - There are plenty available on the market and they stop tonnes of detergent being dumped into our rivers and seas.

6. Defrost your fridge - Fridges and freezers account for nearly 25% of the average household energy bill in the uk. Make sure they’re working effeciently by keeping them defrosted and clean.

7. Don’t overfill your kettle - Only boil the amount of water you need, this saves both time and energy. You only go back and reboil already boiled water anyway!

8. Use Less Paper - Why print out all your emails, there in you inbox anyway! The average amount of paper being used per person has quadrupled since the 1970’s.

9. Unlaiden your car - Now this is a tricky one! Every extra 100lbs of weight you have in your car reduces your fuel economy by 2%. This sounds simple, but what if you car share? Two people in a car must surely use less fuel than two cars each with one person in, and don’t use this as an excuse not to take your bottles to a bottle bank!

10. Switch it off - Some electrical appliances, especialy entertainment eqipment can use up to 85% of the energy they use when switched on, when in standby. These items have a major  impact on carbon emissions and the cost of our electricity bills! What I’ve done is move all of the items that can be switched off i.e TV, DVD player, Satelite etc to be plugged into one extension cable and anything that can’t be swithed off into another. Unless they’re needed the items that can be switched off are turned off at the wall so they can not be left on standby. This takes a little while to get into the habit of doing but it makes perfect sense.

11. Unplug your phone charger - This sounds a little like the previous point, but most people forget their mobile phone charger as it can’t be put in standby and they only charge their phone every few days. But, the reality is that most people leave their charger on and pluged in all the time. Here’s the scary part, amazingly 95% of the energy a phone charger uses is in the transformer part. Only 5% is used to charge the phone. This means that all the time the charger is pluged in and on it’s using 95% of it’s total energy! So turn it off.

12. Keep your water-heating thermostat down - The average water-heater thermostat in the UK is set to 65 degrees C. How many times do you then add cold water to make it more acceptable? Why not just reduce the thermostat to 60 degrees C in the first place? This will save you energy and stop you scalding your hands!

13. Turn down your heating - Another energy one! 20 years ago the average indoor temperature was 15 degrees C. Now, the average temperature is 21 degrees C in winter. Turning down your thermostat by just 1 degree C saves about 240kg of carbon dioxide, this apparently is the equivalent to planting 8 trees. So why not turn it down lower to maybe even 18 degrees C, you could always put a jumper on! Oh and of course save money.

14. Become water aware - When brusing your teeth or washing your hands turn off the tap between times. This could save over 6 litres of water each time. 1/3 of the water we use in our homes is flushed down the toilet, so try reducing the amount of water in the cistern. There are plenty of water saver items on the market which slow the flow of water down so less gets flushed, but a cheaper way of doing this is to put a couple of bricks in the cistern, to reduce water volume, or cut a plastic bottle in half and put some holes in it to slow the flow of water, similar to the other devices available on the market.

15. Turn off your PC - Probably very relevent if you’re reading this blog! 70% of all computers are left on full time. A PC left running 24 hours a day creates 716kg of carbon dioxide a year, whilst leaving a monitor on uses enough energy to laser print 800 A4 pages. So please consider your usage and urge your colleagues to turn their PC’s off.

16. Switch to green - Swap your electricity supplier to a green energy company such as Good Energy, Ecotricity or maybe even npower. Each of these companies has a green or renewable energy tariff, they may not save you money but they will contribute the global reduction of carbon. Try U switch!

17. Check your tyre pressure - Having the correct tyre pressure can save up to 10% on your petrol costs and reduce emissions.

18. Drive smoothly - Over revving, accelerating hard and then braking can all contribute to poor efficiency. Driving smoothly can increase this efficiency by 10%.

19. Keep on moving - An idling car engine gets you nowhere and increases your emissions by 13%

and finally……..

20. The three R’s - Reduce, Reuse and Recycle! Most British households still only manage to recycle a measly 27% of their rubbish. Come on guys, we can all do better than this!

Over the next few weeks and months I’m going to be using all of these ideas. It’ll be interesting to see how they have an effect on my carbon footprint and maybe see what they do to my energy bills!