N-Ways for Better Earth

• The energy saved by recycling one cold drink can is enough to run a TV for three hours.
• A return flight across the Atlantic is equivalent to running a car for a year for each passenger.
• Heat bread rolls in a toaster rather than in the oven for 15 minutes. It saves 170 grams of CO2 each time.
• Planting and protecting a tree can contribute to environmental benefits worth Rs 900,000.
• Saving one unit of electricity can save about 500 grams of coal and reduce significant amount of emissions.
• Watch out for fancy gizmos. They are more energy consuming. Plasma TVs burn over four times more energy than traditional analogue sets.
• Pack lighter suitcases. The world will save 2 mn tonnes of carbon a year if every airline passenger cut the weight of baggage to below 20 kg
• Your refrigerator is the biggest energy user in the kitchen. Don’t open refrigerator door regularly. Opening doors of refrigerators 10 times a day consumes at least Rs 10 more than normal power consumption.
• A clogged air filter will result in lower fuel economy and increased engine wear. A dirty filter can reduce your fuel efficiency up to 20 per cent.
• Sunlight can be used in many ways to save energy. Use a solar water heater instead of an electric geyser. A 100 litre solar water heater can save around 1500 units of electricity every year.
• Turn your appliances off if you aren't using them - items such as DVD players consume 85 per cent of their total energy while on standby.
• Lawns only need watering once a week, post rain only after two weeks. Do watering early morning for minimal evaporation and water conservation.
• Recycling and re-using products like paper and bottles will help protect the environment. Use recycled paper. Recycle your office and household waste.
• Collect the water used to wash vegetables and salad to water your pot plants. This can save 15 litres a day as well as providing water for your plants.
• Setting computers, monitors, and copiers to a sleep-mode when not in use helps cut energy costs by 40 per cent.
• Laptops are more environment friendly than desktop. It consumes five times less electricity. f you buy a desktop, get an LCD screen.
• Take a cloth bag with you when shopping. Use recycled paper. Avoid products with a lot of packaging.
• Wear your jeans at least 3 times. Wash them in cold water. Don't use the dryer or the iron. By following these practices you can consume up to 5 times less energy!
• Walk, bike, carpool or take public transport once a week. You will save 1.5 kg of carbon dioxide for every 5 km you don't drive.
• One tree stores 13 pounds of carbon a year. Plant 300, and nullify the greenhouse effect you can cause in a lifetime.
• Turn off the tap when brushing your teeth and soaping your hands. This can save around 16 litres a day. That’s 11,000 litre of water per person per year.
• Replace incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents (CFLs). These use four times less energy and last eight times longer.
• Fix dripping taps. A drip can waste over 20,000 litres of water every year.
• A plant on your desk acts as a natural filter, absorbing airborne pollutants and computer radiation while replenishing oxygen levels.
• Avoid long showers. Time your shower to keep it under five minutes and you will be able to save 1000 gallons a month.
• Recycling 1 aluminum can saves enough energy to run a television for 3 hours or light one 100 watt bulb for 20 hours or computer for three hours.
• Buy in bulk. It is cheaper and eliminates small containers & excess packaging, which accounts for 50 per cent of the domestic trash.
• Set your washing machine to as cool a wash as possible. Washing your clothes at 40 degrees rather then 60 uses a third less electricity, so a third less CO2.
• Battery chargers, such as those for laptops, cell phones and digital cameras, draw power whenever they are plugged in and are very inefficient.
• Refrigerator motors and compressors generate heat. Allow enough space for airflow around refrigerator. If heat gets trapped, the refrigerator's cooling system will use more energy.
• You can reduce Airconditioners energy by 40 per cent by shading your windows and walls. Trees and shrubs keep the day's hottest sun off.
• Cartridges add metal and plastic to landfills. Buying toner and ink that's refilled can cut this environmental burden.
• One will use 3 to 5 percent less energy for each degree A/C is set above 22°C. Set the thermostat at 25°C for best comfort at least cost.
• To conserve ink, print in draft mode. It may lighten the shade, but there'll be no problem reading your copy.
• Crawling traffic contributes eight times as much air pollution as traffic moving at regular highway speed.
• Instead of throwing away old documents or papers, shred them and reuse them as packing material in shipments.
• Turn down the thermostat. Lowering it by just one degree can reduce heating energy costs by four per cent.
• Keep your refrigerator's coils clean. Brushing or vacuuming the coils can improve efficiency by as much as 30 per cent.
• The blueberries in your cereal may have travelled thousands of kilometers to get to your bowl. Buy local produce. It conserves fuel, cuts pollution and boosts local economy.
• Looking to buy a fridge? Go for an energy efficient model with fewer frills -- remember ice comes with the fridge even without the fancy icemaker which consumes more power.
• Computers too have toxic waste. Next time you buy a new one, sell the old one or donate to charity, or return to the company for recycling.
• Gold needed to produce one ring creates an average of 20 tons of toxic waste, which finds its way into the water supply.
• Switch off the copier overnight. A photocopier left on overnight wastes enough energy to make 5,300 A4 size copies.
• Tissue paper is a major source of waste. Use handkerchief instead. It takes 6,000,000 trees to make one-year's worth of tissues for the world.
• Always turn off your PC. Left on overnight, it consumes enough energy to laser-print about 800 pages.
• Avoid products with a lot of packaging. You can save 545 kilograms of carbon dioxide if you cut down your garbage by 10 per cent.
• You can save 1000 kilo grams of carbon dioxide per year by recycling just half of your household waste. Recycle more.
• Aluminum accounts for 1% of the aviation waste stream. But the energy benefits of recycling 1 ton of it are 11 times that of recycling one ton of newspaper and eight times that of plastic.
• When you buy a computer, buy only as large a monitor as you need. Power usage increases with size. A 17-inch color monitor consumes 35 per cent more energy than a 14-inch one.
• By 2012, Australia will not sell electric bulbs. By doing simply this it will reduce carbon emissions by 4 million tons and cut power bills by 66 per cent.
• Lighting devices like bulb and tubelights consume energy according to their capacities. A so-called zero bulb uses 12 to 15 watts per hour.
• Five earths would be needed if everyone were to live like the Americans and three if like the Europeans.
• According to an alarming revelation, shoppers worldwide are using 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags a year.
• It would cost $ 6.7 billion a year to meet demand of water and sanitation as compared with the $17 billion Europe and the US spends annually on pet food.
• Remove unnecessary heavy items from your car. Every extra 100 pound cost you about half-a-mile-a-gallon.
• Recycle your old glass bottles. The energy saved from recycling one glass bottle will light a 100-watt bulb for four hours.
• Turning off the tap while brushing your teeth in the morning and at bedtime can save up to 8 gallons of water a day, which equals 240 gallons a month!
• Recycle your old newspapers. If everyone in the United States recycled one-tenth of their newspapers, the world would save about 25 million trees every year.
• Laptops are more environmental friendly than desktop. It consumes five times less electricity.
• At least 80,000 acres of forest disappear from the Earth each day; and deforestation is estimated to be responsible for about 20 per cent of global carbon emissions.
• One full standard toilet flush in the developed world uses as much water as the average person in the developing world uses in a day, i.e., for everything.
• A vegetarian diet requires only 300 gallons of water per day, while a meat-based diet requires 4000 gallons a day.
• Every 15 seconds, a child dies from a water-related disease. At any given time, half of the world's hospital beds are occupied by patients suffering from a water-related disease.
• Don't speed. For every mile-per-hour over 55 mph, the average car loses almost two per cent in gas mileage.
• The electric bulb is so inefficient that about 90 per cent of energy it consumes is given off as a heat, while 10 per cent is converted into light.
• The world only worries about outdoor smog and emissions. In reality, however, indoor pollution kills 1.6 m persons every year.
• Car owners need to plant 17 trees every year to counter the greenhouse emissions of their cars. Trees have many benefits.
• If all 4.5 million bulbs in Mumbai were to be changed to CFLs then the peak hour shortage of 250 MW can be met. Some 600 million people are still without electricity in India.
• Bad driving habits could be costing you at the fuel pump. Keeping your tyres inflated properly can improve the fuel efficiency of your car.
• More grain and cereal is fed to the livestock bred for meat in Russia and the USA than is consumed by the entire population of the third world.
• Did you know that tons of fruits and vegetables go to waste every year. People cannot afford to buy them so the EU spends millions of euros annually to destroy good fruits and vegetable. Similar is the case with the US and Canada. This is done while over 40,000 children die every day due to starvation.
• If all tv sold in the US meet energy star requirements, the savings in energy costs would be $1 bn per year & greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced by the amount spewed by 1mn cars.
• Globally, standby power consumption is responsible for about 1% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions.
• Use fan as first line of defence against summer heat. Ceiling fans, for instance, cost about 30 paise an hour to operate - much less than air conditioners (Rs10 per hour).
• Save one litre precious water in each flushing cycle by placing a litre water bottle filled with water, inside the water closet system. Every person can save 365 litres a year!
• Bad driving habits could be costing you at the fuel pump. Keeping your tyres inflated properly can improve the fuel efficiency of your car. Every litre of petrol saved keeps 2.5 kg of CO2 out of the atmosphere.
• Dirty tube lights and bulbs reflect less light and can absorb 50 per cent of the light. Dust your tube lights and lamps regularly.