There are many expensive ways of reducing your carbon footprint like buying an alternative fuel vehicle or installing solar panels, but there are a lot of cheap ways to go green in the home.
Reduction of food waste is a great way of reducing your carbon footprint. You would be surprised how much more fruits and vegetables you get when you start cutting really close to the stem, or blemish spots. Many times you can take produce that is not that appealing to the eye and make it into a salad or salsa. Cut away the bad stuff, chop up the good stuff and squeeze some lemon over it. If it is fruit, you have made a fruit salad. If it is tomatoes and onions you have a salsa. If you get creative you can make some really delicious meals and side dishes.
There is no reason to toss out that stale bread. Cut the bread up into bite-sized pieces and toss with some olive oil. Season the bread with garlic and Italian seasoning. Toast it in the oven for about 10 minutes and you will have the best tasting croutons that your family has ever had.
If you are throwing out food from the refrigerator then you are also contributing to global warming. The food that was in the refrigerator that is now going in the bin was at many other places before it got to your home. Manufacturing plants used up energy and contributed to toxins in the air to create the food. Trucks, trains or ships also used up fossil fuels to get the food to the store. Then the supermarket used energy to store and sell the item to you. You also probably drove to the supermarket to purchase the food. The food then used up energy by sitting in your fridge. Our food produces a huge carbon footprint and we can be much more green by not buying more food than we need, and then not letting it rot or be thrown away.
You can also get rid of the chemicals in your house. Not only do they create nasty by-products during the manufacturing process, they are usually poisonous and harsh on our skin, eyes and lungs. There are more green cleaners coming on to the market, but the best thing to do is make your own green cleaners out of things like lemons, baking soda, vinegar and other common household products.
A great way to save energy in the home is to use a water heater blanket. You can get these at DIY stores. They don?t insulate water heaters during manufacturing. It is basically a bucket of water that gets heated up, loses heat and then fires up again to warm the water back to the temperature set on the thermostat. Insulation blankets are not that expensive and they can reduce your energy bill instantly.
You can also save an additional 5% energy if you lower the temperature on your water heater a mere 10 degrees. As a safety caution you may want to check and lower the temperature anyway. Many people are burned each year from water from the water heater that is too hot. Most of the burns occur in children.
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