Happy Green Year!

Florida's Department of Environmental Protection offers a good bit of advice:

DEP is encouraging Floridians to make a “green” resolution for the New Year. "Even small things like changing one incandescent light bulb to an ENERGY STAR® qualified bulb can have a big impact,” said DEP Secretary Sole. “For example, if all the households in Florida changed just one light bulb to a compact fluorescent bulb, the combined effort would save enough energy to light all the households in Tallahassee for more than two and a half years.” For more information on Green Tips for the New Year visit http://www.dep.state.fl.us/secretary/news/2007/12/1226_02.htm.

Here area few ideas from The Green Book by Elizabeth Rogers and Thomas Kostigen (which is a great book for those that want to know how to make a difference and WHY it makes the difference) to get you started this year:

1. Take a shorter shower. Every two minutes you save on your shower can conserve more than ten gallons of water. And that can add up: If everyone in the country saved just one gallon from their daily shower, over the course of a year it would equal twice the amount of freshwaster withdrawn from the Great Lakes every day. The Great Lakes are the world's largest source of freshwater.

2. Set your thermostat a degree higher for air-conditioning and a degree lower for heating, and you could save $100 per year on your utility bill. Keep adjusting and you'll save even more. If every home in America turned the dial, we could save more than $10 billion per year on energy costs, enough to provide a year's worth of gasoline, electricity, and natural gas to every person in Iowa.

3. Recycle. If everyone in America simply separated the paper, plastic, glass, and aluminum products from the trash and tossed them into a recycling bin, we could decrease the amount of waste sent to landfills by 75 percent. Currently, it takes an area the size of Pennsylvania to dump all our waste each year.

4. Use fewer paper napkins - everywhere. There's no need to grab a huge stack of napkins from the concession stand when you know you'll use only one or two. Each American consumes an average of 2200 standard two-ply napkins per year, or the equivalent of just over six of these napkins per day. If everyone in the United States used an average of one fewer nakpin per day, more than a billion pounds of napkins could be saved from landfills each year. A stack of napkins this size could fill the entire Empire State Building.

5. Buy rechargable batteries, and you'll save money over the long term. A single rechargable battery can replace up to one thousand single-use alkaline batteries over its lifetime. Americans throw out approximately 179,000 tons of batteries per year.

6. Drink tap water when dining out. You can save as much as $7 for a bottle of water, and it may be safer to drink. Tap water is more strictly regulated than bottled water. If everyone drank tap instead of bottled water in the United States, it would save about $8 billion - about as much as the US spends each year in drought response. It also would help prevent plastic waste: Sixty million water bottles are tossed each day in the United States.

7. Pack a waste-free lunch. Eliminate plastic bags, plastic utensils, disposable containers, paper napkins, and those brown paper bags. Instead use a reusable lunchbox, reusable drink containers, cloth napkins, and silverware. You could save $250 a year and as much weight in waste as the average nine-year-old!

8. Walk to school. Only 31 percent of children who live less than one mile from school walk there. Half of all students go to school by car. If just 6 percent of those students who go by car walked, it would save 1.5 million dropoffs and pickups - and sixty thousand gallons of gasoline - a day!

9. Use both sides of your plain paper, and recycle. Paper is the biggest form of waste that comes from schools. Every ton, or 220,000 sheets, of paper that is recycled saves approximately seventeen trees. The average school tosses thirty-eight tons of paper per year, or more than 8 million sheets.

10. Double-side your copies. Whether printing or copying, use both sides of a piece of paper. If just one in four office workers made all of their copies double-sided, the annual savings would equal 130 billion sheets of paper - a stack thicker than the diameter of the earth!

11. Carpool. If the average commuter carpooled every day, he or she would save five hundred galls of gasoline, and 550 pounds of poisonous exhaust emissions every year. Commuters sharing a ride to work would be the equivalent of taking 67.5 million cars off the road - four times the number of new cars sold in the United States per year.

12. Use a ceramic mug for your coffee. Americans use more than fourteen billion paper cups every year, enough to circle the world fifty-five times. The Styrofoam kind will stay on the plaet for nine generations, enough time for your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandkids to be born.

13. Don't take ATM reciepts. ATM receipts are one of the top sources of litter on the planet. If everyone in the United States left their receipt in the machine, it would save a roll of paper more than two billion feet long, or enough to circle the equator fifteen times.

14. Request automatic deposits for your paycheck. Not only will you get your money faster, but you'll reduce the time and fuel you spend to go to the bank. More than seven billion checks are written annually that could be replaced by automated deposits. If everyone who was eligible for an automated deposit opted for it, it would save about $65 billion in fuel costs and lost time expenses - and enough paper checks for everyone in the world.

15. Get paperless bank statements. Some banks will pay you a dollar or donate the money or your behalf when you cancel the monthly paper statements you get in the mail. If every household took advantage of online bank statements, the money saved could send more than seventeen thousand recent high school graduates to a public university for a year.

There are 15 actions you can take today to make 2008 a greener year. On this first day of the year, I've already seen at least 10 people walking, riding, or jogging in the neighborhood. They've made a new year's resolution to be healthier. Let's see how many of us can incorporate one green practice into our new year's resolutions and make the planet a little healthier, too.

Happy New (Green) Year!