In Your Room:
1. Ask your parents if there is plant that you can keep in your room, decorate the pot, and water it when it's thirsty.
2. Turn off the TV, lights, and stereo to save electricity before leaving a room. When it comes to music, many musicians support environmental causes, so check out the performers and bands that help the planet.
3. Use rechargeable batteries in electronics and toys whenever possible. Ask for a 'solar-charger' as a present and recharge your batteries from the sun! Make a list of everything that you have that uses batteries and then also add up the flashlights and other electronics that your whole family uses. The list may help you get the solar charger.
4. Organize a clothes-trading party. Give away toys, clothes and old appliances that you no longer use rather than throwing them away.
5. Smile a lot, but just remember to turn off the faucet while you are brushing your teeth. You can save a couple of gallons every day. Americans use 100 gallons of water each day, twice the rate of other industrialized nations.
Eco-Family and Friends:
1. Make a weekend project with family and friends to plant trees in your yard or in the community. Trees help the air, water, soil, habitats, and they add shade.
2. Go for an easy green gift. Give your friends or colleagues a birthday card or book made from post consumer 'recycled' paper.
3. Help your parents pack groceries in reusable shopping bags rather than using disposable plastic or paper bags.
4. Adopt a favorite environmental cause with your friends. The cause could be an existing organization or something as simple as a fundraiser for landscaping at the local library. Host a movie night with your friends and raise a little money!
5. Make invitations, birthday cards, and thank you cards out of re-used or recycled materials. You can show off your creativity and help form filling up the…landfills.
'Green' Food and Drink:
1. If you don't already have a filtration system on your refrigerator or kitchen sink, encourage your parents to get one. Drink water from home filters or pitchers. Since the 1980's we have increased annual plastic water bottled consumption from 1.5 to 9 billion.
2. Eat one less cheeseburger each month, and over a year you will save over 10,000 gallons of water and the equivalent of the Carbon Dioxide (CO2) emissions generated by driving a car for over two months!
3. Go for more veggies all around. Farmers need about 6 gallons of water to grow a head of lettuce, but it takes over 1,000 gallons of water to produce a serving of beef, because the feed for the cows is so inefficient to grow.
4. Eat more local food. Keep your eyes out for local farmers markets and encourage your parents to buy local produce as well as 'natural' and organic foods that are not grown with chemical pesticides.
5. Go for the most local of all and plant some tomatoes in your back yard or a container garden for herbs inside or outside of your home. You'll taste the difference.
Saving Energy around the House:
1. Help your parents set the timing on the thermostat to save money. Programmable Thermostats automatically adjust based on your family's lifestyle, but over 70% of them in homes are not programmed. You can do it!
2. Count up the number of light bulbs in your house. Then, let your parents know and convince them to switch at least a few to Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFL) bulbs. On average, they use 66% less energy and last 10 times longer than incandescent bulbs. Replace 20 incandescent bulbs that are 60 Watts with a life expectancy of 1,500 hours, with CFLs that only use 14 Watts and last 10,000 hours. Spend $60 now and save $80 each year.
3. Use power strips to cut off the 'phantom' energy, since many appliances consume 25% of their power when they are not even turned on.4. Encourage your parents to buy an ENERGY STAR qualified appliance the next time that they make a purchase. High efficiency appliances save on electricity, natural gas, and water. You save money and the environment.
5. Encourage your parents to get a home Energy Audit. Green home health check-ups for a few hundred dollars now can save you thousands in energy bills. Learn more on the 'Energy Audit' section of greenandsave.com.
Saving Natural Resources around the House:
1. Use a bucket to collect rain water, and then help out by watering a few plants.
2. Get your parents to test out facial tissues made from recycled content. Save over 150,000 trees, if each US household replaced just one typical box of 175 sheets.
3. Get your parents to test out toilet paper made from recycled content. Save over 400,000 trees, if each US household replaced just one typical roll of 500 sheets.
4. Get your parents to test out paper napkins made from recycled content. Save over 1 million trees if each US household replaced just one package of 250 napkins.
5. Get your parents to test out paper towels made from recycled content. Save over 500,000 trees, if each US household replaced just one roll of 70 sheets.
If you're serious about taking it outside, you might be interested in GREENandSAVE's section on Gardening with Children. It's an easy guide for instilling a love of nature and the outdoors in your children from a very young age.
Around School
1. Look for school supplies made from recycled materials. Ask you teacher to purchase recycled classroom supplies.
2. Go for an eco-friendly lunch with less packaging and waste. Help plan a 'trash-free' lunch day at school, and then make it a regular seasonal or monthly event. You can buy forks and spoons that look like plastic but they are actually made from materials like corn starch that biodegrade instead of clogging up the landfills.
3. Look for water containers and bottles that are not just disposable. You can find ones that actually have a filter built right into the top, so that you can re-use it by filling it up with tap water. You help save the planet and your parents' money.
4. Carpool. Boosting US rush hour from 1 to 2 people per car, would save 40 million gallons of gasoline a day, over 15% of US gas consumption.
5. Get on the bus. A bus with as few as seven passengers uses less fuel per passenger mile than a single-occupant car. A bus with a rush hour load of 44 passengers uses less fuel than 11 cars with four passengers each.
Around Town:
1. Bike instead of ask for a ride whenever it is safe.
2. Encourage your parents to 'cluster errands'. A quick one-mile trip to the shop emits up to 70 percent as much pollution as a ten-mile excursion with several stops.
3. Encourage your parents to look into a Carbon offset program, until they are ready to buy a new more efficient car. You can learn more on the 'Lifestyle' section of greenandsave.com.4. For their next vehicle purchase, encourage your parents to seriously look into high mileage cars, hybrids, and plug-in hybrids. American manufacturers are coming out with innovative new lines of vehicles.
5. When you are old enough to drive, look into buying a used car as your first car. Hybrids have better mileage, but all new cars require manufacturing and about 39,000 gallons of water each. A used car is key for eco-friendly re-use.
Around the World:
1. Eco-travel is growing at a rapid pace, and there are excellent opportunities for your family to have fun vacation and also help the environment. Look for an eco-tourism adventure and then share the stories with your friends.
2. Look for "Made in America" or "Made in U.S.A." when you buy products. You not only help the economy, but you also reduce the pollution and green house gas emissions used in manufacturing and transporting products from overseas.
3. Keep a journal of things that you see that waste resources. Then, add a few ideas about what could be done to make it better. You may find that you come up with an idea that has a positive impact around the world. A student won a science fair by 'inventing' a solar panel that is angled to collect the morning and afternoon sun as well as the mid day sun. Who would have guessed that something so simple could possibly change an industry!
4. Remember the three Rs: Reduce, Re-use, and Recycle.
5. Think globally and act locally. Simply, treat the planet like it was your own backyard.
