Its easy being green

“Green”, it’s the new buzzword. Seems everyone is using it these days. Being green however doesn’t mean that you have to make huge sacrifices in every aspect of your life and give up everything you ever loved. It just requires that you be aware of your actions and try and come up with a way of doing what you do that will reduce your impact on the environment. When you’ve got the little things sorted and you see just how simple and easy it is, then you can step it up a notch.

There are many things we can all do that take very little effort on our part, but can make a huge difference. One of the simplest is changing your most frequently used light bulbs to CFL’s. Even if it’s just one bulb in your entire house that you change you will be making an impact. By changing just one 100 watt bulb with a 28 watt CFL (you’ll get the same amount of light don’t worry), and by using the light for just 4 hours in a 24 hour period you will have reduced your annual carbon dioxide production by 451 pounds. As your other bulbs blow over time, replace them with CFL’s.

While we are on the topic of saving energy, let’s talk about your water heater. If you are shopping for a new one, the best option is a solar water heater. Barbados has been using them for years with great success and slowly but surely it’s starting to make its way into people’s homes in T&T. If you’ve already got a water heater installed, try turning the temperature down. How often do you really need your water to be scalding hot? Let’s face it, we always add cold water to cool it down anyway, so why make it that hot in the first place?

Beware of the voltage vampires! These are appliances that still draw energy even when they are switched off or in standby. Televisions, DVD players, microwaves, radios, cell phone chargers, clock radios, anything that has a display or a light or uses a remote control, chances are its sucking energy and dollars out of your pocket. Unplug everything you aren’t using, put appliances on power strips so you can cut the power to them easily and then look at your next electricity bill (the actual not the estimated) and see if there isn’t a difference.

Most people don’t even think about the math but showering uses a lot of water too. Average shower lasts about 10 minutes. Average showerhead uses about 3.5 to 6.0 GPM. That’s 35 to 60 gallons of water per shower. Add that up over the course of a year and you could end up with 12775 to 21900 gallons of potable water down the drain, and that’s if you only take 1 shower per day! You can cut that figure by more than half if you install a low flow shower head (about 2.4 GPM) and try and cut down most of your showers to 5 minutes. Turn off the shower while you lather up and shampoo, or get the shower head that has a ‘pause’ button. Shave after you shower and fill up the sink or a basin with water to rinse out the razor. Turn off the tap while you brush your teeth and wash the dishes, and for those with older toilets that don’t have a water saving feature, just place a brick or a bottle filled with water inside the tank.

Let’s talk about waste too. So far in T&T there aren’t many recycling options. There are a few companies out there that do recycling, but they are mostly geared towards businesses with large volumes of waste, and none do curb side recycling. So for now our best option is to not create the waste in the first place. Use reusable everything! Buy a reusable water bottle. Or if you must buy bottled water, try and reuse the bottle a few times before you throw it away. Try and stay away from as many one time use things as you can, and stretch the useful life of everything you buy.

These are just a few of the simple things we can do every day. Even if half of the 1.6 million of us give a few of these things a try, it will go a long way to make a big difference.

Kermit the frog was wrong, it is easy being green!

Article originally written for Trinibeat.com