Easy Ideas

Eat Seasonal Foods: Those blueberries in your fridge in January were grown in Chile and flown to Arizona. They may be healthy but think of the fossil fuels it took to get them here. Making some small changes in your food choices is a good start. In winter, better choices in Arizona are winter squash, carrots, broccoli and spinach.

Light Bulbs: Dust your light bulbs and change them- to compact florescent- only when they burn out. You’ll increase energy efficiency, and light output, and because electricity production generates pollution, you’ll also help promote cleaner air. If every American home switched to compact fluorescent bulbs, we’d keep more than a trillion pounds of greenhouse gases out of the air which is equal to the emissions of 8 million cars. That’s $6 billion in energy savings for America.

Recycle: If everyone separated the paper, plastic, glass and aluminum products from the trash and tossed them in a recycling bin, we could decrease the amount of waste sent to landfills by 75 percent. It takes an area the size of Pennsylvania to dump all our waste now.

Washers: Switch to warm or cold wash and cold rinse cycles, and save at least 90 percent more energy than when a machine washes in hot water only. Together, all U.S. households could save the energy equivalent of 100,000 barrels of oil a day by switching from hot-hot to warm-cold cycles.