AT HOME
This months At Home tip:
To create your own natural disinfectant cleaner: Combine 2 cups of water with 15 drops of grapefruit seed extract and pour into a spray bottle. Grapefruit seed extract also whitens tile, tubs and sinks!
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.
Conserve Water: Here are some easy ways each of us can help:
1. Use it over again- Use grey water from your washer, bathtubs, showers and bath sinks to help irrigate your landscape. Most households generate 20-35 gallons per day
3. Use Leftover cooking water- Not only does it save water; the nutrients from what you cooked will help grow your plant.
4. Don’t let water run while you shave or brush your teeth- If you do, you waste up to 10 gallons of water!
5. Put a capped, water–filled plastic bottle in your conventional toilet tank (one-liter size works the best. You can also add stones for weight and make sure it’s away from working parts). This will help save about ¼ gallon of water each time you flush.
6. Take shorter showers- You use about 5 gallons of water per minute during your shower.
*source- Tucson Water
