How to Go Green and Save Our Planet

I think we all know we should go green for the good of our eco system but it looks to daunting and we can't see much we can do. We can start by doing something though, no matter how small, every effort counts. Just imagine if everyone did something every day, what a difference it would make. Here are some small things we can do to start and we can get better as we go along.

1. Do some green cleaning. Natural cleaners like soda, borax, vinegar and lemon juice can clean our homes and get rid of the alternative chemicals.
2. Fix all your leaky faucets. A faucet that leaks 60 drops a minute can waste 192 gallons of water in a month.
3. Recycle all your paper, plastic and cans. Just think if everybody did that we could save half the resources we use today and cut the greenhouse gas emissions we produce in half.
4. Don't buy new unless you have no choice. Used furniture can be as good as new and sometimes look better. Our resources have already been used for those. Why waste more.
5. You can buy perfectly good clothes at thrift stores that have brand names and look as good as new. Save your money and our resources.
6. Donate things you would throw away to the needy, thrift stores or have a yard sale.
7. Buy all the produce you can from markets that sell food grown near your own neighborhood, or better yet. Grow your own garden vegetables, buying local helps the farmers and keeps many trucks off the road.
8. Buy cloth diapers, wash them and let the sun dry them on the clothes line.
9. Instead of buying paper towels and paper napkins, buy cloth ones to wash and dry on the clothes line.
10. If you can't add a solar panel to your roof, build a wall of glass windows on the south side of your house and line up large metal containers painted black and filled with water inside the windows. It will save you money on your heating bills while saving our valuable resources.
11. Simple car pooling and ride sharing can have a great impact when you think 78 percent of cars on the road carry one person.
12. When you replace TV, DVD's, VCR's and telephones buy the ones that meet energy efficiency guidelines. If everyone did that it would be equivalent to taking more than 3 million cars off the road.
13. Maintain your car well, just properly inflated tires can save Americans more than 4 million gallons of gas a day.
14. You can reduce your carbon dioxide emissions by about 1,590 pounds per year by if you leave your car home two days a week and take public transportation instead.
15. Using energy created from renewable resources like wind mills can reduce the burning of fossil fuel such as coal.
16. Plant trees any where you can.

Most of us can't do all these things but if each of us starts out by doing just what we can and add to it as time goes on. We will eventually get there and hopefully save our planet for our children and our children's children.

We can't start earlier so we must start now.