For years now, I’ve been fighting the habits of my youth and the habits of society. Habits that for some would mean changing the way they live their daily lives. The one question that gets back to me is, how do you make your live greener without actually having to spend money, or make huge personal changes? I know that overnight, people are not going to become more green. They’re not going to stop driving their cars, and riding public transit. They’re not going to suddenly move much closer to the people and activities that they do, so that they go walk instead of drive.

 What we can do is reduce WASTE. Waste can be defined as ‘use inefficiently or inappropriately’. For this post, I’m going to define waste as the use of resources that have no absolutely no use in your daily lives. Ok, so that is a bit of a broad definition. So lets get some examples:

  • Leaving the lights on when no person or animal is around. If you were like me as a kid, you got yelled at for doing this.
  • Leaving the TV on when no ones is around to watch it.
  • Credit Card offers that go straight from your mailbox to your recycle bin without even being opened.
  • Leaving your computer running, even though you’re not using it.

Those are just a few examples. Notice that changing the negative activity into a postive will not require any money, and only a slight change in habits. Unfortunately, the environmental impact of one person getting his/her name taken off a mailing list is minuscule. How about the amount of trees saved and toxins from the ink when 100,000 people get their name taken off of mailing lists for products that they don’t even want in the first place?

 So here are a couple of sites that can be helpful:

  • Catalog Choice - Get your name taken off of mail order catalog mailing lists. Reduce your waste before you ever even get it.
  • OptOutPrescreen - Drop the amount of unsolicitated credit card offers and other mail by 90%.

Those are just two sites that we use to reduce our carbon footprint without having to really change our daily lives.

Hope everyone has a happy holidays, and if you are shopping on Black Friday (aka Buy Nothing Day), I hope you limit it to what you need, as opposed to buying things just because they were on sale.