Avoid using trash bags for your green waste. If you have a green waste pickup, use reusable cans instead of bags.
Use re-usable coffee K-cups. The average coffee drinker consumes more than 2 cups per day.
Did you know: According to Marketwatch in 2015, there were approximately 121 million households in the U.S. of which there were 20 million Keurig machines. There are likely even more being used today. If you use one, please use a re-usable K-cup and influence others to do the same.Reduce the number of products you use that contain microbeads.
Link: Visit beatthemicrobead.org to find out where your products rank. After a little research, I found that most of the products my family uses have microbeads. We are now looking for alternatives.Share a homegrown plant or tree with someone. This is a Better For Better original and is a very low cost way to ‘Do Something Nice for Someone Today’ while you ‘Do something today to make the world better’.
Examples: See the pictures below for some of the plants and trees grown/shared by Better For Better.Go paperless when you can. Many of the bills we pay through the mail can be done online without receiving a paper bill.
Use your own bag or no bag at all for food to go.Just think about it. Energy and materials are used to make a plastic bag. Then the bag is used for 5-10 minutes to transport your food and it’s discarded into the trash. Then it’s delivered to the local landfill where it takes 100’s years to breakdown. In some cases those bags don’t make it to the landfill and find their way into our waterways.
Turn off your sprinkler timer when it rains. Watering lawns and plants during or after a rain is wasted energy and produces unnecessary run-off. After a good rain, you can usually skip multiple watering cycles.
Example: Let’s say you have a modest sized front and back yard with 6 total valves watering at ~ 6-gallons per minute for 10 minutes each. That’s 360 gallons or ~ 540 Watt-hours of wasted energy for every watering cycle.Wash your cloths on cold when you can. For every load you wash on cold, you’ll save approximately 6.7 ounces of liquefied natural gas or equivalent.
Use re-usable containers for packing lunches for you and your family.
With ~ 180 schools days and 2 children, we used over 1000 plastic storage bags per year before switching to re-usable containers.Use re-usable straws or none at all.
Example: If a family of 4 goes out to eat 2 twice a week and each has a drink with a straw, that would equate to 400 plastic straws a year sent to a landfill.
Did you know: A major coffee chain recently (July 2018) announced they would replace the plastic lid and straw combo with a new sippy style lid. This is a good thing? Well the new lid has more plastic than the original combination. Yes the new lid can be recycled according to the chain but this is far from a monumental change for the better.
