How You Can Help

Help solve global warming and reduce your own carbon footprint by making climate-friendly choices each day.

Minimize Your Carbon Footprint

We all have an impact on the Earth – an ecological footprint left behind by our activites and consumption habits. By reducing the energy and fossil fuels you use, you can save the environment from further damage.

Choose energy efficient products

By using energy-efficient products at home and at work, we can significantly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions without sacrificing function, style, or features. Buy the most efficient technologies and ask your leaders to set new standards for efficiency for all sectors so that from now on ‘best practice’ in energy efficiency becomes normal practice for everyone.

Turn off computers and monitors when not in use

These common pieces of office equipment consume a lot of electricity. The single most powerful climate change tool on these machines is the OFF switch. Forget what you’ve heard about how powering up equipment repeatedly wears it out. That’s old information, dating back decades. New equipment can be safely switched off and powered back on when it’s needed again. Also, make sure the hibernation and sleep settings are enabled.

Use a power strip

Equipment from faxes to toaster ovens draw energy just by being plugged in. Save energy by plugging all office equipment into a power strip. When you leave, just flip the off switch on the power strip.

Turn down the heat and air conditioning when you aren’t home

Try using a programmable thermostat or setting your thermostat yourself to 68 degrees while you are awake and lower it to 60 degrees while you are asleep or away from home. In the summer, keep the thermostat at 78 degrees while you are at home, but give your air conditioning a rest when you are away. This will allow you to save about 10% a year on your home energy costs. If every house in America did this, our total greenhouse gas production would drop by about 35 million tons of CO2. This is about the same as taking 6 million cars off of the road.

Insulate your home

Was your house constructed before 1980? If so, it could be one of the 80% of American homes built without enough insulation. This means your heating and cooling costs could be going through the roof, literally.

Change your home’s air filters

Heating and cooling uses about half of the energy in a typical home and can account for about $1,500 a year in annual costs. You can conserve energy by doing some basic home maintenance like replacing air filters and insulating your heating ducts.

Make the switch to compact florescent bulbs

According to the government’s EnergyStar program, if every American home replaced their five most-used light fixtures with EnergyStar rated compact fluorescent the savings would add up to $8 billion annually in energy costs. That’s like taking almost ten million cars off the road. CFL’s are widely available, affordable, and they last ten times longer than traditional bulbs.

Wash your clothes with cold water

If you usually use hot water for your laundry you can cut your energy consumption in half by choosing warm water, and up to ninety percent if you choose cold. Your current liquid laundry detergent should work fine. If not, special cold water detergents are available. Your shirts and pants should be just as clean, and you’ll thank yourself when the electricity bill arrives.

Take public transportation

One of the best ways to reduce your impact on the climate is to take a public bus, subway or train instead of driving. If just 10% of US passenger car travel were instead on mass transit, we would save 75 million tons of CO2.

*PowerReady International is pending Green Certification.