Convert Your Toilet To Dual-Flush

A common toilet may use gallons of water per flush. And you pay for it all. But a modern toilet will flush on about 25% of that.

Go to a home improvement store. Look for a product like HydroRight, less than $20 USD. You will need about ten minutes to put it in. You will use no tools. You will not need to turn off the water.

First, read all the instructions before starting. When you remove the product from the packaging, there's a white cable tie on it. Don't cut this! It's not packaging. It's part of the product.

Flush to lower the water level, and then unsnap and remove the flapper. Yes, the water just keeps running continuously into the bowl. We'll stop it soon. Insert the device in place of the flapper, and attached it to the vertical fill tube, tightening it with the white cable tie. Now the water stops running out the bottom. Remove the flush handle, and run the cable from the device over to the handle hole. Insert the back-side of the new flush button in the handle hole, and snap on the front of the new flush button. Calibrate according to the instructions, until the toilet just barely flushes using the top half of the new flush button, and using the least water with the bottom half (which presses the whole button).

Using the top half of the new flush button, you'll use about 25% of the water in the tank. Using the bottom half , you'll use about 66% of the water in the tank.

Spend less money, help the environment.

If You Pay For Refuse By The Bag, Divert More

If you pay by the bag to have your trash hauled away, you can save money by throwing away less and diverting more. By defining "diverting" as "not throwing it in the waste bin", any recycling effort, composting effort, or reuse effort contributes to your household diversion ratio (what you divert versus what you throw away). "On-site diversion" is any effort whereby something never reaches the curb, such as composting of kitchen scraps, and not only saves you money in haul-away fees, but also provides free compost, saving more money. But if your recycling is free or a fixed rate, then recycling will save you money as well versus the per-bag fee. Our landfills will last longer, saving our municipalities the costs, and thereby our tax dollars.

Not sending waste to a landfill or incinerator has environmental benefits as well. Carrots, cabbages, and newspapers, all things you might think would break down in a landfill, have been found still intact over thirty years later. The things we were taught would breakdown in the landfill are not, along with the plastics and metals we knew would still be there, leaching their components into the soil and water table over time. Incineration immediately releases the components into the air even faster than landfill decay would release them. So increasing our household diversion ratio benefits the environment.

The decision is made next to the shopping cart, not next to the waste bin.

Once you have carried a product home, you have a limited number of ways to dispose of packaging and waste. Select your purchases based on how you will divert the waste. Often you will find that bulk purchasing of items in recylceable packaging, loose materials from bins carried home in your own bag, and products wrapped simply in paper, are less costly as well.

Spend less money, help the environment.

Use Free Shipping

Of course using free shipping can save you money, assuming you are only ordering what you need, and the total cost is lower than the cost of the item(s) plus shipping from another vendor.

But if you consider that one package delivery truck moving about through your neighborhood uses less gasoline than if everyone went to the store for an item, there's an environmental angle as well. Buy.com quotes a Carnegie Mellon study to back this claim, as well as several other points about green e-retailing. I assume other online retailers can make the same claim, and the bigger they are the more they can reduce pollution per item via economy of scale. So consider a free shipping option to get dry goods and sundry items to your household. Even with shipping in items from a distance, it still may be a better option for the planet as well as your pocketbook.

Spend less money, help the environment.

Use A Massaging Shower Head

The massage setting on the shower head pulses the jets; it turns them "off" intermittently. Mine uses about 40% less water this way. And I pay for water by the gallon. If you are on a well, you are paying for the electricity to pump the water instead.

Spend less money, help the environment.

A Car With Better Gas Mileage

It's a trite suggestion at this point, but it's still worth mentioning: a car that gets more miles per gallon of gasoline or diesel will save you money and pollute less.

It doesn't make money sense for most of us to replace a car just for this reason, because the break-even point is too long with purchase cost or car payments factored into the decision. But if it is time to buy a new car for other reasons, picking one that gets more miles per gallon will save you money.

There are environmental debates about differing car technologies and manufacturing processes. But whether you choose a conventional internal combustion engine, a hybrid, or other option, buy less and therefore use less refined petroleum products. The standard internal combustion engine used today is not very efficient and wastes our natural resources.

I say a "car" and not a "truck", because most people I know with a truck (pickup, van, or box truck for example) need the towing or cargo capacity to earn their living, and a decrease in earnings to save on gas most likely does not make money sense.

Spend less money, help the environment.

Introduction, or What Is Meant By Both Greens

Welcome! The goal here is to suggest ideas that save two kinds of "green" - money (green being a slang term for money, as in the United States of America where money in one form is in paper bills and is green), and the environment (green being a slang term for describing nature and the planet and the living things including the people who are in it). The theory here is that more people would save money if it also helped the environment, or that more people would help the environment if it also saved money, depending on which you think is the higher priority. In any case, the goal here is to suggest ideas that save both at the same time, as there are a number of places you can find ideas for saving either individually.