Your 'KISS the Planet' eco-hints

KISS The Planet: 100 Ways.

1. Only charge your phone when you need to. If it’s half full, there’s no need to leave it plugged in over night.

2. Unplug your phone charger when you’re not using it. For all the chargers plugged in right now and not charging, they could be powering 150,000 homes.

3. Install double glazing. It cuts heat lost through windows by half.

4. Install insulation. It reduces unwanted heat loss or gain and can reduce the energy demands of central heating and air conditioning.

5. Buy bulk wherever possible.

6. Use dryer balls in your tumble dryer. You’ll save time and money and all the guys out there have a new joke…

7. Put foil behind your radiators. It reflects heat into the room and you’ll use less energy.

8. Only boil enough water for what you need. If you make one cup of tea, boil one cup’s worth of water.

9. Turn the heating down in your home by 1 degree. It’ll make a huge difference in the long run to energy savings.

10. Leave the car at home! Shift some winter flab and cycle!

11. Defrost your freezer regularly. It’ll work better and use less electricity.

12. Turn lights off when you’re last leave a room.

13. Sign up to a green energy supplier. They will supply electricity from renewable sources (e.g. wind and hydroelectric power).

14. Use one appliance at a time. Do you really need to chat online while listening to the radio and watching the TV on mute? NO.

15. Turn down the water heating setting. Just 2 degrees will make a significant difference!

16. Check the central heating timer setting. There is no point heating the house after you have left for work, school or college.

17. Hang out the washing to dry rather than tumble drying it.

18. Get yourself an Electrisave, it shows you instantly how much electricity you are using. Turning off electrical items you are not using can rapidly deliver you a £50 a year reward in savings – and 250kg CO2 a year off your footprint.

19. Take the crap out of your car. Do you need all that stuff in your boot? The amount of extra fuel you burn just carrying dead weight ends up being a lot.

20. Turn the heating down at work by 1 degree. It’ll make a huge difference in the long run to energy savings.

21. Do your weekly shopping in a single trip.

22. Go for a run rather than drive to the gym.

23. Swap your gas-guzzler for a hybrid car. A range of eco-friendly cars have been developed over recent years, driven by various forms of energy including fuel cells, solar power and electricity.

24. Rediscover the joy of public transport. Long distance off peak rail is great for unwinding and having a quiet time.

25. Changing your driving style has economic and environmental benefits. Drive slower, accelerate gently, avoid hard braking and read road conditions so you can adjust your speed to all circumstances.

26. Car share with someone else who is going to the same place as you.

Simon Dale says, “At drive time we all race to get home. But instead flooring it to make the lights, racing the guy in the nova, or showing off to the girl who couldn’t care less, why not think about what happens to our earth when you raise the revs?”

Road transport accounts for 22% of total UK emissions of carbon dioxide – the major contributor to climate change. Why not walk, cycle, take a bus or tube, or even car share? 

“It’s time we put our foot down for mother earth.”                 

 

27. Don’t turn on the washing machine until you have a full load. This will save electricity, water and washing powder!

28. Place one or two plastic containers filled with stones in the toilet’s reservoir. It will displace about 4 litres of water per flush - a huge reduction of water use over the course of a year.

29. Combine two trips. Visit friends and family living abroad for your holiday.

30. If you go on far-flung holidays, do it less often.

31. Take a holiday in the UK. Millions of people visit the UK every year for their holiday. Why not do the same and get to know your homeland better? You will be helping our economy, too.

32. Switch Fuels. Consider converting your car to a less environmentally damaging fuel. A conversion to allow it to run on both Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) and petrol means you will be using a fuel that burns more cleanly, is half the price and leaves performance and miles-per-gallon virtually unchanged. There are only around 1,000 filling stations for LPG at the moment, but in emergencies you can revert to the original fuel at the flick of a switch.

33. Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) is even cleaner than LPG, but only about 25 filling stations in the UK offer this fuel.

34. Improve fuel economy. A well tuned engine and properly inflated tyres all have surprising effects on fuel economy.

35. Use public transport instead of driving. They offer far higher energy-per-person efficiency than a typical car. A full train is at least twice as energy efficient than a full car, making it especially good for longer commutes.

36. Go Electric. For short to medium distance commutes, electric vehicles offer a good solution. They are quiet and emission-free in use and require less maintenance and fewer replacement parts than their conventional counterparts, which means less waste is generated over their useful life.

37. Buy a greener fridge. Fridges are the plague of the ozone layer, so get a 100% ozone-friendly fridge.

38. Turn the drippy shower or bath tap off properly. There’s going to be a major water shortage in the future. Think of the energy it took to get that water to you in the first place.

39. Turn your tap off when you brush your teeth. The basin’s right in front of you, so why leave the tap on? What is your other hand doing? Nothing. SO TURN IT OFF.

40. Invest in a rain water butt to collect rainwater for your garden.

41. Reduce fax-related paper waste. Use a fax-modem and by using a fax cover sheet only when necessary. Fax-modems allow documents to be sent directly from a computer, without requiring a printed hard copy.

Charlie says, “I get my gossip hit every day from the papers – fashion disasters, naughty rumours – I love it!

Did you know you could walk for a mile through the rainforest and you wouldn’t see two trees the same? Recycling your daily newspapers helps reduce the 2.7 million acres of rainforest destroyed every year.“Look out for the newspaper recycling bins in Central London!”

42. Fly less often.

43. Stay longer when you fly long distance rather than taking 2 shorter holidays.

44. Check out the LG Steam Washing Machine. They use less water and are more environmentally friendly.

45. Save the bath and washing up water. Siphon it onto the garden, using the garden hose.

46. Flush the toilet only when necessary. Contact lenses? A snotty tissue? No.

47. Get reclaimed floorboards or sustainable wooden boards. They’ll look great and you won’t be impacting the rain forest.

48. Recycle as much as you can. Recycling uses less energy and produces less pollution than making things from scratch. If your council doesn’t take a particular item, go online and find the nearest place you can drop it off.

49. Love your bum more. Use recycled toilet paper.

50. Recycle your mobile when you’re done with it. Ask if the shop you get your upgrade from will take your old phone, and make sure they’ll do something green with it.

51. Choose suppliers who take back packaging for reuse.

52. Keep several differently coloured rubbish bins to sort rubbish, or buy or make a bin divider.

53. Get your household bills emailed to you. It’ll save an amazing amount of paper, and it’s GREAT not getting those bills through the door….

54. Encourage communications by email. Read email messages onscreen to determine whether it’s necessary to print them. If it’s not, don’t!

55. Don’t turn on the dishwasher until it’s full. This will save electricity, water and washing powder!

56. Produce double-sided documents whenever possible.

57. Find a supply of paper with maximum available recycled content.

58. Re-use junk mail and letters. Many are blank on the back. Use this paper for phone messages, notes, even for letters - it will make people think.

59. Save used envelopes & Postpaks for re-use.

60. Buy and grow organic food. It really isn’t that expensive.

61. Do you really need a supermarket’s plastic bag to carry one item like a toothbrush or a book?

Neev says, “I love shopping! Clothes, food, things for my flat, I just can’t help myself; if I see something I like I’ve got to have it! But what happens when I’ve got my booty home and it’s time to bin the bags?”

Every year around 13 billion plastic bags are given away in the UK and 98 per cent end up in landfills taking 500 years to decay.

“Take a canvas bag with you when you go shopping or invest in a ‘bag for life’”

62. Re-use plastic bags. Keep a couple at work or leave some in the car for when you go shopping.

63. Keep your mobile for longer. There’s no point in upgrading it unless it’s damaged in some way.

64. Don’t chuck out old furniture. Give it to a charity so someone else can use it.

65. Re-use products for as long as possible. It is amazing how often people buy products and use them only once or twice, even though they can be re-used many times.

66. Refurbish office furniture before purchasing new furniture. It’s less expensive than buying new and better for the environment.

67. Walk, ride your bike, skateboard, inline skates or scooter, or use public transport instead of using your car.

68. Don’t buy peat compost. The bogs they dig up it up from are wildlife habitats that are being destroyed.

69. Install a solar panel or a wind turbine. Solar panels can save you well over £100 a year and a tonne of CO2.

70. Use sheep wool insulation. It’s the truly sustainable insulation, naturally ecological and warmer!

71. Check out Ecopod. It’s a revolutionary design in coffins made from naturally hardened, 100% recycled paper. Made from 100% ecologically sound materials the Ecopod is the ideal product for a non-toxic burial or cremation.

72. Read Harry Potter! The British edition of the Deathly Hallows is published on “100% ancient-forest friendly paper”, made from a mixture of recycled and FSC-certified pulp, according to UK publishers Bloomsbury.

73. Check out freecycle.org to swap your stuff.

74. Buy local produce whenever possible. When food does not have to travel great distances, fewer greenhouse gas emissions are emitted during transport.

75. Educate yourself about climate change. Don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers or see on the television. Some politicians spend a lot of time trying to confuse the issue.

76. Let your Elected Representatives know you care. Write and urge them to support actions to reduce carbon pollution, save energy and expand the use of renewable energy.

77. Reduce the amount of rubbish coming into your home.

                                

 

78. Use low energy light bulbs. They aren’t that expensive and they last forever.

79. Cut out fast foods.

80. Bake your own healthy goodies rather than eating sweets with loads of packaging.

81. Use ammonia or pure soap instead of detergent for laundry & dishes.

82. Cut by half the amount of detergent you use.

83. Bicarbonate of soda makes an excellent tooth cleaner. It leaves the mouth fresh and gums tingling. It cleans dentures too.

84. Use less toothpaste. A blob half the size of your little fingernail will do a perfectly good job.

85. Wash up just once a day using bowls or buckets. Use one for washing, one for rinsing. Then throw the water on the garden.

86. Replace cleaning products. Ammonia, or sifted wood ash, used with a scourer, will clean greasy or heavily soiled surfaces.

87. BUT… don’t BUY scourers. Try using a mesh bag or a plastic Christmas stocking. (Start saving them now, before they are phased out!)

88. Vinegar will clean your toilet. Leave in the bowl overnight, then brush vigourously and flush.

89. Use fly swats instead of sprays.

90. Lavender oil or oil of citronella make good personal insect repellents.

91. Use soft rags instead of sponges.

92. Use handkerchiefs instead of tissues.

93. Use cloth serviettes rather than paper ones.

94. Disposable nappies are NOT particularly disposable – use cloth ones instead.

95. Use a teapot or infuser, not tea-bags.

96. Wash out margarine and ice- cream containers and use for food storage instead of cling film.

Justin Wilkes says, “I recycle old tracks every day in Kisstory… But what about all the old CDs I don’t need anymore? Throwing away all that plastic can’t be good for the planet…”

Londoners throw away enough rubbish to fill an Olympic swimming pool every hour. But 60% of that could be recycled. 

Last year Bexley was the best London borough, recycling an impressive 40% of their rubbish.

“Separate your rubbish and let your local council recycle for you!”               

 

98. Compost ALL waste food.

99. Use your Consumer Power. You can make a big difference just by making informed choices about the products and services you buy. Use businesses that make an effort to protect the climate and which stock climate- friendly products.

100. You can mend your own clothes, shoes and appliances. You’ll increase your self-respect, your self-reliance and save money as well as resources.