Bike to work? Check. Installed solar panels and a heat pump? Check. Composting, avoiding plastic, buying second-hand – check, check, check. You’re doing a lot to make your lifestyle more eco-friendly, but you may still have some habits with a surprisingly large impact on the environment.
If you’re trying to figure out the most important things you can do to reduce your environmental footprint, prioritize those with the greatest impact:
- Decarbonizing your transportation
- Cutting household energy used for heating, cooling, and electricity
- Replacing animal-based products with plant-based ones and cutting food waste
- Buying and wasting less
To do the most good, prioritize addressing these items before tackling things with smaller environmental impacts. People with different habits and different living situations may have very different ecological footprints, so use a footprint calculator to get personalized recommendations about where to focus your efforts.
Below are 9 things you may do that can have a significant impact on the environment.
Keeping Your Thermostat High (or Low)
Household heating and cooling account for about 17% of most people’s carbon footprint. Setting your thermostat higher all winter can use a lot more energy for heat than necessary. Similarly, if you’re keeping your entire house super-cooled all summer, you’ll use much more energy than if you cool more selectively.
The fix: In winter, dress for cooler temperatures and lower the thermostat settings. You may be surprised how comfortable a lower-temperature house feels if you’re wearing a sweater and warm pants instead of thin cotton clothing. Also consider which spaces you’re actually using and heat those with space heaters to make them more comfortable rather than heating the entire house.
In summer, dress for higher temperatures and try setting the thermostat a few degrees warmer. Fans are far more energy-efficient than air conditioning, and the breeze they create can make you feel 10 degrees cooler. Also close curtains and blinds during the day to prevent heat gain, and bring in cooler night air when you can.
A programmable thermostat can change temperature settings when no one’s home so you don’t waste energy heating or cooling your house unnecessarily.
Next step: Get a home energy audit. For a very small fee, an expert will come perform tests that can show you where you’re wasting energy and give you actionable steps to help you make your home much more efficient. Many energy audits come with free programmable thermostats, low-flow shower heads and faucet aerators that will quickly pay for the minimal cost of the audit. Often the auditing team will even seal up air leaks they find for free.
Learn more:
Using electricity you don’t need
Maybe you’re diligent about turning off lights when you leave a room, but if you’re leaving electronics plugged in, you’re likely wasting large amounts of electricity without realizing it.
Energy ‘vampires’
Modern electronics like computers, televisions, and printers are designed to stay on standby mode all the time, which can consume up to 25% of the electricity they use when they’re running. Up to 10% of your energy bill comes from devices drawing power even when they’re off, including TVs, printers, computers, and other electronics. Even the clock you don’t use on your microwave is constantly drawing power.
The fix: Use a ‘smart’ power strip that powers down devices completely when they’re not in use or connect them to a standard power strip and cut the power manually. Look out for things that you leave constantly plugged in, like an electric toothbrush or hand-held vacuum. Unplug them until they need charging again.
Holiday lights
Everyone enjoys a little sparkle around the holidays, but if your lights are running all night when no one’s around to see them, you’re not only wasting electricity, you’re adding to the ever-growing problem of light pollution, which has a negative impact on wildlife.
The fix: Put your lights on a timer to shut them off automatically at bedtime. And don’t be that house that still has their full holiday display going at the end of February.
Learn more:
Having a lawn
Grass lawns have a huge environmental impact, from the tons of chemicals used to maintain them to the massive amounts of water they consume each year. Then there’s mowing. Mowing the approximately 40 million acres of lawn in the United States requires more than 800 million gallons of gas EVERY YEAR, pumping 16 billion pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere annually.
Even worse, fertilizer used on lawns breaks down and emits not only carbon dioxide, but also nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas with 300 times the warming potential of CO2. Herbicides used on lawns poison beneficial insects and wind up in our waterways.
The fix: Avoid fertilizers and pesticides. Mow less often (ideally with an electric or human-powered mower), and let the fallen grass clippings act as fertilizer. Let the lawn go dormant during dry parts of the growing season, and never water at midday, when a large percentage of the water is lost to evaporation.
Replacing even part of your lawn with native plants and trees can dramatically reduce the ecological footprint of your yard by eliminating the need for chemical inputs, mowing, and water. Plus these plants are far better at pulling carbon from the atmosphere and add badly-needed ecological diversity.
Learn more:
Running water when you don’t need it
Whether it’s rinsing your dishes before putting them in the dishwasher, leaving the water running when washing your hands or brushing your teeth, or watering your yard inefficiently, most people use far more water than they need to.
Most people are surprised that washing dishes by hand requires up to nine times as much water as running them though an Energy Star-certified dishwasher. But if you rinse each dish before you put it in, you’re wasting gallons of water, and if you use hot water, you’re wasting additional energy. Find out more about the considerable footprint of clean water, which itself takes energy to produce.
Another water-waster to be aware of: Rinsing everything you recycle with clean drinking water. Recycling actually has a comparatively negligible environmental benefit, so if you run clean tap water over everything you recycle, you’ve likely undone much of that benefit.
The fix: Think before you turn on the tap, and then turn it off if you don’t need it running. Physically remove any leftover food, and then use water that’s already rinsed something else (produce, your hands, or a pot you needed to handwash) if you need to get a recyclable item or a dish cleaned off.
Learn more:
How to conserve water in the kitchen
Your internet habits
The internet is an inescapable fact of modern life for most of us, but our use of it produces some startling environmental consequences. From streaming movies to storing family photos in the cloud, our consumption of data has exploded in the last few years.
All that data needs to be stored somewhere, and that requires data centers, which have multiplied rapidly with rising demand. Data centers use tremendous amounts of electricity, much of which is generated using fossil fuels. They also require huge amounts of water to keep servers cool.
The massive expansion of AI is making the internet even more damaging to the environment. Compared to a standard search performed using Google, asking ChatGPT your question consumes up to ten time more electricity, according to the International Energy Agency. Recent research suggests some efficiency gains, but AI continues to drive the dramatic increase in new data center construction. The largest data center built to date consumes as much energy as two million households, and even larger ones are in the works.
The fix: Trim your . As in other areas of your life, try not to consume what you don’t need. That means judiciously considering whether you need an AI tool to get information you could get from a standard search, not saving 100 photos of the same thing in the cloud, deleting old emails and unsubscribing from email lists you don’t actually want. If you needed one more reason to spend less time watching TikTok videos and Netflix, knowing you’re helping the planet by getting off your screen may be the nudge you need.
Washing chemicals down the drain
Thousands of household cleaners and personal care products contain chemicals that have damaging effects on the environment. When we send them down the drain, they pollute waterways and harm aquatic ecosystems.
The fix: Learn how to limit the environmental impact of cosmetics and swap out chemical cleaners for eco-friendly alternatives or homemade ones.
Apparently some people flush dental floss and contact lenses down the toilet. If that’s you, stop. Those bits of plastic are terrible for aquatic life and belong in the trash can.
Keeping an older car (or household appliance)
While it’s generally green to make things last as long as possible, in the case of items that use energy, you have to consider what’s known as the life cycle costs. Any vehicle or appliance in your house that’s inefficient wastes energy (or water) every time you use it.
The fix: Especially if you drive regularly, replacing your gas guzzler with a fuel-efficient or electric car has major environmental benefits. Likewise an energy hog refrigerator, gas mower, or inefficient washing machine.
Idling your car
Have you been told it takes more gas to turn a car off and on again than to keep it running? If you’re a driving a car that’s more than 40 years old, that may be the case, but research has shown that modern vehicles actually use more gas idling for 10 seconds than when turned off and on again.
That antiquated belief unfortunately persists, and people leave on their cars – sometimes for half an hour or more – when they could turn them off. Besides wasting gas, idling pollutes the surrounding air, which anyone nearby has to breathe. You may have noticed signs near school pickups and hospitals marking these areas “no idling zones” because car exhaust enters the building’s fresh air supply.
The fix: Whether you’re waiting for kids at school, killing time before an appointment, or taking a phone call, consider turning off the car. If it’s hot out, try opening the doors or windows instead of running the air conditioning the entire time. If it’s cold, you might turn the car back on if you need to wait in the car for a longer period, but for a few minutes, the car should stay warm enough.
Using a leaf blower
Besides the immense noise pollution they cause, leaf blowers have an astonishing environmental impact. Their inefficient two-stroke engines spew as much as 30% of their fuel directly into the atmosphere, not only warming the climate, but also hurting air quality. The California Air Resources Board estimates that using a leaf blower for one hour releases as much pollution as driving a car 1100 miles!
The fix: Use a rake when you need to get rid of leaves. Your neighbors and the planet will thank you.
For bonus points, consider leaving the leaves where they fall. Besides nourishing your soil as they break down, according to the Xerces Society, leaves provide essential winter habitat for beneficial insects. You can rake them up in spring and add them to your compost pile.
Awareness is the first step to making more environmentally-conscious choices. As you go about your day, look through your green-tinted glasses to find ways you can make your lifestyle gentler on the planet one step at a time.
I was just thinking an article on this topic would be good — very timely! However, you might want to check the links. When I was looking for more to link to, I clicked on suggestions like digital newsletters, streaming. and downtime and was taken to some yummy snacks! 🙂
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