What Can I Do?

What You Can Do

Ideas from What Can I Do? An Alphabet for Living
by Lisa Harrow

What Can I Do? provides you with many suggestions for responsible living as well as web resources that give detailed information on how to take each step. Below are a few ideas from What Can I Do?

• Recycle your batteries. The batteries used in modern portable technology release some appalling toxins when discarded or incinerated. The better alternative is to recycle them.
• Buy shade-grown coffee. Coffee cultivated under a forest canopy preserves the natural habitat needed for migratory songbirds and other creatures.
• Demand power from renewable energy sources. Call your utility company and ask for it.
• Buy fresh, locally-grown produce. You can support your neighbors and know where your food is coming from and what is happening to it. This also reduces the amount of fuel needed to ship food around the country.
• Invest in socially responsible companies. Being a socially responsible investor means investing in companies, products, and services that are economically, environmentally, and socially responsible.
• Reduce the amount of energy you use to heat and cool your home. By turning the thermostat down three degrees in the winter and up three degrees in the summer, you will save the world nearly 1,100 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions every year.
• Eat less meat. If each American ate two fewer meat dishes each week for a year, the grain that otherwise would have been fed to feedlot animals would be enough to feed 225 million people for that whole year.
• Use biodegradable cleaning products that lack harmful petrochemicals, phosphates, and "active washing ingredients." White vinegar, for example, can be used to help clean the laundry and to get bugs off plants.
• If you must use plastic, seek out alternatives to petroleum-based products. Corn, wheat, peas and sugarcane can be used to make plastic that feels and looks just like petroleum-based plastic but takes a month to compost instead of centuries.
• Recycle. Each recycles beer can saves enough electricity to run a television for three hours.
• Use compact fluorescent light bulbs. They last up to thirteen times longer than incandescent bulbs and use 75 percent less electricity to produce the same light.
• Carry reusable shopping bags in your trunk in order to cut down on the amount of on-time-use plastic bags.