Mobile or cell phones (depending on which country you live in) cause a great deal of harm to the environment if allowed to enter landfill. Cadmium from the phone’s batteries (which is even more harmful then lead) can potentially leach into the soil and cause problems. For this reason it is important to recycle your old phones rather then throw them in the rubbish bin (or forget about them in a draw somewhere). Recycling also allows metals such as gold, silver, copper and nickel to be recovered from the old phones.

There is much debate about the most energy efficient way of making a cup of tea or coffee. An under sink on demand hot water system has been voted most efficient over at TreeHugger
Another power saving suggestion (for those of us who don’t have an undersink system) is to boil some water for your first cup and fill a thermos to drink from for the rest of the day so that you don’t need to boil the kettle again and again.

Every day a huge amount of drinking water gets flushed down the toilet. It is estimated that around 40% of household water use in the US is in the form of flushing the toilet. This is a rather sad thought considering the fact that we are using up our earth’s water faster then it is being produced.

There is an immediate (free) solution you can use though. If you are still using an old style toilet which just simply uses too much water, you can use a displacement device to save some. A displacement device is a fancy phrase for putting some objects in the toilet’s water storage tank which take up some volume and therefore save that amount of water. You can use anything which won’t disintegrate in the water (if in doubt make sure to wrap it in some plastic). I filled some small bottles with water and placed those in the tank.

Of course there are many other ways of modifying the toilet to use less water but I think this is by far the easiest and one you can do right now. Every little bit counts!

Welcome! This blog is about everyday tips anyone can use to help reduce their energy and water wastage. I am by no means an expert and I will be learning as we go along. Please feel free to send in any corrections, ideas and comments.