The number one way to improve the quality of your indoor air is to remove your shoes before entering your home. Think about it. All the toxins and crap (literally) that you track in on the bottom of your shoes eventually turns to dust and settles on everything you own and becomes inhaled and ingested. Gross.

It is now my habit to remove my shoes when I come home. I have to say though, that I hate walking around barefoot inside, especially since I live with a 4-year-old who is a fairly sloppy eater and a husband who is a fairly enthusiastic cook. The floor is often wet or sticky.

I searched for and found perhaps the greatest green product known to man…mops on slippers called Slipper Genies, I bought ours at Sur La Table. The mop bottoms come off so you can wash them.

An immediate hit with the whole family.

Very efficient: making the mess and mopping it up at the same time

One big item on my greening my home project is a good-looking, versatile, shoe rack. I haven’t been able to find one, I may just have to design one myself. In the meantime, we’ll have to endure the mess at the front door.

In the course of one day, I use at least 2 napkins, a couple post-it notes, and countless scraps/sheets of paper. I’ve been told this is wasteful, and in fact, it is: the average U.S. person generates 2 lbs. of paper waste per day and uses 10,000+ sheets of printing and copying paper every year. Consequently, paper waste makes up over 40% of North American landfills. There are a couple easy ways to decrease the consumption of paper:

1. Confession: I am a compulsive doodler. When I doodle, taking up a whole page at times, it’s extremely wasteful. So I know this is pretty obvious, but using less paper is the easiest (and cheapest) way to help the increasing use of paper products.

2. If you cut something out of a piece of paper, leaving “useless scraps” behind, don’t go straight to the recycling bin; keep a pile or bin on your desk or on your counter at home. The scraps are great for leaving reminders, shopping lists, to-do lists, really anything.

3. If you must buy post-it notes, buy them recycled. Post-it makes recycled products, which still look like their colored selves, but are much less harmful for the environment than the originals. Also, you can buy recycled printing paper and napkins as well (you can find these recycled paper products at Staples and SeventhGeneration.com).

Sure, water bottles are convenient, they’re tasty, and you know they are always filtered to perfection. But 80% of all those bottles end up in a landfill and the other 20% are “in the wild” where it takes up to 430 years for them to disintegrate. I suggest buying a reusable bottle and putting tap water in it. New York City tap water is delicious, and is argued to be the best in the country. Nalgene bottles have just now been discovered to have a harmful chemical called BPA, but CamelBack has BPA-free bottles that are not only useful, but colorful and pretty as well.

This was so ridiculously easy, I can’t believe we didn’t do it before.

This is the hot water heater before:

and this is after:

Make sure you leave any air intakes and valves uncovered (notice the perforated vent at the bottom - it’s pretty clear on the instructions)…and wear gloves to prevent splinters from the fiberglass.

You can see two choices of hot water heater insulation at Low Impact Living. I went to Lowe’s and all they had were the Thermwell R6.7 version (shown on top of the LIL page) which said it could fit up to a 60 gallon tank but it barely fit our 50 gallon tank - it actually didn’t completely wrap around the entire tank - but it’s pretty close.

We can expect to save from 4% to 9% in water heating costs from this $16.95 installation that took less than 1/2 hour.

We want an official audit of the energy efficiency of our house so we signed up for a free audit by National Grid (the utility formerly known as Keyspan).

I plugged in all the relevant information about our house into National Grid’s Home Energy Analyzer. The results are posted to the left. I don’t know if this is a real result or if it’s just a Magic 8-ball type of thing that generates similar results for everyone. Regardless, the 3 repairs listed that would generate the most savings are:

• “Controlling air leakage” which we are preparing to do along with all the insulation work.

• “Replace the heating system” which we are not about to do (we installed radiant heating and an efficient central heating/cooling system a few years ago)

• “Install a programmable thermostat” which my husband did about 8 months ago.

So we’re doing pretty well. The Audit is scheduled for September 3rd. I’m concerned that we’ll get what we paid for with a free audit but I plan to review it with some experts who do this for a living and we’ll let you know how it rates.

Oddly, improving insulation barely makes the list. Next I’ll do the R-value calculations to see how much we can expect to save by doing the insulation work.

Stay tuned.

Doesn’t it feel strange, holding a handful of heavy batteries and then casually tossing them in the trash? Throwing away non-rechargeable batteries is not illegal, but when in a landfill, most batteries begin to leak, causing lead contamination to our groundwater.

Recycling these batteries is not a difficult task in the least, and it is helps the environment out a lot. All you have to do is mosey on over to the nearest Staples, RadioShack, or Best Buy (find the location nearest you here), and ask them if they can recycle your non-rechargeable batteries. Yup, it’s that easy! All this commotion over how to get rid of these useless burdens is really unneeded, seeing as it is so simple and easy.

Teen Green will be new series of posts written by Izzie D., our summer intern.

Enjoy.

A few months ago, my school had a clothing swap. At first this might seem strange; wearing other people’s old clothing doesn’t sound so appealing…But actually, it was great. I brought in two bags of gently worn clothing (or never worn; some still had tags on them) and browsed through my classmate’s rejects. As they say: “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”, and that’s exactly what happened. I left with two bags of new clothes, all of which I now wear frequently. Besides the fact that it was all free (which is a huge plus), it is also really great for the environment. It eliminated the whole process of packaging and shipping, which conserved materials, gasoline, and reduced the amount of carbon emissions that would have been released by the shipping transportation.

Another way to get great clothes that are cheap and eco-friendly, is by shopping at a thrift store. If you find a good store, they have great clothes that are incredibly cheap (and most items will feel like they’re one-of-a-kind). I would recommend Beacon’s Closet, which has clothes ranging from vintage to modern (accessories and shoes as well) and you can sell them your clothes for cash or store credit.

So basically, looking good doesn’t always have to be expensive and bad for the environment; there are alternate ways to get cheap (or free!) clothes that will not only make you look good, but make you feel good too.

Yup, it’s that unfortunate time of year again: when all the magazines have their “Back to School!” issues and teens around the world begin to realize that the freedom of summer is slowly coming to an end. Not that I really want to think about school supplies, or anything having to do with school for that matter, but this year I have vowed to go as green as I possibly can, without bankrupting my parents. I was thinking: why not buy green school supplies?

Over the course of the school year, I tend to waste some paper, and lose many pens and pencils, so why not go green? I did some research on where I could find these products, and to my surprise, I found that stores such as Office Max, Office Depot, and Staples all carry some green supplies (I can shop online as well…just in case I want to savor my summer laziness even more than I already do). Other options are greenlinepaper.com (which is best for recycled paper, notebooks, and binders), and redapplesupply.com (which has a bigger variety of green school supplies).

Then I realized this: if the inside of my backpack is eco-friendly, why shouldn’t the outside be green too? So commenced the start of my search for a green backpack. I found greenearthofficesupply.com, which has recycled rubber and hemp bags (and the bags aren’t ugly, they’re actually pretty attractive!) I also came across hemp-sisters.com, which has bigger backpacks that look exactly like regular harmful ones (and most are under $30).

If these websites don’t have what you’re looking for, chances are that grist.org will. They have loads of links and suggestions for going green in school and staying in a budget.

“Are you in that room?” “No.” “Then why are the lights on?”

That is a typical conversation between me and my dad, and I’m sure it’s not rare in other households as well. It’s hard to remember to switch that light off as I’m leaving a room, it is a tiny little detail that doesn’t really affect me short term. There are other things I am thinking about when I leave a room, such as “what’s to eat?” and “I guess I should be doing that homework”, but my dad says that it is a habit that I must quit, before I “kill the planet”. I wouldn’t say that my dad’s scolding is going to scare me into turning off the lights everytime, he’s not so intimidating…But I do start to feel bad as I begin to realize how much of an impact I make every day on the environment (I found out just how much, when I discovered The Impact Calculator). As a solution to this problem, I found the Smarthome Aube Solar Timer Switch. It allows me to leave the room, carelessly forgetting to turn off the lights as usual, without my dad (and my conscience) being so unhappy. It’s a simple way to help the environment, and is great for families with careless teenagers like me that want to help, but just can’t seem to remember.