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What are three easy steps you can take to make your life a bit more “Green”?

1. Recycle More.

Find out what you can recycle in your community.
Click HERE to see the list of garbage haulers that bring recyclables to Millennium Recycling. If you find your garbage hauler, click HERE to see what you can put in your single stream bin. If your hauler is not bringing their materials to Millennium Recycling, ask them to!

Outside of the single steam bin, there are many other opportunities to recycle in your community. Take the little effort to find out where you can take items like electronics, batteries, bulbs, paint, oil and everything else that can’t go in the recycle bin. We’ve put together a great TOOL that lets you find a quick and easy outlet for almost anything. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, just ask us and we’ll get you an answer. If you make a plan for these harder-to-recycle items, you’ll recycle them instead of burying them in the dirt. Landfills are lame… tell your friends!

Compost if you Can.Not everyone has a yard and a garden, but most everyone generates compostable waste. If you have a yard, great. You can compost much of your fruit and vegetable waste in a pile in the corner of your yard or till it into your garden. If you live in an apartment building, check out this article about composting in yardless homes.
Paired with recycling, composting can help us reduce our waste to almost zero. It can happen. We can do it.

2. Decrease Energy/Fuel Consumption

Tame Your Car.
Carpooling is a great way to decrease the cost of a daily commute. Carpooling also decreases the energy consumed maintaining roads due to the decrease in traffic. The US could save 33 million gallons of gas each day if the average commuter carried one extra person. That’s a lot of fuel. If you don’t have any friends to ride with you, no problem; like our Facebook page and we can share some of ours.

Keeping your car tuned up and in good maintenance can save even more fuel. According to commute.com, families can save $120 a year just making sure their gas cap is tight enough. Furthermore, gas mileage can be improved up to 3% by having adequate tire pressure. Not getting oil changes on time and using dirty filters (oil, gas, air) can decrease fuel efficiency by 10%. Another good tip for the commuter: take that extra junk out of the trunk. An extra 100 pounds can decrease fuel economy by 2%.

Don’t Leave Home Without It.
Reducing your at home energy consumption can be as easy as flipping off a switch. We aren’t talking about the bird. Shutting off your home’s appliances can reduce your energy bill. Turning off the five most common “vampire” appliances, including your TV and XBox, can save your energy bill $200 a year.

3. Choose to Reuse.

Stop using disposable containers.
Pack your lunch or water ration in a glass or plastic container made to be washed and used again and again instead of a container made to be tossed in the rubbish. The water used to wash them is so much smaller than the water and energy used to make new, disposable containers. The five minutes it takes to wash it out could save a few thousand years of decomposing time in a landfill.

Up-cycle!

If you have never heard of up-cycling, your mind is about to be blown. Up-cycling occurs when someone takes a thing that usually gets thrown away after use and re-purposes it to function as a new thing. This reduces our spending and discarding behavior and often leads to interesting and unique creations. Check out cool sites like Pinterest for some up-cycle ideas. But beware: up-cycling can be addictive.