Tips for Green Savings

Steve Needle of Needle Point Homes, owner/builder of The Point at Morristown, New Jersey’s first Green Globes certified building.

Posted May 1, 2008

CHANGE A LIGHT BULB: Use compact fluorescents wherever possible. If every home in the country replaced its five most frequently used bulbs with CFLs, the nation would save almost $8 billion per year in energy costs and eliminate greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions from 10 million cars.

SHOP WITH A REUSABLE BAG: There’s no satisfactory answer to the supermarket question, “Paper or plastic?” More than 380 million plastic bags are thrown out each year—they take almost a millennium to biodegrade. And 14 million trees are consumed to make 10 billion paper bags.

BEWARE OF PHANTOM POWER: Any charger or appliance left plugged into an outlet still uses power. Do we really need to leave our phone chargers plugged in all the time?

STOP USING DISPOSABLE WATER BOTTLES: It takes 6 liters of water­—5 to cool down the plastic during manufacturing­—to produce a 1-liter bottle of water.

DUCT SEALING: 20 percent of the air that moves through a home’s HVAC system is lost to poorly sealed connections. Use duct mastic to seal ducts and improve indoor air quality (fewer pollutants circulating), lower utility bills (as much as 20 percent!), and burn fewer fossil fuels.

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