Climate-Saving Resolutions for 2015
Our friends at Oroeco are passionate about making it easy and fun to manage your personal carbon footprint. With their easy and fun web app you can track and manage your carbon footprint, take advantage of dozens of personalized tips to reduce your impact, and collaborate with friends, family and neighbors to reduce your impact on the planet. Here are their top 10 climate-saving resolutions for 2015 to get your budget, your body and our planet off to a great start in 2015!
Oroeco can’t help you get to the gym or eat less chocolate, but they DO have a few climate-saving resolutions that make it easy to save money AND save the planet this year, leading to health and happiness all around!
The average household can save over $1,000 each year while reducing climate impacts by 20%? Here are five easy-to-implement climate-saving resolutions that cost little to put into action but can make a big difference for the world, your wallet and your waistline (click through to Oroeco to read the other five resolutions!).
Take any of the actions below and you’re on your way to a better year already!
- Kill the vampires: This tip is perhaps the easiest of them all and doesn’t require anything beyond a little brain power: simply unplug your electronics when not in use, or turn them fully off with a powerstrip. Most electronics suck ‘vampire power-’ which means they use energy even when turned off! Unplugging appliances when they’re not in use is the best way to slay these vampires. Some, like the oven, might be impossible to unplug, but others, like TVs, DVRs, stereos and wireless routers should be accessible and easy to unplug or switch off with a powerstrip.
- Reduce your food waste: Here’s another freebie tip: by simply reducing your food waste you can eliminate about 2,200 pounds of CO2 each year and make a ton of other impacts! All the energy used to grow, transport and chill that wasted food can be saved each time you make conscious purchasing decisions. How to reduce your food waste: plan your meals ahead to avoid overbuying, serve smaller portions (which is also good for your waistline), freeze foods if you can’t eat them soon enough, and turn less-than-perfect veggies into soups or pasta sauces.
- Know your climate impacts: It’s said “you can’t manage what you don’t measure,” but it’s easy to track the climate impacts of your spending and lifestyle choices with our fun (and FREE!) software at Oroeco. You can improve your impacts with personalized tips, collaborate and compete with your friends, win prizes and engage your community to scale your personal actions into bigger change. Sign up here to start tracking your impacts and begin changing climate for the better this year.
- Clean up climate with carbon offsets: Supporting pollution reduction projects by purchasing carbon offsets is the only way to fully eliminate the climate impacts of your lifestyle. Unfortunately there’s not yet a global tax on carbon pollution, but you can start paying your carbon cost now to make a real difference for climate and communities. You can subscribe to monthly offsetting through Oroeco to make sure you’re treading on the climate as lightly as possible. Your offset purchases fund clean cookstove projects in Africa, supporting healthier forests and families through our partnership with Impact Carbon, and you can even gift offsets to your friends and family.
- Share your climate love! Each change we make as individuals has a positive impact, but we encourage you to amplify your impact by sharing these resolutions with friends and family. Perhaps the biggest change we need to make is to shift the culture around climate action, so that climate-friendly living is the new normal. The only way that’s going to happen is if we talk about climate with everyone we respect and care about. Let your friends and family know why you’re passionate about climate, and how you can support each other to change climate for the better this year. We’ve built Oroeco to make these conversations a bit easier, and we’re on Facebook and Twitter, so you can share the climate love with us there too!
Got some other climate resolutions for the New Year? We’d love to hear about them in the comments below.