Use Your Microwave More

As kids, TV dinners were awesome. These microwavable bad boys were the hallmark of homes with two working parents. Funny enough, microwaves have always been easy to use and they also use less energy than a regular oven. On average, you use 1200 watts of electricity per hour of microwave use. Most things will be microwaved for about 1 to 5 minutes on average, with some occasionally surpassing that. Yet for every hour of regular oven use, you’re using 3000 watts of electricity.

On average, most things one cooks in the oven per use will take 20 to 40 minutes on average. If you used an oven even for evening meals only, you’ll use up more power than a microwave uses for three meals per day when used at an average rate. This is one of those green hacks that seem to tell you the obvious thing to do, right? You could use a microwave more in a given month and use less power, saving you a bit on your energy bill. Everyone wins here!

Compost Food You Do Not Eat

One of the biggest issues in our environment is food waste. This is a huge problem when it comes to things one cannot throw out for animals to eat or give their pet. The best thing you can do is compost various food products. This means stuff you will not eat like the shells from nuts and eggs, along with coffee grounds and filters. However, you can also compost any fruits and vegetables along with shredding newspaper, cardboard, and paper.

Some do not realize that you can also compost things like grass or yard trimmings/clippings on top of wood chips and sawdust. Even hair and fur can be composted. Green hacks we recommended so far are going to be practical, but composting isn’t easy for many. Sure, it is great for the environment. However, it is tough to do for some, so check out the EPA’s guide on home composting.

Upcycling

Recycling is great, but did you know you can essentially get creative yourself and “upcycle” various products people do not use? This pretty much means you will make something new out of something old. You’ll see this more often with clothing items, but it’s regularly done with numerous things. The goal of upcycling is to create not just something new out of discarded objects or materials. Rather, they want to make something of higher quality or higher value than the original.

While impossible, imagine if something threw out their PS4 and a person was able to upcycle it into a PS5. Again, not really possible to do with ease. Yet something like this is the real ideology here. Sure, it is not always possible to buy and then repurpose an item into something worth more than the original item itself. However, you have still given an old item new life and kept it from polluting the planet. Which makes this one of our favorite green hacks.

LED Lightbulbs

You’d be surprised how much energy the normal incandescent bulb uses in your home. Not only do they use up more energy but they also die off quickly too. Of course, companies want to make money, so selling off lightbulbs that are made to die after a specific period of time is a good way to do just that. However, LED lightbulbs eventually hit the market and changed the game. These lightbulbs are much brighter than regular lightbulbs of the same size.

Around 6 times more luminosity is present with these bulbs, in fact. They also use much less energy to a shocking degree. The average 250-lumen incandescent bulb uses 25 to 30 watts of electricity while the LED lightbulb of the same size uses just 3 to 5 watts. If you go all the way up to 2600 lumens, an incandescent bulb will use 150 watts of electricity while the LED bulb producing the same lumen rate will only use up to 30 watts. This isn’t just one of our green hacks, we’re literally saving you tons of money by informing you of a much better product.

Avoid Air Travel When Possible

You’d assume that if you’re going somewhere faster, you’d use less fuel. Yet Air Travel is one of the biggest contributors to climate change issues. A trip from New York to San Franciso can expel between 2 to 3 tons of carbon dioxide per passenger. This is compared to the 19 total tons per person on average in America per year, as of this current writing. While it makes sense to assume a trip from one coast to another in the U.S. will use up a lot of fuel.

However, simply traveling between 1 to 4 states away can use up far more than driving there. On average, an airplane expels up to 53 pounds of carbon dioxide per air mile. Compare that to your average car, which emits an average of 404 grams per mile. You can see how one of the obvious green hacks pops up in the world of travel knowing this. Drive rather than take a plane, whenever possible. The environment will thank you for it.

Grow Your Own Fruits and Vegetables

While many farmers will grow and sell what they have, they’ll often need to sell their fruits or vegetables at a higher cost simply due to the work and money it took to grow them. Yet farmers are often growing a large supply of crops meant to sell. However, you can buy some seeds or plant trees that will produce your own fruits and vegetables at 10% of the cost it takes to continue buying them from a store or farmer.

You might rightly point out that some of the fruits and veggies you love cannot be planted outside the entire year. This is very true and well worth consideration when it comes to growing your own food. In cases like this, you’ll need to purchase a greenhouse. Yet you do not need to break the bank, there are many ways to make one or buy materials that won’t cost nearly as much to form a greenhouse. Once you have this, you can temperature control things to grow what you need.

Collect Rainwater

We should make sure to point out that collecting rainwater can be very helpful. However, this will truly depend on your location. Places near China or Russia will often have acidic rain that will actually make rain and even snow turn orange from pollutants in the environment. If you are not near a plant of some kind or in a badly polluted environment, you can collect rainwater to use for a variety of things.

The obvious thing to use it for is to hydrate yourself, plants, and even animals. The water can be used for showering, laundry, and much more too. We’d still recommend boiling the water, and not letting it sit out in an open place. Those who collect rainwater will usually have it in a large barrel or can that will be completely closed. This helps in two ways. First, it keeps animals from contaminating it and it’ll keep the water from evaporating in hotter environments.

Invest In A Hybrid Or Electric Vehicle

When electric vehicles were first brought out a little over a decade ago, they weren’t fairly priced and the mileage was terrible. Hybrids seemed to sell better, as they allowed the driver to switch between using gas and electricity. The electric and hybrid vehicles of today are far different. Not only are they priced around the same as any other gas-powered vehicle, but the mileage is tremendous. The average for an electric car today is roughly 200 miles per charge.

However, the best can reach around 400 miles per charge. On top of that, many major brands like Ford decided to make some of their major car lines into hybrid or full electric options. The Ford F-150, for example, also utilizes gas far better. Enough for a person to go around 600 to 800 miles on both its electric and gas usage. It is also priced at the exact same as the normal gas version. Clearly, we know CO2 emissions aren’t good so using hybrid and electric options is the best thing one can do.

Use Rechargeable Batteries

Speaking of electric vehicles, every single one of them will have a rechargeable battery. However, you should also know that you can buy several rechargeable batteries for numerous other products. That includes smaller battery versions like AAA and AA batteries. You’d think that, since batteries sell so easy for companies, they’d never want to make a battery that can be recharged numerous times.

However, many of the top battery companies have done just that. This includes the likes of Energizer, likely the king of the battery world along with the likes of Duracell. Companies like Rayovac and even Westinghouse along with Amazon sell rechargeable battery models that can be used in your everyday products. Of course, this is good because it means you pollute less when you do not throw out as many batteries. It’s much more efficient these days.

Use Electric Lawn Equipment

Continuing the trend of green hacks surrounding electric products, this type of thing is perfect for lawn equipment. Did you know that the average push mower or riding lawnmower emits more carbon dioxide than your average vehicle? The U.S. EPA looked into it and found that hour-for-hour, lawnmowers emit up to 11 times more CO2 than cars do. That means that this is one of the most important areas to improve. Like electric cars, electric lawn equipment has improved dramatically.

Weedeaters, lawnmowers, and much more can be all-electric today. Some people in the world of lawn maintenance will tell you the batteries do not last long. However, most companies even allow you to buy batteries separately so you can charge one while you’re using another. Then switch them out with ease. On top of that, they last as long or longer than a tank of gas, making many puzzled about what the gripe is. It just really depends on how much you use them and what they are used for.

Stop Buying Items You Don’t Use Regularly

One of the biggest problems people have, seemingly, is impulse control. We’re going to be honest in this part of the green hacks list to tell you, quite simply, to stop buying crap you do not need. We know, it looks cool or could be useful. However, unless you plan to use this item a lot, do you really need to buy it? We bring this up because so many people buy things they don’t use much, only to throw them out and further pollute the environment.

It makes sense to some, at the time, to buy something they want. We get it, and we’re all guilty of this fact clearly. In fact, this writer as well as everyone on staff here is guilty of buying things they wanted at the time, only to throw them out soon after the buy. That said, try to always think about the “purpose of the purchase.” Does this item offer something useful long-term? Is it something you “could” use again and again? If not, perhaps you shouldn’t be buying it.

Buy Local Products

While we referenced you should try to grow your own food at home, if possible, we know this is not always possible. That said, if you’re going to buy something like fruits and vegetables, always buy them from someone local. This goes for any food product, as there are plenty of local farms that sell eggs and even entire chickens to stores to sell to you. Yet you can go directly to the local places too, or go to the sellers that you know utilize local produce and meat.

You can also buy other items locally too, but we know this is not always possible to do for things like clothing. You might also not be a fan of buying stuff from places like Etsy. However, the more localized something is, the better. This means it took fewer emissions to get that product to the stores, therefore to you. The more local a product is, the better in this case.

Rather Than Buying New Eco-Products, Use What You Have Until You Cannot

An interesting issue has come to pass in this area. People want to use eco-friendly products, which is awesome. Take something like a nice electric car, for example. It is good that a person would want to use this over a gas-powered car. However, it takes a lot of power and energy to make it. This power was provided by things like coal through the local power company. This is okay if you’re buying to go from gas to electric, but not when you’re going from electric to electric.

Buying a new electric car when your current electric car is fine is dumb because it uses extra emissions to do so. It is best to wait until the current electric car is no longer useful to you or isn’t working as it should. The same you’d do when switching from a gas-powered car to another gas-powered car. The same goes for lawn equipment and everything else. Never buy new eco-friendly products when there isn’t a true need to do so. This is one of the most important green hacks we have.

Where do We Find this Stuff? Here are Our Sources:

Centers for Disease Control (CDC)

United States Department of Agriculture

United States Environmental Protection Agency

Stanford University

University of Montana

Habitat For Humanity

North American Association for Environmental Protection