nachotalk.com

Normally, Nate and I use NachoTalk to voice our opinions on social or cultural matters, but this time around, we decided to talk about something that transcends our normal classification: the environment.

Yes, it is true that we have not posted a lot in the recent weeks, mostly due to scheduling conflicts, but we (read: me) finally managed to find more spare time.

Today is October 15th 2007, today is Blog Action Day, and we agreed that we would take part in this very worthwhile endeavor by sharing a couple of our thoughts on how you can save yourself some money and, at the same time, help this world, your living environment:

Reuse and recycle:

The easiest thing to do is to reuse some of the things you come across in daily life. Think of the hot water you use to rinse your coffee pot to make it nice and warm so your coffee stays warm longer or the water you waste by flushing your toilet.

By simply switching to a vacuum flask, you will have steaming hot coffee (or tea) for a long time, while at the same time not having to waste any water.

For your toilet, you can do a number of things: If you are building a new house, it might be interesting to look into a flushing system that collects rainwater and dispenses it throughout the house.

Rain water is good, nay, great for a myriad of things such as flushing your toilet, watering your plants, cleaning dirty tires and washing the car itself. While this may seem strange at first, it has been done and the initial cost can be offset easily.

Besides saving yourself money in the long run, this will also give you a great feeling; because you are not wasting 20 to 30 gallons of fresh water each time you wash your car. Lifehacker even recommends washing your car with a microfiber cloth.

Part of the water you save can be used to ensure a humidity level of 45% in rooms you are heating in the colder months of the year. The air humidity ensures that you are living in a healthy environment and is just right to prevent any fungus from setting foot in your living environment, thereby impacting your health as well as forcing you to use environmentally-questionable chemicals to remove the fungus.

As far as recycling goes, you will have to get a little creative: The huge box you got with your big-screen TV makes (part of) a great fort for your kids and the small box that was used to deliver your shipment of new DVDs can be repurposed as document storage.

Refill and rethink:

Most of us have an ink-jet printer at home or in the office and everyone who does knows the age-old problem of ink cartridges. Whenever you need them, they are empty and new ones are expensive, sometimes, even more expensive than a new printer. Solve this problem by refilling your cartridges.

This may seem difficult and messy at first, but it can in fact save you a lot of money once you get used to it. A word of advice from someone who went down this road before: make sure to follow the instructions of your refill-set to the Tee and make a couple of test printouts before you print important items.

However, before you print, you might want to consider if you even need the thing you are going to print. Is it an important email or just some random note? Storage is cheap to come by, so if you feel that the mail can be saved for later retrieval instead of being printed out, do it.

ePaper and eBooks have come a long way and while the production of standalone eBook devices is still more expensive than printing 50 books, there are ways you can save forests, for example, if you have a Blackberry or Pocket PC, get yourself eBooks instead of printed books. eBooks are cheaper to come by and you can carry around your whole library without feeling its weight.

Revamp and retry

Being constantly connected in this world is becoming as common as fire hydrants on a street corner, but being connected means that you need to charge your batteries. Do yourself, and our environment a favor and switch off your device during the night if at all possible.

Sure, a DVD player that takes two instead of ten seconds to start looks cool, but it also consumes a lot more energy, energy that costs money, money that could be used to buy something nice … like, oh .. I don’t know - a hybrid car?

Back when the first electric cars were introduced, early adopters had to fight with loads of problems, the most prominent one being that the car could not be recharged at enough locations and was therefore bound to a certain geographical area.

The current generation of hybrid cars eliminates this problem by charging your battery on-the-fly, the process involves friction and works so seamlessly that you will not even notice it and if you do a lot of low-speed driving (that is - below 30 mph / 50 kph) these cars can get you up to 100 mpg.

We have made the first step; here are a few tips you can use to save money and help our environment. We can only go so far - the most important thing is that you have to want to help.