by Nathan Creitz

Created on: July 18, 2008

There are some things for which I cannot trust the government to ever solve. One of those issues is environmental sustainability. I'm grateful that these issues of sustainability are important to our elected officials, but there is only so much they can do. It is up to the consumer to make the difference.

I'm no treehugger, but I know there are some things that every one of us can do right now to make our society more self-sufficient. There are hundreds of ways we can reduce, reuse recycle, but I want to narrow the list down to 10 things that not only help the environment but might actually save us time, money and effort as well. In other words, these should be no-brainers, and yet the majority of people in our country have yet to see the value of the following ideas. Implementing just a few of these could save a consumer literally hundreds of dollars a month. So without further ado, these are my top ten ways consumers can create a more sustainable society:

10. Change a lightbulb. According to GE, "If every household in the U.S. replaced ONE light bulb with a GE Energy Smart bulb, we would save a combined national total of $600 million a year in energy costs. We would also save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes for a year and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of more than 800,000 cars."

9. Walk or bike instead of driving those short trips.
The bicycle manufacturer Trek has a few stats on their website:
- 60% of the pollution created by automobile emissions happens in the first few minutes of operation, before pollution control devices can work effectively.
- 24% of all trips are made within a mile of the home, 40% of all trips are made within two miles of the home, and 50% of the working population commutes five miles or less to work.
- The U.S. could save 462 million gallons of gasoline a year by increasing cycling from 1% to 1.5% of all trips.

8. Stop Drinking Bottled Water
According to the Refill not Landfill Campaign:
- Making all of the bottles for the US requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually. That's enough to fuel 100,000 cars.
- Americans send about 38 billion water bottles a year to landfills. (According to Brita)

7. Shop Locally
There's no reason to buy a tomato from Brazil. Many places have local farmer's markets that you can go to and buy fresher, cheaper ingredients that weren't frozen, packaged, shipped, unpacked, and put on the shelf. To shop locally is to conserve energy, support your local community, and

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