THE 10 EASIEST HOUSEHOLD SAVINGS…
1 Turn your TV off at the mains. Sets left on stand-by are still using 25 per cent of their power
2 Turn the tap off when you brush your teeth – a running tap wastes 2.5 litres of water a minute. If everyone in the UK did this, we’d save 180 million litres a day, enough water to supply nearly half a million houses
3 Have a shower – not only does it use 40% less water than a bath, but you can now buy a water-saving shower head, saving 70,000 litres water over a decade
4 Turn your thermostat down one degree and save 1/3 ton on your annual CO2 emissions
5 Unplug chargers and transformers when they’re not in use, They still burn energy if they’re plugged into the mains – known in the trade as ‘leaking electricity’
6 Turn off your computer overnight – leaving the monitor on at night wastes enough power to microwave six dinners and costs you £30 a year
7 Compost kitchen waste – over half household waste is biodegradable. Sending it on a long lorry journey to a landfill site creates pollution and increases your council tax
8 Stop junk mail – the amount of waste paper buried each year could fill 103,448 double-decker buses. You can opt out of junk mail by registering with the mail preference service: www.mpsonline.org.uk or call 0845 703599
9 Use an ecological washing powder – if there was a countrywide switch to ‘green’ laundry products, we could eliminate 700,000 tons of detergent from our sewage plants and waterways each year
10 Save water when flushing the loo – you can put a brick (or ‘hippo’) in the cistern or try the old saying: ‘if it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down’
