Heating your home creates greenhouse gas emissions, whether your family uses electricity, home-heating oil, or a woodstove. In fact, heating and air–conditioning devours more than half of the energy that an American home uses. Making door snakes is a fun way to defend our home from drafts that leak from under doors and around window sills.
Here’s what you can do:
Make a door snake that will fend off drafts, keeping rooms warm in the winter and cool in the summer.
Here’s what you’ll need:
One yard of fabric (scraps work great)
Small piece of felt or ribbon for the tongue and eyes
Masking tape
Sand or fine gravel
Scissors
Pins
Measuring tape
Fabric glue
Funnel
And here’s how you do it:
Measure the width of the door.
Cut out a fabric rectangle that is about 1.5” longer than the width of the door and 7” wide.
Turn the fabric upside down and fold in half lengthwise.
Glue the long end and one short end, leaving a 1 inch border. Make sure to leave one of the short ends open! If needed, hold the seams in place with tape or pins until the glue has dried.
Use masking tape to seal the seam shut so that the sand won’t leak out.
Turn the material inside out so that the other side of the fabric is showing. Using a funnel, fill the snake with the sand.
Glue the last end shut.
Cut out the tongue and eyes and sew or glue them onto your snake. You can also use googly eyes or buttons if you have them. Add any other embellishments you can think of—like spots, stripes or even a rattlesnake tail!
Mother’s and Father’s Day may have come and gone, but it’s never too late to help out with the household chores. In the summer, you can get the sun and wind to pitch in too by hanging your clothes outside to dry. Sun and wind are both renewable resources, which means they will never run out! Line drying one load of laundry prevents about 3.35 pounds of C02 emissions by saving the electricity it would take to run the dryer.
For many families, piling suitcases, kids and even cats and dogs into the car for your summer vacation is a yearly tradition. You and your family can green your car trip and get the summer off to a cool start by trying these simple steps:
1) Don’t idle. Have you ever walked behind a car in a parking lot that was sitting with it’s engine going? Cough! Cough! Idling causes unnecessary pollution. It’s a good rule of thumb to turn off your engine when parked for more than 30 seconds. The best way to “warm up” your car is to drive the vehicle and it will be “warmed up” in 30 seconds.
2) Lighten up! Get that junk out of your trunk. Driving around with unnecessary weight makes your car less fuel efficient.
3) Be a smooth operator. Avoid jerky starts and stops and use cruise control to maintain a steady speed. And slow down! Your car uses less fuel when driven close to the speed limit.
4) Keep it in tune. Get regular tune ups and make sure your car’s tires are properly inflated to boost it’s MPG.
5) Check your cap. Many cars have missing or broken gas caps which cause gas to leak and harm the environment.
6) Don’t be a drag. Remove bicycle and ski racks when not in use, and keep those windows closed when driving on the highway to reduce drag and improve your fuel economy.
7) Make a plan, Stan. Plan your route to avoid sitting in heavy traffic.
Did you know that last week was Arbor Day? On Arbor Day, people all around the country plant trees in their communities. If you haven’t planted a tree, it’s not too late! Trees do many wonderful things for the planet, like filtering carbon dioxide from the air and giving us oxygen to breath. When planted near a house, trees provide shade that cools the home in the summer, helping to save energy. Planting trees native to your area is a good idea. They require little maintenance and provide homes and food for the creatures in their ecosystem. To learn more about how you can get started planting trees visit the Arbor Day Foundation.
You might have been too young to vote in the recent presidential election, but don’t let that stop you from voting with your light switch for Earth Hour 2009. On Saturday, March 28 at 8:30 PM, as many as 1 billion people around the world will turn off their lights in a universal vote to stop global warming. The World Wildlife Fund will present these votes at the Global Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark this year. At this important meeting, governments from all over the world will gather to decide how to fight global warming.
Earth Hour began in Sydney, Australia in 2007. 2.2 million homes and businesses switched off their lights for one hour. The following year, Earth Hour went global, with 50 million people world wide sending a powerful message against global warming. Important landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, the Sydney Opera House, Rome’s Colosseum, and the Coca Cola billboard in Times Square all went black.
This year, you can VOTE EARTH just by switching off your lights.
Replace incandescent bulbs with energy efficient ones
Switch to Energy Saving Light Bulbs
One of the best things you can do for the planet is also one of the simplest. If every home in America replaced one traditional incandescent light bulb with a compact fluorescent light bulb (known as a CFL), we would save enough energy to light more than 2.5 million homes for a year, and prevent the CO2 emissions equivalent of nearly 800,000 cars from entering the atmosphere. These energy-saving bulbs last 13 times longer and use only a quarter of the energy as traditional light bulbs. Now just imagine what a difference it would make if you changed all of the light bulbs in your house!
