Rid yourself of Junk mail – or at least recycle it. The average U.S. household receives 1.5 trees’ worth of junk mail each year, and many of these are thrown right into the trash. If you want to reduce the amount of junk mail you receive, you’ll need to register with the Mail Preference Service. It costs a buck, but you can do it easily online at www.dmaconsumers.org/cgi/offmailinglist. For the junk mail you continue to receive, remember to toss it into the recycling bin instead of throwing it out with the garbage. You can even recycle plastic window envelopes. If all Americans recycled their junk mail, $370 million landfill dumping fees could be saved each year.

Use cold water when you run your garbage disposal. Better yet, try not to use it at all by composting your food waste or disposing of it in the trash. Your drain will be less clogged, you’ll save money on maintaining your septic system. Disposal wste can disrupt nutrient balances in water and soil ecosystems, which in turn can harm wildlife

When cooking and baking, try to avoid wasting food by using perishable ingredients before they spoil, measuring carefully, and saving leftovers for future meals instead of throwing them away. If you could reduce the amount of food wasted in your household by just twenty-five grams per day (about the weight of a slice of bread), you’d save twenty pounds of food annually – roughly enough to make 16 meals. If all U.S. households reduced their food waste by this amount, the savings would be enough to provide three meals per day for a whole year to each of the 1.35 million children in the U.S. who are homeless.

Keep your kitchen scraps from fruits, vegetables, and coffee ground in a composting bin or container. Try adding them to your garden or stating a compost site in the yard. You’ll grow a better garden, create deeper topsoil, recycle nutrients, and save landfill space. If, over the course of a year, everyone in the US composted their kitchen scaps instead of sending them away in the trash, the organic waste diverted from landfills could make a three-foot high compost pile to cover the city of San Francisco.