Tips for a green house

Declare war on the dryer

The dryer is usually the second-largest energy-consuming appliance (after the refrigerator) in the home.

CC King, a mother of two, including a teenager, sees gobs of laundry each week. And yet, her dryer gets fired up about once every six weeks. The household makes do with an outdoor clothesline as well as a web of lines hanging in the furnace room.

Block junk mail

Pankaj Shah is an antijunk mail crusader who founded GreenDimes. For a $20 annual fee, Shah's Web-based company www.greendimes.com will stop 90 percent of your junk mail and plant 10 trees in your name.

Forget water bottles

"I am trying very hard to remove all plastics from our life," says Mary Hanisco, 40, a textbook editor.

The plastic used to make disposable water bottles is made from petroleum. The Earth Policy Institute estimates it takes more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually to make water bottles for American consumption.

What's more, 60 million plastic bottles end up in landfills and incinerators every day - a total of about 22 billion last year, according to the nonprofit Container Recycling Institute of Connecticut.

Use different lightbulbs

Despite their oftentimes institutional glow, compact fluorescent bulbs use 70 percent less energy than typical light bulbs and last up to 10 times longer. If every American household substituted just five compact fluorescent light bulbs for typical incandescents, "it would be equivalent to taking eight million cars off the road for a year," according to TheDailyGreen.com.