Ready to Take Oprah's Go Green Challenge

Ready to take Oprah's Go Green challenge? Make saving our planet a part of your daily life with easy changes. Start today with simple suggestions from Oprah's Go Green show like Eco Bags reusable canvas bags for grocery shopping, Seventh Generation non-toxic cleaners, eco-friendly recycled paper products, organic baby products and natural pet care products (don't forget fido!). Incorporating items you use everyday in your house is one of the biggest ways we can have a positive, lasting impact on our Planet Earth. If a third of us agree to stand against the gravest threat in human history, and decide to do our part in a systematic way, then we can do collectively what our elected leaders refuse to consider.

Green plants with less water, more trees to provide shade.
Planting more trees helps in the short term because they soak up carbon, as wind breaks they save energy, and as shade they help to lower cooling costs. As for plants, do everything you can in your yard to use less water. Choose hardier plants, plant things in groups that require more water and put in mulch to help keep moisture in. Finally, make sure you water your lawn sparingly. All of these will conserve energy.

Go organic.
Most American farmers still spray a billion pounds of pesticides to protect crops each year. When chemical pesticides are used to kill pests, they also kill off microorganisms that keep carbon contained in the soil. When the microorganisms are gone, the carbon is released into the atmosphere as CO2. And when those organisms are gone, the soil is no longer naturally fertile and chemical fertilizers become a necessity, not a luxury. Not to mention all the pesticides you ingest from the produce!
Here are other simple things you can do with food that will also make a difference:
Eat locally grown food. If the food doesn't have to travel far, there's less CO2 from the trucks that ship it.
Eat fruits and vegetables in season. Again, that saves the enormous transportation costs.
Plant your own vegetable garden. It's not as hard as you might think.
Buy recycled.
This may sound simple, but it takes less energy to manufacture a recycled product than a brand new one. So if you and every other consumer buy recycled, you'll help create a market, and conserve energy along the way. Recycled is often considerably cheaper than non-recycled, so it's cost-effective as well as conservation-minded. For instance, recycled paper can be as much as a third cheaper than non-recycled paper.

Be a minimalist.
This item may be the single biggest way to make a dent in the global warming problem. Again, we know it sounds obvious, but buying less things – some of which you just don't need – changes the energy equation across the board, on every single consumer product. If everyone used less, the impact would be large indeed.

So how about some specific things? Here are a few:
Buy in bulk. In short, bulk items use less packaging, which translates into less energy.
Go through your closet. Donate or recycle what you really don't need, then make a pledge not to replace everything you just got rid of.
Buy quality, reusable products that will last longer. Over time, you'll obviously buy fewer products that way.
Be creative in what you use for work, play and leisure. You don't always have to buy new products for activities. Re-use in creative ways.

Change your light bulbs!
There are now highly efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) that last for years, use a quarter of the energy of regular bulbs and actually produce more light. While ENERGY STAR bulb will cost more initially – anywhere from $3 to $9 a piece – remember that there are two price tags: what you pay at the register and what you pay in energy costs over the bulb's lifetime. So you may pay more up front, but you will actually save hundreds of dollars in your household budget over the long term because of their long life.

Here's the impact. If every household in the U.S. replaced a burned-out bulb with an energy-efficient, ENERGY STAR qualified compact fluorescent bulb, it would prevent more than 13 billion pounds of CO2 from entering the atmosphere – which is like taking more than a million cars off the road for an entire year.

Start big or start small with the Go Green Challenge~ after all, every bit makes a difference!