I thought that in honor of Earth Day, it would be a perfect opportunity to create my first post themed on how you can treat ‘Mother Earth’ with some proactive steps towards a greener lifestyle. Like most of us, I never gave much thought to being more efficient with my day to day power consumption and did things like leaving a room with my computer on, blasting music all day, or leaving the television on and coming back in a few hours to continue finishing a movie.
Now that I’ve got my own house and I’m working on making it a home, I see exactly how much electricity I use and garbage I create monthly. My habits not only affect my wallet, but also our world by using up resources unnecessarily. Since this realization, I’ve taken complete control of the situation by recycling as much trash as possible and using energy efficient power strips with my computer and media center and turning them off when not in use along with monitoring my monthly power usage. Those efforts have cut my carbon footprint size in half.
Another thing that I’ve learned is to be a bit more critical on things that I throw away…like batteries. Instead of throwing them in the trash, I recycle them. Just three months ago, I had a laptop battery that completely died on me and wouldn’t be recognized by my laptop, So, I got a new NewerTech battery and used the free recycling program that NewerTech offers specifically for laptop batteries. Along with my laptop battery, I started playing around with some new programs that I found interesting, but seemed extremely slow. I thought it was my processor that was slow at first, which had me considering replacing my whole computer. Instead, I researched the issue more and discovered I could gain better performance by just adding more RAM and while I had the case open, I upgraded my hard drive too for a much faster computer that will delay my purchasing a new one for several years.
By the way, I’ve never upgraded anything before in my laptop, so I reviewed OWC’s installation videos and the step by step instructions really helped me through the process.
I think many of us take this ‘big rock’ in space for granted most of the time and if we all take a little time out, especially today, to reflect on how we can individually live in a more environmentally responsible way, we can collectively make a difference today and for future generations.
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