Couple of ideas on Conservation

I mentioned in my previous blog about recycling and consequently conservation and how we should do it. I have been regularly recycling most of whatever waste generated at my home. However, recently I did somethings to reduce waste which I receive regularly at home. The biggest of them is the mails from credit card companies. Interestingly, the companies from which I already have card, they also keep sending offers for new cards with lots of offer. As a first step, I called all the companies with which I have cards to stop sending me any new offers in mail. It took me half an hour to call American Express, Bank of America, CitiCards and couple of other companies. I canceled all mail subscriptions for me and my wife. They canceled all of this without any question. This half an hour will pay off as I will have to deal with less mails everytime and will not have to shred them.

Then I get offers from DiscoverCard at the rate of one offer per week. So I called them at the number they gave in offer letter and instead of opting for a new card I requested to remove me and my wife's name from their mailing list and they delightfully agreed. Then I visited Val-Pak site and removed my address from their mailing list as well. Just less than an hour of work and I reduced lot of junk mail to my house and helped the environment by less production of these junk mails.

I bought CFLamps which are of low wattage and replaced couple of bulbs I use most in my house. This will be a "little" (just a couple of bucks) costlier option, but I am now using lots of less energy than before and helping environment as well.

In few conferences I attended I got cloth bags (which I considered useless mostly). Now I keep few of these bags in my car always and whenever I go for grocery shopping I try to keep most of the stuff in those bags as well and reduce the usage of polythene bags.

I hope I gave you some very simple ideas in conservation and I hope you will definitely do your part in helping the environment as well. I know these ideas are not new but its always inspiring to see others doing that :), so may be I inspired few of you. Please leave the comments if you did get inspired or if you follow the things I mentioned.

Anurag