Send out e-cards this holiday season instead of real ones. This will not only save you time and money, but it will greatly reduce waste.

About 90% of artificial Christmas trees are imported from China, leaving a heavy carbon footprint. Additionally, they can’t be recycled and are not biodegradable, so they will clog up our landfills. Instead, buy a real Christmas tree this holiday season. They help support local businesses and can be recycled. And who can resist that pine smell?

Thousands of trees were damaged and/or destroyed due to Hurricane Sandy. Get a group together on the weekend and plant new trees where your town needs them the most. Then share your great work by taking a picture and posting it to this site!

Make your community greener. Encourage your friends and neighbors to get involved with eco-friendly projects, such as planting trees in the local park or cleaning up a street in your town. Think of creative ways you can reach a large audience, such as writing a letter to the editor of your local paper or the head of your local government. You can even post to online community websites, blogs, and groups to get people excited about helping the environment!

Since Halloween is over, put up a sign telling people you’ll take their used pumpkins, and think of creative things you can do with them. For instance, lay out a tarp and have fun crushing the pumpkins into cider to serve to your friends. You can even combine the pumpkins with leaves and make a rich compost for a garden.

Be sure to only give your business to restaurants that follow green practices. For instance, Starbucks shifted from completely non-recycled paper to a 10 percent recycled post-consumer cup. This will save 11,000 tons of wood and 47 million gallons of water each year.

Compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL) last 10 times longer than incandescent light bulbs, use two-thirds less energy and give off 70 percent less heat. In fact, if every American family replaced just one regular light bulb with a CFL, it would eliminate 90 billion pounds of greenhouse gases, the same as taking 7.5 million cars off the road.

Landscape irrigation is estimated to account for almost one-third of all American residential water use, totaling more than 7 billion gallons per day. Instead of using the hose, install a rain barrel to collect rain water from your roof and awnings, and use the water for your grass and garden. Plants will love it, and you will conserve water.

Almost 8 printer cartridges are thrown away every second in the United States, and each one takes approximately 1,000 years to biodegrade. Search www.Earth911.org in order to find local places to recycle printer cartages, as well as other objects such as batteries and cell phones.

For your next birthday party, choose a “Planet Party” theme and brainstorm ideas to get your friends as interested in the environment as you are! You can all dress in green, create eco-friendly crafts (found in your ECO-Effect books), and eat finger foods to reduce the need for disposable cutlery.