Going green: five habits you should pick up to help save the world

There’s a lot happening in the environment lately, and all of us have to do our part in order to stop things from getting bad to worse. Now, we find out about the different ways even we of the computer age can contribute to the cause, and it’s not about going out of our offices and planting lots of trees (although that is pretty good, actually). The habits you should pick up in the full article.

 

Saving the world may not be as hard as, say, going on an epic quest in green tights and saying nothing to anyone. It could be just as easy as cutting back on the things that we usually waste, or making sure that nothing is taken for granted in terms of resources.

And to get us started, those of us who center our lives (and occupations) in the computer-driven workplace, PC World has five simple ways to get the green going.

First one: save paper and ink. That’s easy, right? If you get a lot of printed material that you know you’re not going to use anymore, then print on their reverse sides, assuming that the other side of the printed material is clean and all.

Shrinking your text and setting up your printer so that it prints two pages of material into one sheet of paper can also yield a lot of savings.

Second one: use CDs and DVDs sparingly. If you’ve always had the habit of burning stuff into recordable media but always leave a lot of the available space unused, then now is the time to break that habit. One way is to simply use rewritable discs that you can use again and again. Of course, they’re a bit more expensive and take longer to burn, but at least you’re not forced to have a lot of coasters around.

Third: tweak your PC’s power settings so that it hibernates whenever it’s idle. Hibernation is different from actually shutting it down, as while it does turn the equipment off, it saves your work first and then lets you continue right from where you stopped the moment you ‘wake’ it up. A great solution for those of us who work with computers all day, and where turning the PC on and off is not a valid option.

Fourth: turn them off. Printers, scanners, everything hooked up to your PC will keep on using electricity even if you’ve turned off your PC. Yes, even if they’re on standby mode. A good way to handle this particular situation is by simply turning everything off when you’re not using them. Having a unified power strip where you plug all your PC-related gadgets also help, as it lets you turn off one switch instead of a lot.

Fifth: Recycle old technology. If you still have that old, clunky PC from last month and want to get rid of it, an earth-friendly way is to simply recycle them. Better yet, donate them to services such as Freecycle, a big mailing list for people looking to give stuff away or are looking for free stuff. You may even net a few friends or two.

These are just a few of the things you can do to help the world be green again. Not too hard, are they? Updates as we get them, and stay green.

Via PC World