Ever wonder how much it actually matters whether you recycle that can or swap out that light bulb? Counting it up in inches, hours, and gallons, or even in hippos, breakfasts, or Tolstoy, can help you see the difference you're making. Here are some fun, real ways to visualize the impact of your green choices.
- In one day, a single low flow toilet in a single household saves 50-80 gallons of water, more than the amount drunk in 24 hours by a 3-ton African hippopotamus. That's a lot of water!
- Recycling a six pack of cans saves enough energy to run an average television for long enough to watch your local half-hour news every day for two and a half weeks, or long enough to watch 36 house renovations on Greenovate. That's a lot of screen time!
- Changing one 100-watt incandescent light bulb to a 100-watt CFL in a fixture you've got switched on for 8 hours a day saves 216 kWh over the course of a single year. That's enough electricity to blow dry your hair in the morning and the evening, plus microwave your breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for all 365 days. When you've done that, you'll still have plenty of energy to spare, if "plenty" means enough to make about 28,000 holes with a power drill. That's a lot of holes!
- If you recycle a four-foot high stack of newspapers that's equivalent to a saving a 40-ft fir tree. In the time it takes a fir tree to grow that large, you could fly a single-seater airplane for 4,000 trips around the entire circumference of the Earth. When you've finally landed, you'll still have enough hours to give an unabridged audio book of Tolstoy's famously hefty epic novel War & Peace 700 plays from beginning to end. That's a really long time!