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" Reduce, reuse, recycle. These three words have become synonymous with &amp;quot;lighter&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;green&amp;quot; living. Unfortunately, too often the first two words in this mantra are completely forgotten. This is a shame because the way we should be employing these words is in the order they appear. First we should reduce our consumption, then we should reuse items when possible, and as a last resort we should recycle objects we no longer need. Now don&amp;#039;t get me wrong, recycling is great, but it&amp;#039;s also the most energy expensive option of the three, and if we follow the first two religiously we should have very little the recycle in the end.  In honor of Earth Day, I&amp;#039;ve compiled a table of 10 everyday disposable items that are creating a lot of unnecessary waste. By replacing some of these with reusable items, or eliminating them altogether, you can reduce the amount of trash you create by quite a bit in the next year.  1. Post-it Notes: While these little guys are great for leaving yourself reminders, they&amp;#039;re pretty wasteful. Even worse, they&amp;#039;re rarely recycled (yes Post-its can be recycled!). By cutting your Post-it use by four packs a year, you can save almost a third of a pound of paper.  2. Drinking Straws: Plastic straws, though small, make trash that&amp;#039;s completely unnecessary, and every ounce of trash created by a straw is entirely avoidable. By eliminating five straws a week you can keep more than one third of a pound of unwanted waste out of our landfills.  3. Paper Mail: Though e-mail has rendered snail mail almost obsolete, a lot of companies still mail out paper bills and advertisements. Eliminate one piece of mail a week by either switching to online billpay or removing yourself from a mailing list or two and in one year reduce your paper use by 1.15 lbs.  4. Zippered Sandwich Bags: Packing a lunch today? Then chances are you used at least one sandwich bag. If you&amp;#039;re able to replace one sandwich bag a day with a reusable storage container, you can decrease the amount of plastic in the dumps by 2 pounds this year.  5. Disposable Flatware: If you&amp;#039;re in the habit of ordering in lunch, there&amp;#039;s a good possibility that whether you ask for it or not, you get plastic flatware. If you can use real utensils instead of plastic (a fork and knife) 5 times a week you could save yourself and the planet 2.7 pounds of plastic a year.  6. Plastic Grocery Bags: If you go grocery shopping frequently, or buy your toiletries at the drugstore, it&amp;#039;s probably safe to say that you accumulate at least one plastic bag a day. By replacing that one plastic bag a day with a reusable tote for the next year, you could keep 5.3 pounds of debris from going into a landfill.  7. Plastic Water Bottles: Some cities have already banned the sale of plastic water bottles, which is great! However, for the rest of us, plastic water bottles are a constant temptation because of their convenience and availability. By cutting out just one plastic water bottle a day, you can save 7.9 pounds of plastic from either being recycled or thrown away.  8. Disposable Food Containers: If you&amp;#039;re accustomed to ordering food for delivery or getting takeout, you probably go through a lot of disposable food containers. If you eat in instead of taking food to go you&amp;#039;ll eliminate the need for food to be packed in disposable containers and save at least 10.6 pounds of plastic.  9. Disposable Coffee Cups: For most of us coffee is a part of our daily morning ritual. By replacing a disposable 10 ounce cup (smaller than a Starbucks small) with a mug 5 days a week, in one year you&amp;#039;ll save 6.45 pounds of trash. Now here&amp;#039;s the crazy part: If you stop using the protective paper sleeve on top of replacing your paper cup you can save an additional 5.3 pounds of trash a year, for a grand total of 11.75 pounds!  10. Paper Towels: This is another product that&amp;#039;s completely unnecessary! Even though these items are easily replaced with cloth rags or sponges, the moment you buy these guys you can&amp;#039;t stop finding uses for them and before you know it the whole roll is gone. If you buy just one less roll of paper towels a week, you&amp;#039;ll reduce the amount of paper towel waste you create in a year by 15.7 pounds! Implement all of these changes for the next year, and reduce the amount of garbage you make by almost 60 pounds. In addition to helping the environment, most of the changes will also save you some Cash! "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/institute/a18580/green-trash-reusable-disposable-eliminate/>