If all Americans who take transit to work drove alone, they would fill a nine-lane freeway from Boston to Los Angeles. Fewer cars on the road also significantly reduces commuting time. People spend an average of 36 hours--nearly five full work days--in traffic delays per year.

Keeping your tires fully inflated could improve your gas mileage by around 3%. (It also makes your tires last longer.) The average American, who drives 12 thousand miles per year, could save about 16 gallons of gasoline annually (assuming 25mpg) just by maintaining his or her tires at the proper pressure. Across all US households, the gasoline savings could total 1.6 billion gallons--approximately the total volume of ice cream produced in the US each year.

Seek out energy efficient (front-loader) laundry machines. Your clothes will wash and dry faster. There are about 40,000 coin laundries in the US. If just one load in every Laundromat in the US were washed by a front-loader washing machine instead of a top loader, we'd save a million gallons of water per day--as much as ten households use in a year.

Live on-campus if you can. You'll cut down on commuting time, gasoline consumption, car maintenance, and pollution. There are 11 million college students, and 50% of those enrolled in the state universities live off-campus. If half of these students could bike, walk, carpool, or take public transportation to school, more than 2 million commuter vehicles could be removed from the nation's busy streets and highways.

Choose wastebaskets made from recycled steel. Steel is the most recycled material in the US, and producing products from recycled steel requires 75% less energy than that required to manufacture products from iron ore.

Try to use a tape dispenser made of at least 50% postconsumer plastic. Plastic waste makes up 11% of landfills, and only 5% of it is recovered and used as recycled material.

Try to use recycled stainless-steel scissors. If they have plastic handles, make sure it's at least 30% postconsumer plastic. Each year, steel recycling saves the energy equivalent of electrically powering about 18 million homes for a year.

Try to use plastic rulers made from 70% postconsumer recycled plastic. If every student in kindergarten through high school used one, we'd utilize 462 million inches of recycled plastic instead of 38.5 million feet of wood rulers or 7,291 miles of metal rulers.

Avoid products that contain polyvinyl chloride (PVC). This type of plastic is found in some backpacks, folder covers, and raincoats. PVC may contain toxins that can be harmful to immune systems and is extremely difficult to recycle. In fact, of the 1.6 million tons of PVC discarded every year, the amount recycled is, at best, negligible. So check the product label for PVC disclosures or ask if what you're buying is made from PVC.

Recycle your paper clips, or just reuse the one you have! Enough paper clips are produced each year to hand every person in the world at least three. For every one hundred thousand paper clips produced, only twenty thousand are used to hold together paper. The rest aren't being used.