Consider vegetarian diets for your pets, or at least consider feeding them less meat, poultry, and fish. It takes less energy to manufacture vegetarian pet food because of the process involved. If every dog in the US ate vegetarian one day per month, the energy savings would be the equivalent of 190 million gallons of gasonline - enough to drive every dog in the US to an annual dog show seventy-five miles away.

The next time your canine or feline friend needs a new bed, look for one that is filled with recycled fiber. If just one in every twenty dog owners purchased a bed made from recycled materials, the fiber savings would total nearly 3,200 tons and fill four hundred garbage trucks.

When you clean your fish tank, remove only one-third to one-half of the water and use it as a nutrient rich solution for house and outdoor plants. You'll conserve water and eliminate the need for chemical fertilizers. If every fish owner adopted this habit, the freshwater saved annually would be enough to fill two twenty-four ounce bottles for each of the 1.2 billion people in the world without access to safe drinking water.

Try purchasing a pet leash or collar that is made from organic canvas materials instead of nylon. Nylon production emits nitrous oxide-a type of greenhouse gas associated with global warming. If every dog in the US eventually received a replacement leash made of organic fibers instead of nylon, it would prevent the release of as much greenhouse gases as 250,000 households produce each year.

1. Don't forget to unplug the tree when you go to sleep. Not only will it conserve energy, but you won't worry about the possibility of burning the house down!

2. Reuse or Recycle your gift wrapping. If you gift was in a bag, keep it and use it for next year. Any bows and ribbon can also be reused. If it's wrapped in paper, be sure to place it in the recycling bin. And think about using newspaper to wrap gifts next time. Many papers have holiday issues in the days leading up to Christmas and you can plan what holiday image appears on the top of the gift if wrapped correctly.

3. After the kids have seen the cookies and milk put out for Santa, sneak back in and place everything back in the fridge...unless you actually enjoy them for yourself!

You can reduce the size of your "footprint" by purchasing shoes made from recycled materials. Look for soles made from postconsumer tire rubber, insoles made from foam cushions, or canvas made from old jackets or jeans. Your new footprint could represent the reuse and recycling of almost anything from soda bottles, foam cups, milk jugs, cardboard, and magazines to denim, coffee filters, file folders, cork, blankets, and burlap sacks. If every American household purchased one pair of shoes made from recycled materials, the savings could total more than two hundred million pounds of waste diverted from landfills.

Give secondhand clothing a chance. The average American purchases forty-eight articles of new clothing per year. If just one of those articles were purchased from a secondhand store, the energy equivalent of more than half a gallon of gasoline could be saved, because of all the energy used to manufacture and transport new clothes. If one in every ten Americans substituted his or her next purchase of one new garment with a vintage one, the energy saved could fly every resident of Hollywood to New York City for Fashion Week.

You can add fossil fuel consumption to the list of reasons not to buy real fur. Although synthetic fur is made from petroleum products, it takes only 1/3 of a gallon of oil to produce a faux fur jacket, while it takes twenty-two gallons of oil to produce the energy needed to make one from real fur. If just 10% of the three million real fur garments sold in the United States each year were replaced by an alternative nonfur garment, an average of five million gallons of oil and five million animals could be saved.

Consider buying clothes made from organic cotton. The purchase of one T-shirt and a pair of jeans made from 100% organic cotton eliminates at least 150 grams of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides from the environment. If one out of every five Americans purchased a 100% organic T-shirt instead of one made from conventionally grown US cotton, nearly fifity thousand tons of agrochemicals would be prevented from polluting US freshwater bodies, ecosystems, and wardrobes.

The process of dyeing fabric generates the largest proportion of waste-water produced by the textile industry. So buy clothes with "natural" colors. If most Americans chose one pair of pants that weren't dyed--it would save enough dye to cover the entire city of Chicago with an inch of colorful liquid.