Making your difference

Clean air can be protected and pollution can be prevented with a collective effort. Find our what you can do to make a difference in your home, workplace and community.

Tips for Clean Air in your Home

Tips for Inside your Home

  • Participate in your local utility’s energy conservation programs. Ask your local utility about its customer energy conservation program. If they don’t have a conservation program, encourage them to start one.
  • Unplug items you don’t use very often, such as radios and small appliances. Many of them draw electricity, even when they are turned off.
  • Insulate your attic to make your home more efficient for heating and cooling. This saves energy, therefore reduces pollution.
  • Removing refrigerant from refrigerators, air conditioners, and dehumidifiers before disposing of the appliances prevents the release of about four million pounds of CFCs each year. The used refrigerant can be recycled and reused.
  • Use water-based cleaning products in your home to prevent air pollution.
  • Opt for reusable grocery bags for all of your shopping trips.
  • As your traditional light bulbs burn out, transition to energy efficient compact fluorescents.
  • Opt for consumer goods with recyclable packaging.
  • Use gels, sticks and solids, and avoid using spray products, such as hairspray, bathroom cleaners, air fresheners, antiperspirants and insecticides. Many VOCs come from spray products used in your home.
  • Use environmentally friendly cleaning products, or make your own cleaning products out of household goods, such as baking soda, lemon juice and vinegar. With less toxic chemicals, natural-based cleaning products are not only cleaner for the air, but also safer for you and your family.
  • Use water-based latex paints in your home. These have fewer evaporative emissions and are less polluting, plus they are easier to wash off of your hands.

Tips for Outside your Home

  • Avoid using gas-powered lawn and garden equipment on hot summer days when smog alerts are forecast. Running a gas-powered lawn mower for one hour emits the same amount of pollution as driving your car from Washington, D.C., to New York City and back.
  • Do not burn leaves, branches and other debris in your yard. Burning this material produces harmful emissions that can contribute to smog and other types of air pollution.
  • Participate in recycling programs. Recycling keeps trash out of incinerators and reduces emissions associated with burning solid waste.
  • Set your air conditioners six degrees higher. If all consumers do this, it will save 190,000 barrels of oil a day, and eliminate all pollutants that come from burning oil used produce the electricity involved.
  • Seal containers tightly. Make sure that containers of household cleaners, workshop chemicals and solvents, and garden chemicals are tightly sealed to prevent volatile chemicals from evaporating into the air.
  • Plant shade trees, tall grasses and shrubs around your home to help lower the heating and cooling bills.
  • Use a charcoal chimney starter for barbeque, and avoid using lighter fluid, which evaporates and adds to the air pollution problem.
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Tips for Clean Air in your Workplace

Tips for Employees

  • Use your car air conditioner wisely. Air conditioning is a drag on your car’s engine, reducing gas mileage by as much as 20 percent.
  • Don’t overfill or “top off” your car’s gas tank. Even if you don’t spill gasoline, fumes escape and react with nitrogen oxides and sunlight to create smog.
  • The more weight your car carries, the less fuel-efficient it becomes. Take unnecessary items out of the trunk.
  • Talk to your employer about offering incentives that encourage employees to carpool or take public transportation.
  • If it’s possible, try telecommuting or working a compressed schedule. You can avoid rush hour and cut auto emissions, stress and commuting time.
  • The average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of paper each year. Recycle and save energy, reduce pollution and divert materials from landfills and incinerators.
  • Don’t print unnecessary documents, and if you must print, use recycled paper.
  • Encourage your employer to implement a waste reduction plan in your office. Waste reduction efforts help conserve valuable natural resources, reduce pollution and save energy. Recycling also prolongs the life of materials by reprocessing them into a new material/product rather than landfilling them.

Tips for Employers

  • Participate in waste exchanges. These enable industrial process wastes, by-products, surpluses or materials that do not meet specifications, to be transferred from one company to another company where it can be used again in a new process.
  • Recycle or reuse electronics. Over 90 percent of the materials in electronic products can be recycled or reused in other electronic products. This includes plastics from the casing and metal from the circuit boards and switches.
  • Conduct energy audits to identify ways to reduce energy use.
  • Install timers or motion sensors to turn off lights in rooms not frequently used.
  • Program the heating and cooling systems so that the office is not heated or cooled when it’s empty.
  • Landscape around your office building. Adding trees or a berm around the building can provide shade and protects the building from the wind, lowering heating and cooling costs and increasing efficiency.
  • Reduce landscape maintenance by seeding grassy areas with slow growing grass or natural landscaping. Native flora requires far less maintenance, such as mowing, watering and pest-treatment.
  • Use solar lighting for parking lots and walkways.
  • Make your work-site campus an idle-free zone.
  • Make it easier for employees to walk or cycle to work by installing bike racks and shower facilities.
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Tips for Clean Air in your Community

  • Learn about local clean air efforts and issues. Talk to your state environmental agency to find out what it is being done in your area to improve air quality and reduce pollution.
  • Support environmental non-profits working to prevent a climate crisis by becoming a member, participating in letter-writing campaigns or making a tax-deductible donation.
  • Work with local environmental groups to develop an air quality forecast program, so people can learn more about how to reduce air pollution and how to protect themselves.
  • Replace community holiday lighting displays with LED lights, which are more efficient and last much longer.
  • Appoint a community wide “green team” to oversee purchases by the municipality.
  • Encourage schools to transition from diesel fuels to compressed natural gas in new school buses.
  • Seek bids from contractors who are green and sustainable.
  • Construct buildings that are LEED certified. These building create healthier and more resource-efficient models of construction, renovation, operation, maintenance and demolition.
  • Site new buildings in locations that have access to natural light and shade to reduce dependence on electric light, heating and cooling.
  • Conduct energy audits of municipal buildings, and develop a plan to make each more efficient.
  • Use integrated pest management systems in schools and other public areas, instead of traditional pest management with chemicals.
  • Convert to natural landscaping instead of traditional, energy-intensive green grass lawns that require a lot of water, mowing and energy.
  • Look into and apply for the Community Action for a Renewed Environment (CARE) program available through the EPA. The new CARE program is a competitive grant program that offers an innovative way for communities to take action to reduce toxic pollution.
  • Encourage voluntary emission reduction incentives through grants that cover the incremental costs of cleaner engines and new technologies that reduce the air emissions and public exposure.
  • Investigate alternative fuels and determine if the people in your community will ever embrace mass transit.
  • Implement a community-wide no-idle ordinance, and enforce it.
  • Encourage your local government to replace their fleet vehicles with cleaner vehicles, such as hybrids or other vehicles that run cleaner and produce fewer emissions.
  • Enforce the speed limit. Vehicles traveling faster use more gas and create more emissions adding to the air pollution problem.
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