In my popular book Beat High Gas Prices Now! I offer many ways you can save $20 to $50 per month at the pump. Here are 11 of the easiest opportunities you have right now to beat higher gas prices– without buying a new, more fuel-efficient car or giving up driving altogether.

How to Beat Higher Gas Prices

⇒Drive Less

⇒Drive Smarter

⇒Get a Tune Up

Drive Less – The single best way to spend less money at the pump is by buying less gas. The best way to avoid buying gas is by not driving.

Note that I don’t say, use Uber or Lyft. If prices rise enough, car services and taxis will charge an “emergency surcharge” or some other fee to cover their own increased gas costs.

BONUS: Burning one gallon of gasoline generates almost 20 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2), a potent greenhouse gas that is causing climate change. When you drive less, you generate a lot less CO2, so not only are you saving money but you’re doing your part to stop climate change, too.

1-Telecommute -If there ever was a time to work from home, this is it. You’ll spend nothing on gasoline and save a lot of travel time that you can use for either work or leisure. If your company already has a telecommute policy, take advantage of it. If not, ask your boss if you can work from home a couple of days a week as long until the prices at the pump come down.

2-Car Pool – If you still need to go to a physical work location, find a couple of people to carpool with. Four people sharing a ride keeps three cars off the road, and shares the price of gasoline four ways.

The iCarPool.com mobile app makes it easy to find a ride to share. So do Ridefinders.com, eRideShare.com, and Waze Carpool.

BONUS: Carpool lanes are usually faster than regular lanes used by only one person per car.

3-Use Mass Transit – If your community has a decent subway, bus or light rail system, now is the time to use it. Subways and light rail systems are electrified, so fares should not be affected by higher gas prices.

4-Walk and Bicycle – I have been car-less for about four months now and have been surprised by how easy it is to walk to many places I used to drive to. If you want to walk to the grocery store, invest in a cart on wheels so it’s easy to get your groceries home.

Drive Smarter – The way we drive has a big impact on how much gasoline our vehicle uses.

You can get many more miles to the gallon if you do the following:

5-Drive the Speed Limit – In addition to being safer, driving the speed limit saves gas. How much? Every 5 mph you drive above 60 mph is like paying an additional $0.10 per gallon for gasoline.

6-Don’t be a “Jack Rabbit” – Hopping in and out of traffic, speeding up, slowing down and weaving from one lane to the other wastes gas because all that acceleration and deceleration uses the engine so inefficiently. Plus, it doesn’t really shave that many minutes off your arrival time.

7-Plan Your Route – People waste a lot of gas taking the long way to their destination or not knowing where they’re going in the first place. Use Waze or the GPS device on your phone or in your car to find the shortest route. When possible, travel during non-rush hour.

8-Stop Idling – “Idling” – when you sit in your car with the gear in “park” and the engine running, going nowhere – is another word for wasting gas. Just. Don’t. Do. It. You use a lot more gasoline idling than if you turn the car off for a couple of minutes then on when you’re ready to give. Skip long drive-through lines. If you go to pick someone up, turn off the engine while you wait for them to come out.

Focus on Your Vehicle – Maintain the engine, tires, and air filters to improve fuel efficiency.

9-Change Your Oil and Get a Tune Up – Improve gas mileage by an average of 4.1 percent by maintaining your vehicle in top condition. That may include changing the air filters and replacing the spark plugs.

10-Pump Up Your Tires – You can beat higher gas prices and improve gas mileage by around 3.3% by keeping your tires inflated to the proper PSI. If you don’t know what your PSI is, you can find it on the inside of the car’s front door.

Need a gauge to check your tire pressure? Here are some good ones.

11-Remove the Roof Rack and Extra Weight in the Trunk – A roof rack creates wind resistance, which means your car needs more gas to move forward.

Extra weight in the trunk also puts more strain on the engine to do its job.

Don’t treat your trunk like a storage facility, and don’t leave the roof rack on if you’re not using it.

No matter what the price of gas is, burning it is like burning money (except it has a much bigger impact on climate change).

Hurricane Harvey has reminded us just how dependent on gas we can be if we don’t get smart about how we use it.

The post 11 Immediate Ways to Beat Higher Gas Prices After Hurricane Harvey appeared first on Big Green Purse.

Eco-friendly. It’s such a buzz word in the world of business these days. But the truth is, many people talk the talk but don’t really walk the walk – simply because they’re don’t know how to get started.

If this sounds like you, take a minute to read this post. With the help of sponsor CityDocs, I’ve pulled together 10 simple ways your enterprise can become a more eco-friendly company.

1) Switch to a Paper Free Office

Just think for a second about the amount of work that goes into making one single piece of paper. The pollution caused by logging. The fumes from factories. The toll that transportation takes on the atmosphere. So, why not do your bit to help reduce the reliance on paper, by switching to a paper-free office? There are many computer programs and systems that can help, plus the Cloud now provides invaluable backup for vital documents.

Don’t Miss: 5 Ways to Reduce Waste Office Paper

2) Outsource Your Printing

Even if you go paperless, you may still need some office printing done for annual reports, event planning, and other special documents. Why not outsource the process to an external company that has the machines capable of getting the job done with minimum waste? Working with a professional printer could also potentially save energy, depending on the size of the job.  Remember to print on both sides of a sheet of paper; print on recycled paper; avoid wasting extra sheets of paper within the job; and printing only the copies you need.

3) Encourage Cycling, Mass Transit, Carpooling, and Telework

Shrink your company’s carbon footprint by encouraging employees to get to work someway other than by their own individual vehicles. Can employees car pool? Use the bus or subway system? Why not encourage staff members to pick up a bike instead? You could even introduce a company scheme whereby you help staff members purchase their bikes, or set up some company accounts so employees can take advantage of local bike-sharing solutions. Of course, letting employees work from home a couple of days a week will also significantly cut down on the amount of oil and gas they need for transportation.

This Can Help: 5 Ways to Cut Costs by Shrinking Your Carbon Footprint

4) Install Recycling Bins

Every business, even the most eco-conscious, will have piles of rubbish to dispose of every day. Most of this rubbish will simply go into a bin, and then get taken away in one swirled mess, including food, paper, cans and plastic. If you install specific recycling bins for separate trash items, though, you’ll be amazed by how many staff members use them. At the very least separate office paper from other trash. If possible, arrange for food waste to be picked up and composted by a community composting program.

5) Create a Company Green Purchasing Club

Especially during the summer growing season, many farmers offer buying clubs to employers to encourage employees to buy locally grown organic food. The farmers will take orders in advance and then deliver the food in bags and boxes to the office so employees can easily take them home.

6) Change Those Lightbulbs!

The trouble with traditional lightbulbs is that they consume a lot of energy and don’t last very long, so you have to keep replacing them. Replace them with high-performance compact fluorescents or even better LEDs. They’ll save significantly more energy and money, and it will be years before you have to replace them.

Good Tips Here: How to Pick the Best Energy-Efficient Light Bulbs

7) Green Web Hosting

Web hosting is an area you probably don’t associate with environmental damage, however the amount of energy used by hosting companies is astronomical! Green web hosting companies use renewable energy and carbon offsets to minimize energy use, while still being competitively priced.

8) Share Office Space or Run a Virtual Office

Do you need your own physical office space and all the resources required to maintain it? Or can you share space with a like-minded company? Perhaps you don’t need office space at all, but can run a virtual operation.

9) Use Environmentally Friendly Cleansers

What do you use to keep your office clean and tidy? Most commercial cleansers rely on some combination of chemicals that can actually make people quite sick – from headaches and dizziness to nausea and worse. Replace conventional products with those that are fragrance-free and non-toxic. Most surfaces can be cleaned with warm water and simple, biodegradable, fragrance-free liquid soap.

Try Green Spring Cleaning with Plant-Based Cleansers

10) Educate Others

While your business might be environmentally friendly, the homes of many staff members probably aren’t. Try to spread your enthusiasm by educating staff members about the small things they can do. This won’t impact your business directly, but it will certainly help the world as a whole!

Do you have any tips yourself to be a more ethical company? Let us know in the comments.

The post 10 Ways to Become an Eco Friendly Company appeared first on Big Green Purse.

Looking to start a business on a budget? Right from the start, you can save money by using less energy, paper, supplies, and maybe the actual office itself.

BONUS: you’ll shrink your carbon footprint, too.

To help you get on the right track, I’ve identified 5 smart ways to cut business costs by shrinking your carbon footprint.

1. Go Paperless
2. Automate Energy Use
3. Telecommute
4. Skip Unnecessary Trips
5. Share Office Space

1. Go Paperless

Paper makes up about 35 per cent of our waste even though it’s an easy material to recycle or not use at all. That could mean you’re spending a hefty chunk of change on reams of paper you’ll just end of throwing away. Instead…

• Create a digital business card that you can easily email to people you meet. If you must print a card, choose one of those half-sized designs.

• Use electronic software programs to print fewer documents, share documents and files online, produce rough drafts, and publish e-versions of final drafts.

• When you do need to print, print on both sides and again, use available software to eliminate unnecessary blank pages.

• Reuse paper printed on one side into note pads, stuffing for shipping containers, and scratch paper for kids’ art projects.

• Recycle waste paper through local recycling programs.

2. Automate Energy Use

* Use a programmable thermostat – If you have set up shop in a building or office where you have to pay for heating and cooling, make sure you have the option to change the temperature of the thermostat.

* Put office lights on sensors or timers to make sure the lights go off when no one is working.

* Program computers to shift to sleep mode when they’re not being used, though it’s better if you can get them turned off completely when they’re not needed.

3. Telecommute

* Reduce overhead. Many businesses now keep their office footprint small and their overhead costs low by allowing employees to telecommute. Some entire businesses operate this way.

* Share desks. Perhaps employee A uses the desk when she is in the office Monday-Wednesday-Friday, and employee B uses the same desk when he is in the office Tuesday-Thursday.

4. Skip Unnecessary Trips

If your business requires you and your employees to travel to conferences, meetings and sales calls, consider whether the cost and carbon footprint of transportation, hotel, meals and other related expenses are worth the price.

* Can you cut them down to zero by attending the event virtually, conducting the meeting on Skype or a Google Hangout, or holding a webinar?

5. Share Office Space

Renting office space can eat into costs. Plus, it may not be a good use of precious resources if you end up having to pay for office space you don’t use. If you can’t operate virtually, a good and eco-friendly solution is to bunk with another, like-minded company.

* Share administrative services, the cost of maintaining conference room facilities, and other related expenses while maintaining a separate identify.

Of course, it also makes sense to compare prices of any products you do buy. Our sponsor for this post, Cost Compare, will soon enable its customers to compare prices on a wide variety of supplies, including coffee makers, CRM services, mailing lists, and even graphic designers. You can learn more about them right here.

NOTE: Sponsors enable us to bring you expert content at no cost to you. Our editorial opinions remain our own. Thanks!

The post 5 Smart Ways to Cut Business Costs by Shrinking Your Carbon Footprint appeared first on Big Green Purse.

According to Clean Air Partners, a non-profit organization that helps cities and communities in Washington and Baltimore raise awareness about air pollution so they can reduce it, code orange means that the air I’m breathing outside is, well, pretty bad.

Specifically, it warns that “pollution levels are harmful to children, older adults, and anyone with a respiratory or heart condition.”

On a code orange day, parents should keep their kids indoors – even though it’s summer and they’d love to be running around outside. It means that older folks should stay inside, too – no brisk walks around the block, definitely no lawn mowing. Ditto for anyone with asthma or other lung ailments. When I hear “code orange,” I automatically think, “Uh, oh. I better stay inside,” even though summer is my favorite time of year.

Clean Air Partners bases its recommendations on a sort of measuring stick called the Air Quality Index, or AQI. The AQI, seen right, uses both a color-coded and a numerical scale to report on how clean or polluted the air is and what associated health effects might be of concern. The AQI, says Clean Air Partners, focuses on health effects people may experience within a few hours or days after breathing polluted air. Pollutants it monitors include particulate matter, ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide.

Obviously, even if you don’t have a weakened immune system or heart disease or a similar problem, it’s not a good idea to breathe dirty air, no matter how old you are. Staying inside on code orange days or worse is a way you can protect yourself and your family in the short-term. Long term, we all need to work together to protect the air we all breath.

The most important action we can take is to use less energy, since burning oil, coal and other fossil fuels is the primary source of so much air pollution.

AT HOME:

Turn off lights and electronics when you’re not using them. Use a programmable thermostat like the Nest to keep your air conditioning at a reasonable and even temperature. Don’t mow the lawn if you really don’t need to. Use a gas or electric grill instead of charcoal.

AT WORK:

Telecommute if possible. Otherwise, carpool or take mass transit to work to reduce the amount of gasoline being burned. Support your employer’s energy-saving initiatives, which will help clear up the air in your entire community.

If you live in the Washington/Baltimore region, you can also sign up for free Air Alerts to get air quality updates, especially when pollution levels are projected to be high.

Our air can get dirty and smoggy, but it doesn’t have to. Saving energy always makes sense. It increases our national security and saves us money, too. But in the summer, it’s especially important, since it’s the best way to keep our air clean.

The post What is a Code Orange Day & How Does It Hurt Your Lungs? appeared first on Big Green Purse.