The Tucson Association of REALTORs® has a large building with a flat roof that is just begging for a water harvesting project. With the water gathered, it could water the current landscaping and could probably even sustain more desert landscaping as well. TFS, a local company says "By irrigating your landscape with collected rainwater you reduce your demand on municipal water and the associated chemicals and fossil fuels used in its transport and treatment." Which translates to big energy savings. TFS has come out to the site and has the cistern we would like to use.

Turn a standard toilet into a low flush one in minutes! Although still a novelty in the US, low flush toilets are widely installed in Europe and Asia. Some countries even have multiple grades of water, drinking grade, washing grade, etc. Long story short, water is made cheap in this country, and people use more of the stuff when it's cheap. (We all know people who keep green lush backyard lawns in Phoenix, AZ, not to mention the golf courses!) However, you can implement a basic change starting in your bathroom to make a difference in the way you use clean water! Save large glass jars and wash them. Good candidates are those relatively slender and yet tall pasta sauce jars and juice jars. You may need to look around to find ones that fit well in your toilet's water tank. Fill 1 or 2 of them with water and sit them at the bottom of the toilet tank. Make sure they don't touch the mechanical parts in the tank so flushing isn't affected. We have 3 bathrooms in the house, each of them has 2 jars in the water tank! If more flushing power is needed, we just flush an extra time once the tank is full again.

Our goal is to start an urban-patio vegetable garden, so we can locally grow organic produce. This size bed can supply us with spinach, chard, and cabbage for the whole year, thus reducing the energy used in transportation and refrigeration. Benefits of raised plant beds: - Making a raised bed means that we'll be importing soil in order to raise the bed. This means we can choose good-quality soil and amend it with just the right fertilizers and compost or other organic matter to produce better plants. (Soil in our patio is a layer of gravel on top of a layer of caliche.) - Raised beds warm more quickly in spring, allowing us to work the soil and plant earlier. - Raised beds drain better. - The soil in raised beds doesn't get compacted, because they are constructed with accessibility in mind. - It's easy to tailor the soil for our raised bed to the plants we plan to grow there. - After the initial construction process, raised beds require less maintenance than conventional garden beds. - Easy attachments of either greenhouse plastic, or shade cloth (something we may need in mid-summer). All of the necessary labor will be done by ourselves, thus reducing the cost. We have already started the plant seeds. Rough Cost Breakdown: - Lumber & Hardware: $61.13 - Organic Garden Soil (22 cu. ft.): $75.46 Similar Products: - Sam's Club – $199.88 (not including soil) - Urban Garden Solutions – $229.08 (not including soil)

I am a grad student, so both attention span and money are short. The container would allow me to eat foods I grow myself (tomatoes, beans) that do not need energy spent transporting them to the local grocery store. I would be able to show my friends how simple it is to start being more environmentally conscious even with busy lifestyles.
The how-to youtube vid
Cost Breakdown

The roof rack fairing can improve fuel economy by streamlining airflow over a roof rack on your car. Most of my miles are on freeway roadtrips. If this saves 1/2 mpg of gas (conservative, according to some users), I'd realize savings of about a tank every year.