5

Not Painting Everything White

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When Michael Jackson serenaded us with the idea that black and white didn't matter, he must not have been aware of the effect of color on energy efficiency. Color can make a world of difference there.

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Or in his case, no color whatsoever.

Researchers who must have had a fun time with their grant application process took a black car and a silver car, then left them in a parking lot in the Sacramento heat for one hour. At the end of the allotted time, the silver car had an internal air temperature about 9-11 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the black car. This may seem like a no-brainer, but when a driver has to spend extra time and energy running the air conditioning to cool down his dark-colored car, the difference adds up to the tune of about a two percent increase in fuel economy. If every car out there joined the automotive Aryan Brotherhood, we'd see a drastic lowering of carbon emissions.

Berkeley Lab Environmental Energy Technologies Division
The baby in the silver car was much more comfortable than the baby in the black one.

4

Collecting Seashells

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Beaches are kind of like the off-Broadway shows of nature -- they're often very beautiful, but they're also a little gross, and you probably only went because someone else suggested it. Many people's fondest memories of the beach include picking up shells and tiny bits of ocean-polished glass while listening to their parents pretend that nothing's wrong.

But a study that took over 30 years to fully complete suggests that tourism is destroying the ecology of beaches, and it's mostly thanks to shells. Visitors grabbing the odd shell here and there, combined with beach patrols using grating vehicles to make the sands look pretty, have resulted in major change to the ecosystems found along a beach.

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Because what's a post-apocalyptic wasteland without beautiful bathrooms to hide from the zombies in?

On Llarga Beach in Spain, where the study was conducted, the abundance of shells decreased 60 percent as tourism increased 300 percent in the area. Why does that even matter? Along with probably a proportional increase in urine in the ocean, shells play a role in beach erosion, offer shelter for numerous fish and other ocean life, and are even used in bird nests. Fewer shells means fewer of everything that needs them. All because Uncle Charlie wants to bring home a goddamn clam corpse that's going to sit on a shelf and collect dust until Uncle Charlie himself is dead.

3

Windows (Yes, Fucking Windows)

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Here's the thing about windows: They're huge energyholics. A window is effectively a giant see-through hole in your wall that (barely) stops drifters and badgers from entering your home. That pane of glass can't do much else, though. It certainly does nothing to maintain the temperature in your home on hot summer days or cold winter ones. Approximately 30 percent of the energy used to heat or cool your house flies right out the window like a dog who just saw a squirrel.

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"Keep burying those nuts. One day, I'm going to bury you."

Is there a solution to the waste issue? Of course! You could start by living in a dark box and slowly morphing into Gollum. If that doesn't tickle your fancy, there are also "smart windows," which can save more than one percent of the nation's annual energy consumption. How much is one percent? It's the Donald Trump of energy waste: $10 billion.

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Yes, something exists that's as big a waste of energy as Trump himself.

2

Slightly Irregular Food At The Grocery Store

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Most people, when looking at a banana display (bear with us), are going to pick their bananas based on a weird fruit-based body-shaming method we've all grown up with. Forget about all of the slightly misshapen bananas; those are staying behind. Chef Jamie Oliver is trying to help this issue by convincing people that it's okay to eat dick-shaped potatoes, but he's only one man. We all need to help.

ASDA
They all wind up as perfectly-shaped turds at the end.

1

Lawns Are The Goddamn Worst

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During World War II, soldiers were dying from so many bug-transmitted diseases, like typhus and malaria, that the military began to issue powdered DDT, which more or less worked exactly as it was supposed to. The problem was that nobody realized how much residual cancer and environmental damage it would cause.

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They thought it was the latest and greatest all-purpose seasoning.

These newly-returned heroes, however, now realized that they could enjoy a pleasant suburban lawn totally bug-free thanks to DDT, and lawns began to pop up at unprecedented rates. Thanks to our newfound love of soft, cushy Kentucky Bluegrass, we started heavily using water for outdoor purposes. The average American household uses about 320 gallons of water a day, 30 percent of which goes outside, and most of that is used for lawn watering. Across the country, landscape irrigation accounts for nine billion gallons per day. You could remake Waterworld like five times over with that much liquid.

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Your lawn might even appreciate the purified piss as a new taste sensation.

In drier parts of the country, outdoor water uses climbs as high as 60 percent, and as you may have heard, this isn't a brilliant plan in places like California, where there just isn't water anymore. This is made even worse when you figure that 50 percent of that water is pure waste, thanks to evaporation, wind, and runoff. The solution to that, of course, is people like David Bartlett, who runs a company called Xtreme Green Grass that will come and paint your dead fire hazard of a lawn so that you can still pretend your property is verdant and healthy instead of a ghoulishly gussied-up pile of tumbleweed.

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And the way we're going, they'll have an entire globe's worth of business soon enough.

Be sure to check out 5 Ways People Are Trying To Save The World (That Don't Work) and 6 Terrible Ideas That Science Says Will Save The Planet.

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