Water, water, everywhere? Not if we're not careful...

There's so much news about climate change and carbon emissions that other environmental issues often slip to the background. The importance of conserving water is one of those, yet it's every bit as vital to us as the climate, if not more so. Not to mention that if the climate does change problems with water supplies are a possible consequence. So the best thing we can do is get in to good habits now and solve the problem before it happens. Conserving water isn't difficult, it just takes a tiny bit of thought and effort. And it's amazing how easy it is to waste huge amounts of water on day to day tasks.

A friend working in Malaysia sent me the picture below of water saving tips and how much you can save by following them. Obviously not all of them apply to everyone, but they'll definitely get you thinking.

For loads more water saving tips you can also check out http://www.water-guide.org.uk/tips.html or this A-Z of tips from the BBC.

We need your tips! Saving money and the environment

We need your help finding the best eco-friendly, credit-crunch busting tip! Allaboutyou.com have asked us to pick the best green, money saving tip suggested by our readers for use in a list that they're compiling. All you need to do is send us an email with your tip and it could be yours - the more interesting and original the better! We'll be very grateful for all your ideas - send them to us at environmentweb@googlemail.com.

Thanks in advance!

Green nightlife - reducing the cost of having a good time

Everyone needs to let their hair down sometimes. But no matter how green we are in other aspects of our life it's easy to forget that a night out has its own costs in terms of the environment. Radiohead recently had the carbon and ecological footprints of two of their tours assessed with some interesting results. One tour, an amphitheatre tour, generated an estimated 9000 tonnes of CO2, while a tour of smaller theatres and venues generated almost 2300 tonnes. Even more interestingly well over 80% of this (over 90% in fact for the amphitheatre tour) was a result of fan travel and consumption.

Now, obviously we don't want to have to give up live music for the sake of the environment, but there's some obvious things we can do to improve things. In particular where transport is concerned - if more gig-goers car shared or even better used buses and trains it would make a major dent in these figures.

It's not just live music that has environmental impacts though - even a night out on the town will mean more carbon being produced. The lights and sound systems at an average nightclub mean that they produce around the same annual carbon emissions as twenty houses. But steps are being taken to improve things, with a number of eco-friendly clubs existing around the world including Surya in London, which opened last year. The club sells organic drinks, uses a system that recycles its waste water and to top it off generates electricity from the vibrations of its dance floor! It also offers discounts to clubbers arriving on foot or bike rather than by car. The organisation behind the club, Club4Climate are hoping that it will encourage other nightspots to follow in its footprints.

And don't forget even a night in can be made greener, with organic drinks and even carbon neutral beer meaning we can enjoy ourselves with minimal impacts.

What is eco-living? The ideas behind being green.

Eco-living and green-living have become common phrases, so much so that it's often easy to forget that it's not always obvious what exactly we mean by them. So now seems like as good a time as any to sit down and think, well, what do they mean?

First of all the two terms seem to be essentially interchangeable - I've never really heard anyone draw a clear distinction between the two (which makes life a little simpler!). Eco-living has the clue right there in it's name. Eco, derived from ecological, suggests that it's based on living in tune with the ecology and eco-systems around us - plant, animals and the environment we all live in. And that really is what eco and green living are about in a nutshell: trying to live in balance with the world around us.

A key concept that links in with eco-living is that of sustainability. Living sustainably, again as the name implies, refers to living in a way which can be kept up indefinitely. This means not relying heavily on fossil fuels, which will eventually run out, not farming so intensively that the soil becomes infertile and not causing any catastrophic changes to the environment that will irrevocably change the world we live in.

The ways of doing this are many and varied (check out these guides for some ideas) but all result in us trying to reduce the impact that we have on the world around us in one way or another, whether it's by buying local food instead of food transported thousands of miles or whether it's reusing shopping bags to reduce the amount of plastics we use. It's really very simple to take the first steps towards a greener, more eco-friendly lifestyle!