There are five easy habits you can develop to be more environmentally friendly without much effort and still be able to keep your tax refund check. No, you don’t need to build a hydroelectric plant in your backyard, convert your car to bio-diesel, or live in sweltering heat without air conditioning in your home. You may, however, have a couple of habits to break.

Turning lights off, not leaving the water on while brushing your teeth, and recycling raw materials are all ways we know how we can help out the planet. They’ve been talked before, and are probably the three biggest things one can do to make the most waves. What one forgets though, is that those aren’t the only small things you can do to not only save the environment, but money as well.

1. Reuse plastic shopping bags.

This one I think many people do already but it bears mentioning. After a huge trip to Wal-Mart you come away with enough plastic bags to make a tarp to cover your house. My household bought one of those nifty long sock tube things where you stuff plastic bags on one end and bags come out of the other open end. From portable biohazard containers to a simple makeshift small trash basket liner, plastic grocery bags are the Swiss Army knife of plastic containment.

This article appears in Apr 15-21, 2009.