It may be the growing environmental awareness out there, it may be the gas prices, but car-centric attitudes are looking really dated these days.

Take drive-throughs for example; Waiting in your car with the engine running just to have food handed to you is convenient, but also pretty foolish and indulgent. Not only does the practice burn fuel wastefully, but the emissions pollute the air and the atmosphere.

Idling is so offensive these days, it’s kind of like what you’d expect the villain to do in a kids’ cartoon.

A man from Markham, Ontario decided to do something about his distaste for

drive-throughs. He and a colleague did an inventory of all the drive-throughs in town (29!) and clocked the average wait time for an idling car. Based on that information and a formula he borrowed to calculate fuel use and CO2 levels, he projected that over a year at all 29 drive-throughs in Markham, this adds up to 21,759,152 minutes of estimated total idling time, using 435,185 litres of fuel and releasing 118 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

What’s the easiest way to stop idling? Stop driving! But if you’re not quite there yet, there are plenty of things you can do when you operate a vehicle, to put an end to idling for good.

So up until a few weeks ago, I was filtering every cup of water I drank. Then my water filtration system broke and I decided to turn to the tap.

It took me awhile to get used to the idea of drinking tap water. I just couldn’t imagine that the same water that appears in my toilet was good enough for me to drink.

But David Suzuki had the right idea last year when he said, “I think that we’ve got to drink the water that comes out of our taps, and if we don’t trust it, we ought to be raising hell about that.”

And many Canadian municipalities are trumpeting the merits of their own water supply. The City of Toronto says that tap water is just as good and may even be safer than bottled water, since there are actually more regulations on tap water than bottled water.

But whether you filter your water or drink it straight from the tap, what you’re not doing is buying bottled water, and that’s a very good thing.

The lifecycle of plastic water bottles leaves a very large ecological footprint. Consider the energy required to produce the bottles and their packaging, not to mention the waste created from the millions of bottles sent to landfills. Even the bottles that get recycled do so at a high energy cost. Then, the fuel required to transport all that water by truck is enormous and so are the harmful CO2 emissions. Most bottled water travels hundreds of kilometers to get to your local store.

If that weren’t enough, bottled water is between 240 and 10, 000 times more expensive than tap water.

For a solution that is not hard to swallow, get yourself a glass or stainless steel water bottle (like the ones pictured here) and fill it up!

I’ve often wondered about my coworkers habits outside the workplace. Do they make an effort to conserve energy at home? Do they secretly only drink bottled water?

Since I work for an environmental organization, you would assume that my coworkers are extremely environmentally aware and vigilant, but let me assure you that even people who work in the field do not make the best choices all of the time.

In my office, there’s always someone who refuses to print double-sided pages or chooses the garbage bin over the recycling bin. But to be fair, we have done a few exemplary things – like designate a couple of small office printers to use only scrap paper – and collect and dump compost responsibly (even though our office building does not provide the service).

Turning your office green involves buy-in from upper management, but it also requires achievable goals, determination, and a little creativity to make it fun. If you are looking for some ideas to bring to your next workplace meeting, click here for ways to take eco-action in the workplace.