Used coffee grounds. That's right, I said used coffee grounds. Back in my days working at Starbucks, I used to get requests all the time for our bags of used coffee grounds. At first, I thought there were actual people out there who tried to re-use coffee grounds to make coffee at home. Turns out, some of our smartest customers were using the grounds for fertilizer in their gardens. Not only did it save them money – no more bagged fertilizer at the local gardening store – but they also ended up with a garden smelling like fresh, rich coffee.

Let's play pretend for a second and say I have my own garden, to accompany my Malibu beach house that I share with Ryan Gosling (hey, I said PRETEND). I would head down to my local café and ask them for their coffee grounds.

Your barista will thank you for it. Trust me, nothing is less fun than carrying 40 pounds of wet coffee grounds to the garbage dumpster in the back of the shop. You will be doing them a favor, as well as yourselves.

If you do take my advice with the coffee grounds, it's always nice to pay your barista back with a nice basket of tomatoes, squash or eggplant that was freshly picked from your vegetable garden. Makes the barista feel appreciated for doing their part in helping you save the environment.

So, there you go. Used coffee grounds make excellent fertilizer, it's free, it helps the environment by recycling the coffee, and you are able to grow fresh organic vegetables from the comfort of your own home, AND your barista gets a basket of fresh vegetables as a thank you gift for helping you out. Everybody wins!

As a recent transplant to LA, I came with reservations of my ability to explore without a car. Coming from the east coast and living in cities with widespread access to public transportation, I was pretty spoiled. However, to my surprise, LA can be a very pedestrian friendly city. And with the weather perfect year 'round, it's easy to plan a day to do it. Some of my favorite walking neighborhoods include West Hollywood, Silverlake, Beverly Hills, Downtown and Hollywood. All you need to do is check a bus or metro route and get on your way.

In general, here are some tips for planning a good walk:

· Bring water. Use a reusable bottle (duh).

· Wear comfortable shoes. I can't stress this enough. I once did a walk around Paris in loafers. I was hobbling like Quasimodo by the end of it.

· Aimlessly wander, but bring a map. Serendipity is fun, just be aware of your surroundings.

· Enjoy an urban oasis. Try to integrate some urban green spaces in your itinerary.

· Bring a camera. You never know what you're going to see.

I've found two websites that can plan a good walk:

Google Maps. They've recently introduced a function that gives you directions on how to get somewhere on foot.

Walkscore (http://www.walkscore.com/rankings/Los_Angeles). This website has a Google maps mashup that rates how walkable a neighborhood is and provides points of interest in the surrounding area.

For the really ambitious, here's the itinerary if you decided to walk from LA to New York.

At a rate of 3 miles an hour, 24 hours a day (apparently, it doesn't understand the concept of sleep), Google estimates that it would take about 38 days and 3 hours to walk the 2,800 miles. Good luck keeping up the pace through the Rockies.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&hl=en&geocode=&saddr=los+angeles&daddr=new+york+city&sll
=40.720136,-74.010944&sspn=0.029273,0.063171&ie=UTF8&dirflg=w&z=4

Phillip Javellana
NBC.com Intern

Ideally I'd live near where I work or I'd work from home -- both practices that were common until about 50 years ago. Nowadays an hour's commute, especially here in Los Angeles, seems to be the standard. Each morning, I stare out at the freeway before me, lanes clogged to the seams, traffic alternating between speeding and crawling. It could drive a man to desperate measures. And it has.

I have decided to become a hyper-miler, one of those kooky people obsessed with extracting every conceivable mile out of a gallon of gas. The folks who are into this deep have some pretty extreme methods: driving on the painted lines of a roadway or over-inflating tires to reduce rolling resistance (and traction, BTW), avoiding routes that require left turns, "drafting" the cars in front of them. Now I can't quite recommend any of those tips for most folks, but there are plenty of techniques that make sense and can earn you as much as an additional 10% in gas mileage with precious little effort. A few faves:

Avoid the brakes whenever you can. It's all about anticipation. When you see a red light or stopped traffic up ahead, take your foot off the gas the instant you know you're going to have to stop; coasting to a stop is good. Truckers know this technique already --their stopping distances are so long that they have to concentrate and anticipate much further ahead than most drivers bother to.

Ease up to Speed. Slow acceleration is a patient art. Yes, my car is pretty fast when I jump on the throttle -- which I no longer do. In fact, I try to never extend the accelerator more than half way through its range. Can you say 0 to 60 in 15 seconds?

Dump the junk. I finally parted with my 8 x 12' wool moving blanket, five gallons of water (40 lbs.), tire chains (!?), hiking boots, my cassette collection, and a small tool box. What's in your trunk?

Stay home. The ultimate sag mileage improver is to not use the car at all. Can you combine two trips? Work from home once in a while? Walk to the store? We're trying a "no drive" day once a week.

Watch and win. My car's got a nifty "current miles per gallon" calculator as part of its trip computer. It will completely raise your consciousness about your driving style. Yes, it'll creep down into the single digits when you're heading up a hill -- but that's about the only time you need to see it down there. And you'll get a thrill out of watching it jump to 150 MPG or more when you're coasting down a hill.

Now I have to layer on top of this to use some common sense. Don't compromise safety for the sake of saving a bit of gas. But for me, the solace of trying to save energy and reduce pollution is a welcome obsession. It's all about thinking more long term: anticipating traffic, imagining alternatives to the way you've always thought about your car, and considering the wasteful impact of not thinking about the future.

Peter Hammersly
Content Director

You hear that phrase thrown around a lot, but I'll bet you rarely stop to think about what each of the three elements really means. We typically just lump it all together and assume it means to put your cardboard, scrap paper and empty bottles and cans into the recycling bins. But we tend to forget about the first two parts of the phrase. Reduce and reuse…how exactly do we go about doing that?

Reducing and reusing actually go hand-in-hand rather conveniently. If you can think of ways to reuse the things you already have, you will reduce your consumption. It's as good for the environment as it is for your pocketbook.

I'm sure you're already thinking of all the wasteful things in your life that you wish had more than one use. The one that always comes to my mind are those pesky plastic bags under almost every kitchen sink. First of all, shame on you for not using reusable shopping bags in this day and age. But I get it…things happen and we all end up with an excess of these things.

Avoiding purchasing new items and start reusing those plastic bags:
- as trash bags in small trash cans, such as in the bathroom or laundry room
- in lieu of packing peanuts when shipping fragile items in the mail
- to pick up your pet's poo after walks through the neighborhood

Here's an example of how I recently began reusing these adorable glass yogurt containers that were piling up after several months of eating the most important meal of the day…

Oh look…this tasty yogurt just happens to come in rather tasteful glass containers!

They're too cute to recycle or (heaven forbid!) throw away, but they sure do take up a lot of storage space.

Here's a great idea! I can use them as votive or tea light candle holders. To be really festive, I could tie a decorative bow around the top to dress them up a bit.

There's always the utilitarian route. They're perfect for storing nail scissors, clippers and tweezers in the medicine cabinet, or for buttons, thimbles and snaps in the sewing room.

Then once you've identified all the many ways to reuse things that were intended to be single-use items, you can find one last way to reuse...a vase! Not only will it brighten up the room, it'll be your own little reward for helping your both your finances and the planet.

Meet Pucci. She is an adorable pug, who at only 9 months old is already on her way to becoming totally "green." She already has an organic chew toy – a monkey we’ve named Charlie.

Her food, by Wellness, is filled with all-natural antioxidants and nutrients. And on the other end of the spectrum, her poop bags are 100% biodegradable!M

Pucci’s latest way to go green is to help save energy around the house. We used to leave a door open for her to go in and out at night, because we don't have a doggie door yet. Recently, I bought bells for the French doors instead and now Pucci rings the bell when she wants out. Some might say she has her humans well trained!

There are lots of ways, big and small, to have your pet go green. The array of green pet products available now is amazing. There are eco-friendly toys, leashes, beds and treats for not only dogs, but cats and birds as well! You can even make your own pet food or treats if you have hours of free time on your hands. I think even a simple change – like switching to biodegradable poop bags – can have a big impact.

A few great sites that will help you get started on going green with your pets are below. There is even a whole blog site devoted to Raising a Green Dog! One great tip they offer is to convert an old suitcase into a dog bed!

Eco-Pet
http://www.shop.ecopetlife.com/main.sc

Great Green Pets
http://greatgreenpet.com

Pucci wants you all to be her friend on Dogbook, so be sure to visit her online and tell how you and your pet are making the change to a green lifestyle!
http://apps.facebook.com/dogbook/profile/view/5197693

Carole, A. - Los Angeles, CA

Don't live every day like it's your last one!

Morbidly boring, I know, but if we want to have any chance of ensuring that the southern third of Louisiana and the majority of Florida aren't under water by the time my kids start having kids, we need to buckle down on the choices we make. We need to really come to grips with the fact that today is not the last day we're going to be on this planet, and that the decisions we make DO matter and WILL affect the future course of things to come.

It's all about choices. So, with that, I'd like to offer up a list of choices you can make in your life that will help reduce your consumption of energy and natural resources and slow down the toll we're waging against our Earth (it's our only one, by the way, did you know that? We don't get do-overs with planets. I checked as part of my research). I am going to try to steer away from the obvious ones, like "Don't Drive an SUV", or "If you do, for the love of all that is holy, would you please carpool!?", or "Buy GE energy saving light bulbs." You already know all of this, and I don't need to berate you some more. I'd like to offer you some less traditional methods to achieve the same result. So, in no certain order, here goes:

Don't hit your brakes while driving uphill. It not only causes you to burn more fuel to get back up to speed, but the domino effect has caused others to come to a complete stop a half mile behind you.

Similarly, accelerating downhill is just as wasteful; you'll just rush up on the traffic up ahead and hit your brakes.

Rather than speed up to change lanes, ease back on the accelerator to let the car next to you go by first.

A half tank of gas weighs less than a full tank, so it's no surprise that you get better gas mileage while driving in the bottom half of your tank. Rather than topping off when you refuel, just take it to the half tank. You may have the inconvenience of having to refuel more frequently, but over a month's time, you'll notice more miles per gallon, and a lower overall fuel expense.

Richard Cortes
Web Producer, NBC.com