If It's Brown, Flush It Down; If It's Yellow... Um...

So you've changed the lightbulbs, bought a hybrid, started toting a cloth bag to the grocery store, but you're stuck on ideas on how you might get a little bit greener. Or maybe you're just trying to save money these days.

Have you considered your toilet?

Whenever we go to smaller-volume toilets, a lot of the objections raised are caused by a percieved inability to handle, let's call them that they are, gigantic dumps. Fair enough.

Enter the dual-flush toilet, which does an end-run around the problem. If that's what you're doing, well, okay, flush as normal. But if all you're doing is peeing, you can flush in a slightly different way (say, push the handle up instead of down), and the toilet will do a half-flush.

See, it takes less water to flush pee than it does to flush poo. A lot less. The HowStuffWorks link quotes a savings of, again, half the water- 0.8 gallons vs. 1.6. And that does add up on the water bill. Plus if you happen to live in a water-parched region of the country (looking at you, southwest), that's that much more water you can use for other things around the house, or that someone else can use, or that doesn't have to get used at all.