How much garbage do you generate in a day – more or less than the average 4.5 pounds a human produces every day (that adds up to about 1,000 pounds a year for each of us)?

So, did you deep fry your turkey and NOT burn your house down?

Let’s face it. Underwear is one thing we never think of recycling, yet a new trend has started in Japan that may soon gain support (pun totally intended) with the rest of the world, namely, recycling bras into solid fuel. Yep – women in Japan are being encouraged to recycle their used bras to be converted into solid fuel for industrial use.

At Germany’s Munich Zoo, you can watch the courtship rituals of the banded mongoose, hear the morning song of the scarlet ibis or visit the Indian elephants, who help keep the lights on with electricity generated from their poop.

The garden snail. They are formidable pests which have tormented gardeners for generations. There are more and less environmentally friendly ways of getting rid of garden snails. How about turning them into a gourmet meal?

Solar cooking is the simplest, safest, most convenient way to cook food without consuming fuels or heating up the kitchen. The first solar cooker we know of was invented by Horace de Saussure, a Swiss naturalist experimenting as early as 1767.  A solar cooker is like a hot box, in which we can cook our food without any cooking gas or kerosene, electricity, coal or wood.

1. Raise your thermostat to 78º. This is the number one way to conserve energy.

2. When you are away from home for more than eight hours, raise the thermostat setting and you can expect to see a 1% savings for each degree of setback. This will reduce the amount of energy used to cool your home while you’re away.

There's an organization called "The Global Soap Project" that seeks to recycle slightly used bars of soap from hotels and then give them to less fortunate people around the world. Every day, millions of bars of barely touched soap are thrown into the garbage. We Americans expect to find freshly wrapped soap in our hotel rooms. But once we leave, the soap is tossed.

More proof that we live in wondrous times: a fashion designer has created a bikini with solar panels. Yes, you can now sunbathe by the pool and still listen to your iPod or power your phone. Designer Andrew Schneider says (quote) “We were going around the table with ideas. As a joke I said that I wanted to do a bikini that could cool your beer at the beach. A couple weeks later, I realized I could do it.

University students in England are being encouraged to change their ways and recycle through a project in which tiny cameras are fitted into garbage cans. Scientists at Newcastle University say the “BinCams” were placed in kitchen garbage cans in five student households.