Clothing is a great garden treasure and can be reused in many other ways too! Buy clothing made of all natural fibers, not synthetics or synthetic blends. Once clothes are no longer in good enough shape to wear in public wear them in the garden. Anything that is in good shape but doesn't fit right or just doesn't match your evolving sense of style should be given to a second hand store, homeless shelter, friend, relative (or sold on ebay or garage sale). Items that are a synthetic fiber or synthetic blend usually aren't too good for reuse in the home or garden as they don't absorb water all that well or break down in compost. You can resuse some as grease rags in the garage or use old socks for polishing shoes and then discard in the trash after use. Mechanics will also take some of these rags, ask your local mechanic or golf course maintenance shop if they want your clean unwanted synthetic garments. Garments made of natural fibers are your real treasure! The first thing I do is remove the seams and discard them. The seams are usually sown with polyester thread which will not break down. Once you have removed seams, buttons, zippers, plastic ironed on designs, etc: Use cotton garments as cleaning or dusting rags. Once it gets too gross for this just drop it in the compost bin or bury it in the garden. It will break down and add to your soil. Large cotton sheets and towels and the front and back panels of shirts can be used as a weed barrier in your vegetable garden. Just lay it on the ground where you don't want weeds and put mulch over the top. It will break down in a year or two, just when you want to rotate a new crop to the area and rearrange a bit. Cotton, hemp, rayon and other plant fiber clothing can be torn into strips and used as litter in a chicken hutch. Once it gets gross just add it to the compost pile or bury it in the garden. I tend to bury most cloth just because I find manmade waste (paper, cloth) unpleasant to look at in a compost pile and rodents may decide to nest in it. If you don't have chickens just place small scraps you can't find another use for right into the compost or till into the garden. They tend to hold a lot of water in the soil as they break down so this saves on watering thirsty plants too. Bury any wool or cashmere in the garden. Animal hair releases a lot of nitrogen as it breaks down, but can smell when it's wet and can be slow to decompose in a compost bin. This makes it one of those perfect 'bury it and forget it' compost items. Old sheets and towels can be cut to the size of paper towels and kept in a kitchen cabinet for use on spills just like paper towels. They actually absorb more than paper towels and are free and save trees. After using them you can either wash and reuse or just compost as you would a regular paper towel. Use leather with caution. It is one of the most itensively chemically treated products we buy. You don't want residue from these chemicals in your soil (watch the movie "A Civil Action"). The best place for unwanted leather is the trash or recylcling if even available, not the compost.

Oh, lots of things: - Make sure your tires are inflated properly. The owner's manual or a sticker on the gas filler door or a door jamb ought to tell you what the pressure should be. If you need new tires soon, look for tires with "low rolling resistance" -- they can add a mpg or three to what you're getting now, and they're no more expensive than other tires. - Make sure the car is in good driving condition. Do the maintenance specified in the manual. Make sure brakes aren't dragging and clutches aren't slipping. - Assess your driving habits. You may drive "carefully" but what does that mean? Do you anticipate driving conditions so that you don't have to speed up or slow down suddenly? Do you accelerate smoothly and try to coast to a stop (in gear, please!) if it is safe and practical to do so? Do you try to bunch errands into one longer trip so you're not starting the car cold as often? Do you hang the car in gear or shift earlier? Even a car with an automatic transmission can be manipulated by foot some to get it into a higher gear sooner, without creating drama or engine problems. - Get the junk out of the trunk. If you're carrying heavy items you don't use in the trunk or the back seat, take them out of the car. No need to haul them around with you all the time. - If you're stuck at what you know is a very long light or the 7:43 freight train is parading across the road, switch off the ignition. Why idle the gasoline away if you can turn it off for a few minutes and switch it back on before you need to hit the gas again? - If you live in a cold climate, consider switching to synthetic motor oil. It's more expensive than "dino" oil, but it will be thin enough to help your engine start quickly and efficiently in cold weather (cold engines get much worse mileage than hot engines) That's a start. What else can you tell us?

"Depends" Jerry. Decel fuel cut-off is a very common strategy that even existed in carbureted cars (First one I can think of was Ford Escort 1980). When all we had were carbs, decel caused an extremely rich air/fuel ratio and wasted a lot of fuel while simply releasing most of it to the atmosphere right through the engines tailpipe. So they added fuel cut solenoids to shut the idle circuit down during deceleration. Once we had fuel injection interrupting the injector circuit operation was easy to reduce decel fuel waste, and that is standard across the board with every manufacturer. It's use allows for better catalytic convertor operation as well. Very rich fuel ratios deplete the catalyst of stored O2 and in effect turn them off. Combine that with an additional clutch in the transmission that allows for reduced, if not eliminated engine braking when in overdrive and the engineers are attempting to out gain the benefits of even coasting in neutral and not from just a fuel mileage consideration, but an emissions consideration as well. Today's hybrid vehicles are noted for not having any engine braking at all on certain models. In fact once they go into regenerative braking, and if the battery is sufficiently charged they will rely totally on the mechanical brakes to slow the car down unless "B mode" is used. "B mode" is known as mountain braking and uses the electric motors to fight each other to produce the effect of engine braking. You have to study engine control dynamics to see exactly what compression numbers occur during different engine operating conditions, but as far as the argument that you are burning fuel during a strong decel, "There isn't enough compression to properly burn any fuel that gets into the cylinders" once the manifold vacuum reaches a high enough value. So most of the fuel getting to the cylinders simply gets pumped to the exhaust, which quite often would resulted in a pretty loud backfire. Use the lack of such an occurrance, that cars don't back fire out the exhaust like they used to as part of the proof.

eld, a few reactions to your comment. First, if you don't drive much in traffic or with stop and go conditions, it won't do much for you. Many people do drive in situations like that, especially those who commute to work in urban locations. Cars burn gas when idling so whatever is saved is more than nothing. It's low hanging fruit, the feature is cheap and will help and can't hurt. Second, it was developed in Europe, where auto engineers have been focused for years on wringing more performance and more efficiency out of engines. I have a few year old, not small German car with an engine that's maybe half the size of what was put in the same model a dozen years ago. It gets amazing mileage, in the high 20s in town and mid to high 30s on flat highways (at highway speeds). With a turbocharger, it's very fast and responsive at lower speeds. When I lived in Europe a few decades ago, I remember that when stopped for other than a short interval - a draw bridge, a level train crossing, a long signal- drivers turned off their engines. The start stop feature does that automatically for those who, like you and me, appreciate not having to think about it. It's not a big deal but I think it's a thoughtful one.