Going green is easy. If you are reading this, you care about the environment and want to do whatever you can to protect it. Going green is a process that is best taken in small steps. Like any other habit, it begins with an assessment. If you are already using cloth shopping bags, eliminating phantom loads, walking or biking instead of driving and choosing locally-grown foods instead of packaged and processed items, take a bow.
Recycle or Repair Devices
"81% of the life-cycle energy costs associated with a single computer is from its manufacture, only 19% from its operation," states Mark Swanson on the website, Going Green Today. This means that every time someone repairs and reuses computers and other electronic devices instead of buying new, enough energy is saved to make four new devices.
Heating and Cooling
Set your thermostat 1 degree lower in fall and winter and 1 degree higher in spring and summer and you can save 4 to 6 percent of all the energy you use to heat or cool your home, states in the pop-up you see when you click on "January" in National Geographic's "Great Energy Challenge Energy Diet."
Energy Consumption
You can reduce home energy consumption by up to one-third if you follow the National Geographic Green Guide's recommendations. Plug all small appliances into surge-protected power strips that can be switched off when not in use.
Freecycle
Freecycle, a Tuscon, Arizona-based nonprofit organization started by Deron Beal, keeps an estimated 300 tons of items out of landfills by encouraging people to give items away instead of throwing them away, states Sally Deneen at Weatherbug.com.
Reduce Waste
Reducing the amount of waste you produce in the first place should always come before recycling. Containers and packaging were 31 percent of all municipal solid waste in 2007. Bring reusable bags and buy unprocessed, locally-produced items.
Compost
Combine food and yard trimming waste reduction with composting, in an organic garden of your own. Food waste and yard trimmings account for more than 25 percent of all municipal solid waste.
Business Practices
The EPA guide, "Waste Not, Want Not," describes strategies for caterers, grocery stores and restaurants to reduce the amount of still-edible food entering the waste stream. Frost Valley YMCA used those strategies and others to achieve 100 percent recovery of both pre-consumer and post-consumer food waste and yard trimmings through composting. The composting facility doubles as a visitor training site. Visitor donations help offset the cost of running the equipment and maintaining the facility.
Recycled Materials
If you must buy something new, insist that it be made from recycled materials. Every time you buy a T-shirt made from recycled PET, which is the clear plastic used to make soda and water bottles, you keep 19 bottles out of a landfill.
Aluminum Cans
The aluminum cans recycled in 1995 saved 20.6 million barrels of oil. That amount of oil could power the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for six years, according to the Can Manufacturer's Institute, in their "Great Aluminum Can Roundup" fun facts page.
Carbon Dioxide Emissions
Corporate Watch, established in 1996 to provide corporations with best environmental practices research, states that shipping 1kg of New Zealand apples to the United Kingdom produces 300 grams of carbon dioxide emissions, while locally bought apples from Kent produced just 120 grams of carbon dioxide. Similar amounts are produced when shipping grapes from Chile to the United States.
Member Comments