Archive for December, 2010
Recycling Tips and Strategies – 10 Tips For a Greener Holiday Season
As people are becoming more environmentally-conscious, what you give and how you wrap your presents can have a major impact on the planet’s eco-systems. By reducing waste and encouraging recycling efforts, you can do your part to help reduce you carbon footprint, while aiming for a cleaner planet.
We have put together our Top 10 list of simple ways to help make this a green holiday season.
Is it Important to Conserve Water?
Like other things that come to mind, the answer depends on geography. Lucky enough places endowed with rich water resources are not likely to enforce conservation policy. Why should they? Nobody would listen anyway.
Less lucky places however may be starting to feel the grip of scarcity, if not immediate, projected in a not so far future, for a growing population. That may go together with dwindling resources, with available water of lower quality, with increased costs for pumping from further away or for more thorough and costly treating. They could start their conservation efforts by reviewing their old installations, probably leaking precious water to waste with no use whatsoever. But they may be struggling already with tight budgets and may not have access to easy financing for major restructuring.
Efficiency Equals Reduction
Imagine that if at the grocery store the person bagging your purchases left empty, unused spaces in each bag causing you to carry 10 instead of 5 bags out to your car then into your home. You would be investing some extra time, energy and space when it was unnecessary. Now transfer that thought to the waste and recycling industry. Instead of filling a trash bag or bin with large empty spaces, we can all do some simple acts to help keep transportation costs down while reducing fossil fuel consumption and saving ourselves some time and money.
The flattening of boxes greatly increases space efficiency in a bin. This does not just apply to cardboard boxes, but also includes any paperboard (cereal or pet food) ones as well. Crushing cans before recycling is much more easily done if it is possible to remove both the top and bottom lids first. Foil products are easily flattened by hand.