Okay, so to re-energize your efforts to go green this year, I thought I'd remind you of the reasons to do so. These are taken from my favorite book, "The Green Book" by Elizabeth Rogers and Thomas M. Kostigen. We'll focus on just a few things a week to work on. Here we go....
On average, you create 4.5 pounds of trash each day. Over the course of a lifetime, you will leave a 90,000 pound legacy of trash for your grandchildren. If every person in America simply seperated the paper, plastic, glass and aluminum products from their trash and placed it in the recycling bin, we could decrease the amount sent to landfills by 75%! Right now, it takes an area the size of Pennsylvania to dump our waste each year.
Americans use at least twice as much energy and water per person as anyone else in the world. If every American simply replaced just five of their traditional lightbulbs with CFL's, we'd keep more than 1 trillion pounds of greenhouse gases out of our air. That's equal to the emissions of 8 million cars!!!
By 2025, the world must increase its water supply by 22 percent in order to meet its needs. Every two minutes you save on your shower can conserve more than 10 gallons of water. If every American saved just ONE gallon of water, over the course of a year, it would equal twice the amount of fresh water drawn from the Great Lakes (the world's largest source of fresh water) every day.
By setting your house thermostat for one degree warmer in the summer and one degree cooler in the winter, you could save $100 per year! If every home in America made this small change, we'd save enough energy to provide a year's worth of gasoline, electricity, and natural gas to every person in Iowa.
Recycle
Change your lightbulbs to CFL's
Take a shorter shower
Change your thermostat by just one degree
These are really easy things to do and will save you money too!
1 comment:
I'm glad you posted this...recently we at the "Mock" house have been discussing recycling and conservations (well the kids and I have).
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