Great Lakes Green Pages

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle-Tips for a Greener 2010

Global warming, climate change, carbon footprint, sustainability… we all know the buzzwords and if you are reading this post it means you want to live a greener life.  But the question for most people is where do I begin?  Saving the planet is not an easy task, but the road begins with small steps.  Therefore, I present to you a list of some small steps that you can take to make your life a little greener in 2010.

Reduce your energy consumption. It seems pretty simple because it is.  Turn off the lights when you leave the room.  Wash your slothes in cold water.  Turn down your thermostat in the winter by a couple of degrees and put on a sweater.  Get a programmable thermostat.  The easiest thing you can do is change out your traditional light bulbs for CFL (Compact Flourescent) bulbs. For every incandescent bulb that you replace, you will save about $30 a year in energy costs. If everyone in a city the size of Chicago replaced just one main light bulb with a CFL bulb, we would save the greenhouse gas emissions of about 200,000 cars on the road. If everyone in the country did it, we would save enough energy to light 2.5 million homes for a year and it equates to the emissions of over 3/4 of a million cars.  Replacing just 16 bulbs is like not driving your car for a year.  Trade out one in four bulbs in your house and the amount you spend on lighting will be cut in half.  Only 10% of electricity used in an incandescent bulb is given off as light, the rest is heat:  a big waste on a hot summer night!

Reduce your packaging consuption. Packaging amounts to a huge portion of a products carbon footprint.  If you think about all the things that you buy, they come in packages.  The more the packaging, the more the waste that mostly goes to landfill.  Ideally, we would all be able to buy in bulk and have relatively little impact.  Unfortunately, most of us do not have that option.  But with some simple planning and thought, all of us can reduce our packaging consumption.  Buy in the biggest package available that works for you.  Avoid small individually packaged items.  Things like snack packs have a ton of packaging.  But buying in a large package and breaking down into small tupperware that is reusable can have realatively small amounts of packaging.  Buy products that are concentrated.  A concentrated detergent has less packaging than the same washing amount of less concentrated liquid.  Look at your purchases for packaging that ahs recycled content.  Who cares if the cereal that you buy comes in a box made from recycled paper or virgin materials-only Mother Earth.

Reuse everything that you can.  Can that jar be used for something else?  They make a fine vase.  Save those margarine containers for use as a food container.  Wash out your ziplock bags and use them again.  Instead of buying individual hand soap containers, buy a bulk package and refill the small one.  Paper sacks with handles are an instant gift bag.  Newspapers make fine gift wrap.  Write on the back of scrap paper, or print on the back side of all the things you print.  Try sewing a small hole in clothing or invest in a good stain fighter to reuse clothes that you thought were not salvagable.  Still can’t save them?  Try making a wuilt or cut into smaller pieces for dust cloths.  By using everything at least twice, you can cut your consumption of virgin materials significantly.

Recycle. If you are reducing and reusing, then your need to recycle is dramatically lessened.  Still, recycling can have the biggest impact on the environment in that everyone can do it while having the least impact on their everyday life.  If you do not have a curbside recycling program available, make the extra effort to take your old goods to a drop off location.  Recycle all your jars.  Glass is one of the easiest things to recycle and making recycled glass uses 40% less energy than making glass from virgin materials.  Remove your lids and rinse your jars.  When it comes to plastics, all containers have a universal recycling number on the bottom.  While there are not uses for all the numbers so far, emerging technologies are finding ways to make new polymers and diesel fuels from assorted plastics.  In the meantime, Amricans use 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour and most (estimates are about 65-70%) end up in the landfill.  Remove your lids when recycling bottles as they are generally a different type of plastic than the bottle and in some cash strapped communities, it is cheaper to toss bottles with a lid still on than to pay someone to sort and remove lids.  Paper accounts for half of the waste we send to landfill.  If Americans reycled half of that, we would save 125 million trees every year.  Over 48 % of the Earth’s surface was once covered with forests.  Half of those forests are gone and only 1/5 of native forests are left.  Making a ton of paper from recycled stock saves 50% of water used and 17 trees.  For every 38,000 bills paid online, 5,058 pounds of greenhouse gases are avoided and two tons of trees are preserved.  Stop your junk mail!  17.8 tons of junk mail is delivered every year by the postal service.  44% of that goes unopened and less than 25% is recycled.  Recycle all your metals.  All steel has some recycled content.  It is generally at least 25% recycled content minimum, so the systems are all in place already.  Aluminum is easily recycled, and aluminum cans will make it back to the shelf in as little as 90 days.  But it isn’t just cans; foil counts too-even the foil on the 20 million Hershey’s kisses that are produced every year.

The road to a greener life is a long one.  But the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.  What is your next step?

So you bring your own reusable bags to the grocery store.  Great.  You recycle.  Excellent.  But the effort doesn’t stop there.  If you really want to make an impact on the waste stream, you need to start rethinking what you buy.

If you are going to buy toilet paper, and I hope that you are, then you should make sure that it is made with recycled paper.  Not just recycled paper, but post consumer recycled content.  It is always important to look at post consumer content, because if we do not provide an economic outlet for recycled content, then collecting these materials end up being a waste of time.  Stories are often circulating around stock piles of plastics and other recyclables that have no home.  By looking for products that are made from these materials, we create an incentive for the concept of recycling and a market for those foods.

Okay, so you are buying products with recycled content.  Now what?  How much packaging do the products that you buy have in the first place?  By choosing products that feature less packaging, you reduce your impact by requiring less raw materials in the first place.

The mantra of the new economy is reduce, reuse, recycle.  The key to making this mantra meaningful is the priority we give each step.  By reducing what we buy, we lower our need for resources.  You can make it even easier by buying product with less packaging.  For example, I buy a brand of shaving cream that has a small cap that covers only the push top.  By choosing this brand, I use less plastic with every can I buy.  Over a lifetime that can really add up.  I buy toothpast that has the smallest or no box.  Next I try to find a secondary use for all the products that I buy.  Margarine containers hold leftovers.  Jars hold buttons.  A chipped mug holds my pens.  By finding a secondary use for these products, we divert utems from the waste strem as well as reduce our need for raw materials.  Last comes recycle.  We all need to recycle as much as humanly possible, but to really make a difference we need to close the loop and buy products that use the recycled materials.

To reduce waste, we need to look at what we buy first, before we figure out how to dispose of it.  For more  great ideas check out http://42explore.com/recycle.htm