Archive for February, 2009

What to Grow, Part 1

If creativity is missing in your life then get gardening. Whatever size canvas you have to work with you can create the most wonderful sights, smells, textures and tastes by working with nature. Your garden can be a wildflower-filled wilderness or a pungent herbal paradise; you can feed your family from your soil or tempt frogs, bats and hedgehogs into your very own wildlife reserve. But no matter what your aims are, it is essential that you take a few things into account before you rush off to the garden center. The first thing to consider is the environment in which you are hoping to create your green paradise. You should be trying to achieve a perfect balance between the conditions in your garden - the soil type, the amount of sunshine, wind and rain it receives - and your aims for the garden. By so doing you should have a garden that requires minimum intervention of any kind, be it heavy watering or pest control. A green gardener does not attempt to grow plants that need a lot of water in a dry, wind-swept garden or ...

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Purchase Recycled Paper to Help a Bird

Experts have calculated that Americans throw out so much office paper alone that a year's worth would stretch from Los Angeles to New York and stand 12 feet tall. While not done so much in America anymore, logging of the boreal forest in both Canada and Siberia is happening at such a lightning-quick pace, it is proving too speedy for many of the native songbirds that live there. According to a 2007 report by produced by a coalition of environmental groups, known as The State of the Paper Industry.  One of the most troublesome facts among the report's findings is that the average American consumes more than 700 pounds of paper a year. Currently, the paper industry is listed as the fourth-largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions among all manufacturers listed, and thrown away paper accounts for one-third of all landfill waste. It was reported that reducing paper consumption by only 10% would produce savings equivalent to taking 280,000 cars off the road. The problem gets even worse around the holiday season.  That’s when Americans throw away up to 25% more garbage (five million tons more than the ...

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Reuse Or Recycle Your Inkjet Cartridges

Contrary to popular belief, it's a very easy matter to reuse or recycle your inkjet cartridges. If you've been throwing away your inkjet and toner cartridges in the garbage up to this point, you're not alone. There are over 13 cartridges discarded in the U.S. every second, according to the folks at CartridgeFundraising.com. In North America alone, that’s more than 350 million cartridges that end up in landfills every year, and that number increases by about 12% on an annual basis, making that a total of 70% of used printer cartridges throughout the world currently being thrown out. These cartridges are made with plastics that can take at least 1,000 years to decompose. Not a good thing.  In one year, if all of the world's discarded cartridges were stacked end-to-end, they would circle the Earth more than three times. Every remanufactured cartridge put back into use will save nearly 3.5 pounds of solid waste from being deposited in landfills. You have the power to cut down on this amount of waste because some inkjet cartridges can be used more than once.  There ...

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Green Up Your Valentine’s Day

Valentine's Day has been around for hundreds of years, but we haven't always celebrated it the way we do today.  The first valentines were given in the nineteenth century, and commercial marketing and production are responsible for the mass produced, very consumer oriented holiday we now have.  Here are a few facts about how much Valentine's Day consumes each year. Around the world, people send about a billion valentines every year.  That's almost as many cards as are sent during Christmas.  A quarter of all the seasonal cards sent each year are for Valentine's Day, and every year we go through more than thirty-six million boxes of chocolate shaped like heart.  Add to that the demand for fresh flowers, particularly out of season roses, and the fact that over sixty percent of the population buys commercial valentines, and you'll soon see a major environmental impact. So what should you do if you don't feel like contributing to this enormous waste stream?  You don't have to boycott Valentine's Day or give up on romance.  There are plenty of things you can do to cut down your environmental impact.  ...

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Best Online Carbon Footprint Calculator

You've probably heard the term carbon footprint recently, but you might not have a good idea of what it means, or of what yours is.  Your carbon footprint is a measurement of the effects you have on the climate, based on the amount of greenhouse gas you produce in your life. There are lots of everyday activities that produce these gases, from riding in a vehicle to turning on the furnace.  Even using the stove is a tiny addition to the problem of global warming.  Each year, the average American produces twenty tons of carbon dioxide, or about forty thousand pounds. If you want to cut down on your personal emissions, you'll need to know how much you're producing.  It's been estimated that we all need to reduce our emissions by sixty to eight percent to stabilize the concentrations of greenhouse gases.  There are a few ways to do it, and not all the changes are actually that big.  Here are a few examples. If you drive a car that gets poor mileage, upgrade to one that's better.  You could reduce a ...

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