Start A Green Living Now!
Archive for August, 2009
Why Use Paper When You Can Use Cloth?
I love barbecue ribs, and when you eat barbecue ribs the right way, with your fingers it can get pretty messy. Of course since barbecue sauce is finger licking good you can remove much of the residue yourself, but eventually you’re going to have to clean off that final sticky residue. What’s the best way to do it? Most people use their napkins or paper towels to clean off their fingers, and face, and then toss the paper into the garbage. A better solution is to use damp washcloths instead. Damp washcloths can be used throughout the meal to clean off your fingers, and when you’re done, just toss them into the washing machine to be washed the next time you do a load of clothes. In addition, don’t use paper towels to wipe up small spills of liquids, or to wipe your hands, and so on. Instead, keep some cloths handy. Dampen them, clean up what needs to be cleaned up, and then place them on a rack so they can dry and be used again. Paper towels are often created from recyclable material themselves, so they can’t be recycled again, in particular because they may contain bacteria. Some people recycle them as mulch, ...- Bookmark :
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Greening your School
Dwindling financial resources have brought metropolitan school districts to their knees, cutting elective studies, losing athletics programs, and silencing music. In some cities and rural areas the effects are even more troubling as schools are closed and students are crammed into shrinking classrooms. Schools are frantically searching for viable ways to reduce overhead by more effectively managing their resources, and everyone can help.
Many school administrators think that they’ve effectively drained the pool of potential cost cutting and green measures, but green ideas are emerging up from untapped springs of student creativity. Here are a few favorites:
Landscape maintenance: Families volunteer for weekend duties like weeding, trash collecting and seasonal maintenance. Some resourceful parents even take their lawn tractors to the school to maintain playing fields. Science and environmentally minded teachers rotate weekends with the families to keep the team focused and manage the legal requirements from the school district’s standpoint. These “grassroots” groups are tossing out the chemical cocktails utilized by the commercial industry in favor of natural herbicides, fungicides and insecticides.
Janitorial services: Students are getting involved in cleaning up the cesspool of toxic agents traditionally used by school maintenance crews. Science ...
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Trans Fats and Alternatives
We've heard a lot of advertisements lately about how trans fats were bad for us, and how we needed to eliminate them from our diet. As a result, trans fat elimination has become a new, national past time. Even fast food restaurants are taking the trans fat out of their products, which is great news for those who believe that trans fats are killing our hearts. We are being force fed information about alternatives to this bad fat, so that we can still have our food but with a heart-friendly kick.
Trans fats occurs naturally in meat and dairy products. However, they only occur in small amounts, and the real culprit of trans fat overload is found elsewhere. It's being consumed in partial hydrogenation of vegetable oil. While that may sound like a lot to say about the trans fat, it's a fact that this kind of fat has been proven to cause bad cholesterol which leads to heart disease. So, it's something to be concerned about - let's face it, we only have one heart, and the way it goes, so we go with it.
Public uproar has ...
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Bad News for New Jersey Beaches
There’s no denying that pollution is everywhere. Efforts by environmentalists to clean up our rivers, lakes and even oceans continue. What’s the progress to date? Just released, on July 30, 2009, was a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). It was their 19th annual report, "Testing the Waters: A Guide to Beach Water Quality at Vacation Beaches," and the facts it contained showed that there were serious public health risks and problems with the health of beach water all across the country. According to this report, more than 20,000 beaches were closed down for a few days or a few weeks, in 2008. These were ocean, bay and Great Lakes beaches. Although the report stated that there was actually a 10 percent decrease in nationwide closing and advisory days at beaches from 2007, the conclusion was that this was the result of dry conditions in many parts of the country, rather than any large scale improvement in water quality. Indeed, because of decreased funding for water monitoring in some states last year, some beaches remained open that should have been closed. For example, New Jersey monitors 260 beaches. Of these 224 are designated bathing beaches and 36 are environmental stations (which are ...- Bookmark :
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Green Tourism and How it Helps the Environment
Green tourism is defined as general travel going greener. Going green has been recently getting more and more popular, now hotels, airlines, and tourist hot spots are getting greener to help save the environment. The largest industries in the world are both trying to shrink tourism’s environmental footprint while still expanding their ventures, although many of the industries believe that their efforts will not have any effect on the current global warming crisis at hand.
The problem with global warming is that the Earth’s air and the oceans are gradually heating up. We can ignore it now but in the future it is going to be a genuine problem because it is getting worse every year. The part of global warming that is caused by travel has a lot to do with ecotourism or, traveling to places having unspoiled natural resources, with minimal impact on the environment being the primary concern.
Something that could help this is using biofuel in place of kerosene because it would not affect the environment so harshly. Flying is becoming the most efficient way for people to travel these days because it is faster and cheaper than ...
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