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Green at Home
Useful Tips: Eucalyptus Oil
After a nice rain when you go in the forest, often you smell the scent of eucalyptus, which makes everything smell fresh and clean. Gum trees, which is the name that eucalyptus is often known by, happen to be the main tree genus within Australia. In fact, there are 600+ different species of these trees. These trees are useful for building needs, providing timer, they make great windbreaks and cover, wonderful firewood, they are great for landscaping, and they offer nectar to the bees as well. When it comes to products from these trees, eucalyptus oil is one of the best known ones and no doubt you have heard of it. The eucalyptus oil is taken from the leaves of certain trees and steam distilled. Not all of the eucalyptus trees can be used to produce this oil. The oil is flammable and it also has compounds in it that deter pests and other compounds that are excellent disinfectants as well. Of course, only about 5% of the requirements for the world are produced in Australia and surprisingly most of the products actually come from China. However, some of the products that come from China may not be 100% eucalyptus oil, ...- Bookmark :
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Don’t hit Print too quickly
The average American uses more than 700 pounds of paper a year in today’s modern office and at home from the numbers of copies of documents which are made needlessly. Too often office workers are quick to make printouts of documents, especially each and every time a small change is made, despite the fact that the change may only be a minor one. Here are a few tips to help you save the amount of paper that you produce on a daily basis in your office or at home. First, make sure that you have completely checked your document to make sure that you have a true final copy. Before you print your document out, run it through your spelling checker program to make sure there are no glaring spelling errors that haven’t been caught. Next, have someone else who hasn’t authored your work check it over to make sure that there are no errors in punctuation or spelling that that the spelling checker didn’t catch. Although most word processing programs are getting better, it is still possible to have some rather embarrassing errors slip through the cracks (for example, it’s possible to have “form” appear where you meant to write ...- Bookmark :
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Use a Refillable Mug
The EPA estimates that nearly 25 billion one use paper and Styrofoam cups are thrown away by Americans for drinks purchased at commercial establishments or drunk in the office. The sad truth is that nearly every one of these temporary vessels ends up in landfills or clogging our waterways. It’s a very troubling statistic because polystyrene literally takes hundreds of years to break down, and is made of petroleum, which is nonrenewable. Scientists have also recently discovered that carcinogenic (cancer causing) compounds leach out of polystyrene, right into your hot drink. That’s not to say that the ceramic doesn’t have its own set of flaws. The energy invested to make one ceramic cup means you'd have to use the ceramic cup 640 times before it would equal a single polystyrene cup and 294 times to equal a paper/cardboard one. Factoring in the cost in air pollution, it takes 1,800 uses to beat the polystyrene and 48 to beat paper or cardboard. Additionally, you would have to drink 126 and 99 cups respectively for the ceramic to compete with them on the waste issue. And just the use of a ceramic cup totals more than the entire life cycle water consumption of ...- Bookmark :
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Organic Ways to Get Rid of Cockroaches
While cockroaches really are not all that ‘evil,' their presence is not exactly welcome. No one wants to see their home or dwelling overrun with cockroaches which is why it is necessary to take the proper steps required to get rid of them. However, the common ways of ‘evicting' cockroaches are not exactly friendly from the environment. They are also not exactly safe for humans. No, spraying roaches with pest poisons would probably be a plan well worth avoiding. Of course, this does raise questions regarding how to actually get rid of the roaches. For those with such concerns, here is some helpful info: there are environmentally green friendly ways to remove those pesky roaches from your home. Probably the best and most environmentally ways to prevent the infestation of cockroaches in the home would be to employ preventive maintenance skills. This will significantly help reduce if not outright eliminate the presence of roaches in the home. For example, roaches are attracted to food sources. That is why it is so very necessary to clean up all your dishes and food preparation areas thoroughly. Don't leave dirty plates out overnight since this will be an invitation to the cockroaches. In addition to ...- Bookmark :
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Ditch your Answering Machine and Switch to Voice Mail
Although not an idea that jumps right to mind, experts are showing in study after study that by using voice mail, less energy is consumed and results in less hazardous waste than the use of answering machines. In the same way that power plants are responsible for producing considerably less pollution than if everyone ran their own fossil fuel-based generators (or by using electric cars in place of the commercially common gas-powered ones), centralizing voice mail into large servers requires far less electricity than by everyone using their own dedicated machines. These machines must be on and active 24hours a day, seven days a week. Such electronics are responsible for 25% of home energy use, according to Energy Star, the corporation responsible for rating electronics and appliances based on the energy that can be saved by their use, and these electronics directly contribute 2% of the U.S.'s output of overall global warming gases. The Green Book, an ecological conservation group, reports that should all answering machines currently used in U.S. homes was to be replaced by voice mail, the annual energy savings would be nearly two billion kilowatt-hours. This is more or less the equivalent of taking 250,000 cars off the road ...- Bookmark :
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