Monday, April 21, 2008

Celebrate Earth Day 2008 by making a difference

Ways You Can Make a Difference
These actions may seem to be simple and insignificant, but when joined by the efforts of everyone - we can make a difference.

Don't leave the water running. Turn off the water when brushing your teeth or washing the car. Fresh water is one of our most precious natural resources.

Flick off the light when you leave the room. Power plants burn fuels to create energy for your light bulb. Burning fuel makes smog that pollutes the atmosphere and adds to global warming. The less energy you use the less they need to make, and you'll save on your energy bill.

Print on both sides of the page at work. It's easy to change your printer settings - you'll use half the paper and save trees. Way to go! This should save money along with the trees.

Wash your clothes in warm or cold water. It works just as well as hot in your washing machine and cuts back on energy use.

Ditch the disposable cups. Bring in a glass or mug to keep at work instead of using the disposable ones by the coffee pots or water cooler.

Use the right settings on your appliances. Many appliances, like your dishwasher and refrigerator, come with energy-saving settings. Make sure they're turned on.

Turn off your computer at the end of the day. A monitor left on overnight uses enough energy to print 5,300 copies.

Join the paperless society, use e-mail.

Send electronic greetings for special events and you can save money and paper.

If you do not need to make a paper copy, don't. And get off the junk mail lists.

Use cloth napkins and towels instead of paper napkins and paper towels to save natural resources, reduce waste, and save money!

Look at the labels. Take the paper items with the "recycled" emblem over the ones without or look for the Energy Star symbol when buying new appliances.

Bring natural sunlight into your home. Turn off unneeded lights when it is feasible. Turn all lights off before you leave work.

Properly inflate your tires. Once a month can help improve your gas mileage ... and with the price of gas, this should be a regular routine.

Take shorter showers. You can save water and energy.

Tune up your household heating system. You can save energy and reduce your heating costs by 10% Good Recycling Starts at Home.

Recycled materials are processed and used to make new products. One big problem is that paper, plastic, and other commodities are easily contaminated. Be careful to sort your materials appropriately, or the whole load may wind up in the landfill instead of at a recycling manufacturer. What can you do? Flatten your cardboard boxes for curbside pickup. Don't put plastic bags inside paper bags, and don't leave paper receipts inside plastic bags. Make sure you take those sticky notes off of white paper. Remove the caps before you recycle milk jugs. And please wash out recyclables so they don't attract bugs, mold, and mice.

DID YOU KNOW?
Throwing trash in a trash bin and recyclables in their proper container seems to be a very simple concept, yet some of us cannot comprehend the efficiency of this system. Perhaps some alarming facts will make you reconsider where your trash goes.

According to SKS Bottle & Packaging, Inc., if you throw your plastic soda bottle on the ground today and come back 700 years from now, you will find it looks almost exactly same! But if you recycle your plastic soda bottle, you will help make a variety of products such as Rubbermaid, Rollerblades, car bumpers and other common products. Recycling one ton of paper saves the equivalent of 17 trees, according to the Illinois Recycling Association. It saves enough energy to power an average home for six months. It saves 7,000 gallons of water and keeps 60 pounds of pollutants out of the air.

Americans throw away enough paper each year to build a wall 12 feet high stretching from New York City to Los Angeles. Think of how much energy and natural resources we could be saving when, according to the NIU recycling program, we recycle only 22 percent of all the paper used in America in a year. There is vast room for improvement.

Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a television for three hours. It results in 95 percent less air pollution and 97 percent less water pollution than producing aluminum from natural resources. Think of all the beer cans thrown away in a party's aftermath. If we recycled these beer cans, then you might say partying helps the environment. Recycling aluminum saves 95 percent of the energy it would take to mine the raw materials needed to manufacturer aluminum, according to the NIU Recycling Program.

Glass can be recycled over and over again; it never wears out. Recycling one glass bottle saves enough energy to light a 100-watt light bulb for four hours.

Recycling saves enough energy each year to provide heat and light for 400,000 homes, according to the Illinois Recycling Association. According to the Environmental Protection Agency in 1999, recycling and compost activities prevented about 64 million tons of material from ending up in landfills and incinerators. Today, this country recycles 28 percent of its waste, a rate that has almost doubled during the past 15 years. But there is always room for improvement. Recycling is the easiest thing we can do to improve our environment. It saves energy and natural resources, diminishes pollution and reduces our growing landfills. For recycling to succeed we all need to check the labels and to buy products made with recycled content. Everything from clothes to carpeting, cans to comic books are made from recycled materials.You are doing your part when you help close the recycling loop.

For more information, here are a few website:

http://www.zerowaste.ca.gov/

http://www.obviously.com/recycle/guides/shortest.html

http://www.recycle-more.co.uk/nav/page525.aspx

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Walking to Stay Sharp

Walking each day may sharpen your memory and help you juggle mental tasks. In one study reviewed by the National Institutes of Health, MRI was used to track the brain activity of healthy adults age 58 - 78. After a 6-month walking program, brain function, attention span, and focus on goals improved. Light exercise increases blood-flow to the brain and jump starts hormones necessary for nerve cell production. Boost your brain and stay sharp by walking each day! -- United Healthcare

Multitasking

A study at the University of Michigan suggests multitasking could actually be doing us more harm than good. People who spent time stopping and starting tasks took 2 to 4 times longer to complete them. In addition, brain scans showed juggling t6asks reduces the brain power available for each. Over time, stress hormones from multitasking can damage memory centers in the brain. Focus on one task at a time for better efficiency and memory. -- United Healthcare

Thursday, April 17, 2008

A little change can make a big different if you think green

Here's some more "Green Numbers"

Two Birds With One Stone - If one 20-mile trip per week was cut out (by combining errands) for every registered vehicle in the United States, 145 million fewer tons of greenhouse gases would be released into the air each year. That's equal to the annual carbon dioxide emissions from 36 coal-fired power plants.

Use a Rake, for Goodness Sake! - One hour of using a gas-operated leaf blower produces the same amount of greenhouse gases as a car driving 4,400 miles - that's a round trip from Salt Lake City to New York City.

Paint by Numbers - If 1 quart of leftover paint was recycled from every renovation project in America this year (10 percent of all the house paint purchased in the United States is typically thrown out), it would reclaim 2.5 million gallons - enough to paint the outside of the White House every year from the next 43 centuries, or to paint San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge 250 times.

Saturday, April 12, 2008

We tied the knot

I would like to take this moment to announce that Amanda and I got married on Saturday April 12, 2008. We are so happy to start our life together.