Take a look around your closets at home and what do you see the most of?  Hopefully not those ’70’s disco clothes and shoes you’re still holding onto!  The most common item found in most closets is the wire coat hanger. The Organic Consumers Association estimates that 3.5 billion wire hangers are used each year by the dry cleaning industry alone. As these are generally made of steel, this amounts to 195 million pounds of steel used for production.  Since steel is one of the more easily recycled products, you would think that there was a happy answer here, but the hanger network estimates that about 3.5 Billion hangers end up in the landfill each year.  That’s about 60,000 cars!  Wire hangers also take about 100 years to decompose in the landfill.  So what can we do? Read More

Did you know that 1 ream of paper (500 sheets) uses about 6% of a whole tree? Breaking that down, 1 ton of paper = 400 reams or 200,000 sheets of paper. It takes 3 tons of wood to produce 1 ton of copy paper. 1 tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333 sheets. Although programs raising the awareness of paper waste have made a significant impact, the U.S. remains by far the world’s largest producer and consumer of paper. Per capita U.S. paper consumption is over six times greater than the world average. Read More

Title: Electronics Recycling Event
Location: Tampa, FL
Link out: Click here
Description: This Saturday, 15 Nov, there will be an electronics Recycling Event at Busch Gardens Tampa. For every laptop, computer and cell phone recycled, there will be a contribution made to the SeaWorld & Busch Gardens Conservation Fund.
Start Time: 8:00
Date: 2008-11-15
End Time: 12:00

Many people are taking reusable cloth bags to the stores these days; the only problem is remembering to take them from your car to the store!  You can get these bags from most stores for less than $1 but they generally carry the stores advertising.  An alternative is to create your own bags, kids love to do this!  Buy a bag from your local craft store and give the kids fabric paint or paint pens to create your very own ‘special’ bag.  The benefits are that the kids have more ownership in the whole shopping process and may even help by reminding you to take their bag(s) to the stores and it helps teach the children about taking care of the environment. These are great gifts for grandparents too.  

And don’t forget, if you do get some of those pesky plastic bags- recycle them (keep a cloth bag somewhere handy (mine is hanging in the garage) and stuff this with the plastic bags when it is full take it with you to the recycle bin at the store; you recycle and have your handy cloth bag with you).

Elaine

A variation of Parkinson’s law has to be that “stuff expands to fill all available space. Have you ever noticed that you move out of a small place into a bigger place and wonder how you’ll ever fill up the empty house? The next thing you know, you can’t find storage space for that latest “must have” item you brought home from the store. What to do then? Well, since there seems to be a proliferation of Self-storage facilities, that must be the answer.  Or just throw it away and let it end up in the landfill.

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