Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, REVIEW!

Congratulations to all of you for doing your best to reduce, reuse and recycle. Over the past few months we’ve been focusing on reducing waste as much as we can. This of course includes garbage, energy and over consumption. For this week, let’s review what we did and see if there’s any area that needs a bit of work.

In the week to follow, I will look at lifestyle choices in the areas such as food, transportation, investing, and other consumer choices that will help us reduce our GHG emissions even more and build towards a more sustainable future.

TO Do This Week

Review
For details on the following, scan my blog archives!

Reduce
• We are remembering to turn off our lights, computers, monitors, standby lights and any other piece of equipment that blinks - at home and work.
• We’re making our homes free of incandescent light bulbs and installing energy-saving florescent lights!
• We’re printing on both sides of our printing paper and stopping ourselves from printing when we don’t really need to.
• Our car idling days are over. We know that idling hurts our engines, pollutes the air, pumps more GHG emissions in the atmosphere and is a ridiculous waste of money.
• We’re starting to reduce the number of days that we drive our cars and remembering to inflate our tires and tune up our engines on a regular basis. We’re also doing our very best to keep to the speed limit.
• Our showers and faucets are starting to sport low-flow shower heads and faucets. We’re also trying to conserve water as much as we can and ease up on the hot water showers.
• We’re doing our very best to stop junk mail from reaching your mail box, even though some people seem blind to the No Junk Mail Please signs that we’ve posted. I’ve been meaning to call Canada Post to complain. I’ll do that this week.
• We’re not buying gifts that we suspect our friends won’t use. Instead, we’re giving them great experiences through restaurant certificates and tickets to sport and arts events.
• We’ve bought canvas bags to reduce plastic bags. We’re trying to avoid packaging as best we can.
• We’re also trying to reduce the amount of food we throw out, buying what we know we’ll eat.
• We’re insulating our home heater and ensuring our appliances are run as efficiently as possible. Now that summer is upon us, we’re going to hang dry our clothes as much as possible.

Reuse
•Paper printed on only one side does not go into the recycle bin but back into our printers for reuse.
• Used envelops and the like are used for notes and shopping lists.
• Broken ceramics are used in flower pots to help with drainage.
• Water that’s wasted when waiting for hot water is captured and used to water the lawn or plants.
• Plastic bags are used for garbage, plastic tubs for storage. Old clothes are used as rags.
• Resist throwing things out if we can squeeze another life out of them!

Recycle
• We’re choosing recycled print, toilet and tissue paper and paper towels (you can even buy recycled plastic bags for your garbage).
• We’re recycling paper and plastics, and, where available, organic garbage or composting.
• The clothes we’re tired of wearing are sent to charitable originations and thrift shops.
• We’re selling our unwanted goods through yard sales, freecycle.org, the Buy & Sell or other such services.

Coming to a Theatre Near You!
Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth hits the cinemas in June. Click here for a list of cinema’s and opening dates in North America. If you can, attend opening weekend. The higher the numbers on opening the longer the film will be in theatres.

Green Party of Canada
If you are thinking of joining the Green Party – now’s the time. The convention is taking place August 24 - 27 and the party needs new members to nominate candidates (you don’t have to attend the convention to vote). Elizabeth May and David Chernushenko are in the running and they need nominations by May 31. This is a very exciting time for the party. Even if you don’t want to join, I encourage you to check out the party and what it stands for.

Join the March!!
Over 360,000 to date have signed up to stop global warming. Join us!
http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/

In the News
Green Bloggers
If you go to the Canada site, my blog is there!

Grist Magazine

StopGlobalWarming.org
Headlines

World-Wire

Truth Out

1 comment:

Matt Burge said...

Good for you Cheryl. Keep it up. This is what we all need to do.