Save Green - By Living Green
*Here, you'll find a 2-part article that breaks down some of the many R's of waste management. Look for the second part of this article via:
Zero Waste Initiatives aim to create a more
sustainable society by seeing “waste” as a resource that creates jobs and
stimulates the economy. It is also one of the fastest, cheapest and most
effective strategies for combating climate change. Did you know that as much as
82% of the materials in landfills are recyclable, reusable or compostable?
Imagine if we found a way to help everyone in every community reduce that
number to next to nothing! It would save cities millions of dollars in landfill
related costs and create thousands of new jobs. If we could achieve this in the
US alone, the environmental savings would be equivalent to closing 21% of the
US coal-fired power plants. The most common R’s
in Zero Waste, in the order they
should be implemented are: Rent, Repair,
Repurpose, Refuse, Reconsider, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Rot. So let’s take
a brief look at each of these and discover just how much impact it has on our
own budget.
Rent rather than purchasing an item and reduce
all the packaging and fossil fuels associated with that new item. We no longer
have to have extra storage space and we don’t have to do any maintenance. Tool,
office and household rental businesses are sprouting up in every community
offering baby and toddler supplies, furniture, computers and every tool
imaginable. Some of these have memberships where you pay a fee to access all of
their products whenever you need them. So instead of paying out a hundred
dollars for a drill gun, for instance, you can rent one for $5/day.
We
can Repair instead of purchasing a
new item – pretty much everything from shoes and books to lawnmowers and
furniture has repair potential. The trick is finding the people locally who can
do this for you, or acquiring the skills yourself. Like the first ‘R’, you
avoid purchasing a new item and all the environmental costs that come with it.
the e-book version of the Trash Talk series are on Sale Now until June 30! |
When
we have decided that a new item really is eminent, we can be a little more
discerning while shopping. We can Refuse
to accept manufacturing standards by expressing our concerns or praises to the
company listed on the packaging. We might Reconsider
the product we were about to buy and choose one that has a lighter
environmental footprint. We can Reconsider
our importance and realize that we can indeed have a profound impact on the
environment and our local charities, while boosting the community’s economy. When
we learn this it becomes a part of our life, we aspire to do more, we seek out
new opportunities from our choice of transportation to where we live and every
day activities.
Continued on May 8th
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