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Green Advice
by: Eric (Yahoo Answers Contributor)
Reuse: Not necessarily just plastic bottles but consider buying a canteen and using it everyday. Use water filters instead of bottled.
Leave the thermostat on for only periods of time rather than keeping it on 24/7. In Texas, where I live, it gets extremely hot in summer and many people will leave their A/C on which leaves them with extremely high bills. Also related to this is update to more efficient insulation which will greatly reduce the cool air that is lost and thus make the need to use a/c less costly.
It is okay to buy mechanical pencils and use them. The thing is to make sure to make them last and not throw them away unnecessarily. If used efficiently, they far outlast the material consumption of mechanical pencils, which consume massive amounts of wood, which could have otherwise produced oxygen instead of carbon from their death. Using less wood pencils across the entire economy will lead to a trend supporting the conversion to all mechanical as the price of wood pencils will greatly rise due to laws of supply and demand and result in a more "green" writing utensil industry.
Do paperless billing as opposed to receiving junk mail and throwing it away(or only occasionally recycling it). Use E-readers which are electronic, eliminating the need for paperbacks which need wood as well as chemicals and cost a large amount of energy to produce( when compared with a download and a charge). E-readers also have books which cost significantly less to buy and when buying online, require no shipment, which saves packaging, gasoline, and manpower.
Turning off the sink when you are brushing your teeth and using it only when you need the water(gargling, filling up a cup).
Buy produce locally to support an economic trend towards locally grown rather than flown or shipped produce from out of state, which all use oil and gasoline, which subsequently are extremely cheap due to the massive use of them as well as subsidies from the government on oil companies, encouraging them to sell cheap and sell a lot, which further encourages waste.
Also jewelry and much of the minerals mined from the earth, but mostly jewelry are mined using environmentally harmful procedures that not only disturb and damage land, but kill wildlife with the water and chemicals used to extract the ores and gems which wildlife will drink, become sick, and die with. Not buying as much materials with metals like copper, steel, and iron would greatly benefit the environment in that they support either recycling or reduction, which are much simpler alternatives that use much less energy and create much less damaging effects to extract ore.
Fishing is environmentally damaging and is extremely understated in its effect upon natural environments. Overfishing of cod of the coast of Canada(in Newfoundland, I believe) has been so drastic as to the point of limiting the population to something less than 20 years at the current rate until extinction occurs. Though fish are healthy foods, they nonetheless are harvested using slash and burn tactics which jeopardize their sustain ability at the benefit of reduced costs. I suggest eat fish occasionally, or for this matter all seafood.
The person who mentioned a vegan diet, is very correct in saying so, not only from an vegan standpoint, but from an environmental standpoint as well. Meat from cows costs the environment rangeland for feeding, which disrupts plants which disrupts the soil as the plant is no longer able to hold the soil around it down. This results in infertile land. Also observing the energy efficiency of a similar area needed for cows versus that for agricultural plants shows that cows simply waste energy many times over when compared to a plant. When cows are slaughtered they exhaust carbon(they give off methane when they are living too) and thus serve little environmentally beneficial effect. Plants on the other hand convert carbon to oxygen, provide lots of protein in some cases(i.e. soy protein) and are environmentally the more beneficial of the two.
Well, this may have been just a rant or something of the sort but I'm just a high school student with his liberal and radical thoughts between reality and idealism.
Leave the thermostat on for only periods of time rather than keeping it on 24/7. In Texas, where I live, it gets extremely hot in summer and many people will leave their A/C on which leaves them with extremely high bills. Also related to this is update to more efficient insulation which will greatly reduce the cool air that is lost and thus make the need to use a/c less costly.
It is okay to buy mechanical pencils and use them. The thing is to make sure to make them last and not throw them away unnecessarily. If used efficiently, they far outlast the material consumption of mechanical pencils, which consume massive amounts of wood, which could have otherwise produced oxygen instead of carbon from their death. Using less wood pencils across the entire economy will lead to a trend supporting the conversion to all mechanical as the price of wood pencils will greatly rise due to laws of supply and demand and result in a more "green" writing utensil industry.
Do paperless billing as opposed to receiving junk mail and throwing it away(or only occasionally recycling it). Use E-readers which are electronic, eliminating the need for paperbacks which need wood as well as chemicals and cost a large amount of energy to produce( when compared with a download and a charge). E-readers also have books which cost significantly less to buy and when buying online, require no shipment, which saves packaging, gasoline, and manpower.
Turning off the sink when you are brushing your teeth and using it only when you need the water(gargling, filling up a cup).
Buy produce locally to support an economic trend towards locally grown rather than flown or shipped produce from out of state, which all use oil and gasoline, which subsequently are extremely cheap due to the massive use of them as well as subsidies from the government on oil companies, encouraging them to sell cheap and sell a lot, which further encourages waste.
Also jewelry and much of the minerals mined from the earth, but mostly jewelry are mined using environmentally harmful procedures that not only disturb and damage land, but kill wildlife with the water and chemicals used to extract the ores and gems which wildlife will drink, become sick, and die with. Not buying as much materials with metals like copper, steel, and iron would greatly benefit the environment in that they support either recycling or reduction, which are much simpler alternatives that use much less energy and create much less damaging effects to extract ore.
Fishing is environmentally damaging and is extremely understated in its effect upon natural environments. Overfishing of cod of the coast of Canada(in Newfoundland, I believe) has been so drastic as to the point of limiting the population to something less than 20 years at the current rate until extinction occurs. Though fish are healthy foods, they nonetheless are harvested using slash and burn tactics which jeopardize their sustain ability at the benefit of reduced costs. I suggest eat fish occasionally, or for this matter all seafood.
The person who mentioned a vegan diet, is very correct in saying so, not only from an vegan standpoint, but from an environmental standpoint as well. Meat from cows costs the environment rangeland for feeding, which disrupts plants which disrupts the soil as the plant is no longer able to hold the soil around it down. This results in infertile land. Also observing the energy efficiency of a similar area needed for cows versus that for agricultural plants shows that cows simply waste energy many times over when compared to a plant. When cows are slaughtered they exhaust carbon(they give off methane when they are living too) and thus serve little environmentally beneficial effect. Plants on the other hand convert carbon to oxygen, provide lots of protein in some cases(i.e. soy protein) and are environmentally the more beneficial of the two.
Well, this may have been just a rant or something of the sort but I'm just a high school student with his liberal and radical thoughts between reality and idealism.
Source(s):
High school Environmental Science textbook
Green Tip
by: Nicole (Yahoo Answers Contributor)
Green tip - go vegetarian/vegan, meatless Monday's etc. The united nations claims that the meat industry causes more damage to the environment than all the cars,trucks,SUV's,planes,trains, and ships in the the world COMBINED. Even if it doesn't interest you , it is something to be considered when talking about green living.Green Tip
by: "The Cool Guy"(Yahoo Answers Contributor)
Go to your school and pick up trash ask your school's council, or principal about planning "Green Day"