Eat Locally! Buying local food not only helps local farmers thrive, it reduces energy consumption. Estimates on how long the average food travels from pasture to plate range from 1,200 to 2,500 miles. A lot of energy is expended freezing, refrigerating, and trucking that food around. Eating locally grown food means less fossil fuel burned in preparation and transport. Local food is often safer, too. Even when it’s not organic, small farms tend to be less aggressive than large factory farms about dousing their wares with chemicals. However, if you can afford to spend some money on organically-produced food, that would be the best option. Organic farms do not grow GMOs, or spray their crops with chemical pesticides, which are often extremely toxic for natural ecosystems and for our health.
Downshift your driving! As gas prices go up, downshifting our driving doesn’t just make sense environmentally, but it will also helps our wallets. A quarter of the trips Americans take by car are within walking distance, and each gallon of gas that we use equals 20 pounds of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. Every year, Americans are driving more and more, as exemplified by kids’ commutes to school.
Break the bottled water habit! In 2004, the U.S. consumed 17 percent of the world’s bottled water—more than any other country—at almost 7 billion gallons. Making bottles to meet Americans’ demand for bottled water requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 cars for a year. Eighty-six percent of plastic water bottles used in the United States aren’t recycled. Incinerating used bottles produces toxic byproducts such as chlorine gas and ash containing heavy metals. Buried water bottles can take up to 1,000 years to biodegrade. Moreover, while the demand for bottled water is up in the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency had found that 90 percent of tap water domestically is safe to drink. Furthermore, studies show that at least 40 percent of bottled water is just tap water!
Beat the Heat, Wash in Cold! A whopping 90 percent of the energy used by a washing machine goes to just heating the water. You could save $60 or more on your annual energy spending by washing at least four out of every five loads in cold water! And you could reduce your CO2 emissions by 72 pounds in just one month by doing so! Washing in hot water is more likely to clean out your wallet than your apparel. Today’s more efficient clothes washers and laundry detergents make it possible to get even whites clean in cold water.
Bring Your Own Bag! Plastic bags don’t biodegrade, they photodegrade—breaking down into smaller and smaller toxic bits contaminating soil and waterways and entering the food web when animals accidentally ingest. Each year, an estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide. That comes out to over one million plastic bags used per minute. Billions end up as litter each year. According to the EPA, over 380 billion plastic bags, sacks and wraps are consumed in the U.S. each year. (Estimated cost to retailers is $4 billion.) Hundreds of thousands of sea turtles, whales, and other marine mammals die every year from eating discarded plastic bags mistaken for food.
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AuthorNancy Ramon is a writer for online outdoor magazines and blogger about environment. She is a vegan, a cat lady and a fighter for animal welfare. Archives
October 2017
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