You know it’s dangerous to throw compact fluorescent light bulbs, medications, and other household hazardous waste into the trash, but it can be hard to figure out what to do with it.
It’s true that in most cases you’ll have to make a special effort to responsibly get rid of these items. But, luckily it’s not all that hard if you’re willing to do a little research and some advance planning.
To read some common guidelines on recycling some common items, click here.
It’s easy to think of plastic as the villain. After all, there’s a growing number of cities and countries around the globe either banning them outright or proposing taxes and fees to discourage their use. Here’s a partial list: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Westport (Connecticut), Seattle, Portland, China, Ireland, Australia, and Italy.
And yet, the answer to that age-old question is not nearly as clear-cut as it may seem. Did you know, for example, that more energy is used to produce paper bags than their plastic counterparts? Making paper bags also requires a lot of water (not to mention trees).
The production of plastic bags is equally problematic. They’re made from oil (an estimated 12 million barrels a year just to produce those used in the U.S.). Another huge downside is that they can make their way into large bodies of water and harm marine life.
To guide you when to pick one over the other, click here.
Reduce, reuse, recycle — most of us make a habit of recycling, while the first two “Rs” go ignored. However, we can reduce how much stuff we need to recycle by reusing what we already have. Pass along usable goods to other people instead of throwing stuff in the garbage, and people will do the same for you.
More about reusing stuff, here.
Breathe new life into old objects and reduce landfill waste by diverting leftover odds and ends that would be relegated to the dumpster into useful items.
Call it repurposing, call it recrafting, call it creative reuse, or call it trash transformed. No matter what you call it, this concept of “cradle to cradle” is one of the tenants of green living. It means that a product’s lifecycle doesn’t have to end up forever rotting away in a landfill. It can be endlessly reincarnated into useful items.
Read entire article here.
When it’s movie night at home and you’re getting ready to break out the popcorn, using an air popper or jostling a pot of kernels in a heart-friendly oil on your stove top might be your best choices.
A report from the FDA indicates that a chemical coating used in microwave popcorn bags breaks down when heated into a substance called perfluorooctanoic (PFOA).
The Environmental Protection Agency has identified PFOA as a “likely carcinogen.” Another study has found an acid that can be extracted from the chemical causes cancer in animals and is “likely to cause cancer in humans.”
Read complete article here.
BPA or bisphenol-A is a dangerous chemical linked to health concerns from digestive problems to issues with brain development. It’s recently been found in 91 percent of Canadians and is present in around two billion products here in the U.S. that we use on a daily basis. Because it’s the most harmful on developing brains and bodies, children and pregnant women especially need to avoid contact with BPA.
While the industry claims that BPA exposure levels from their products are safe, that claim seems a little shaky when you start adding up all of the places we come into contact with BPA: canned food and soda, receipts, bottled water, plastic food containers, baby bottles, and more.
Here are some of the common places we come into contact with BPA each day and how to limit exposure.
To read entire article, click here.
Are you one of those people who pour the milk down the drain on the expiration date?
Expiration dates on food products can protect consumer health, but those dates are really more about quality than safety, and if not properly understood, they can also encourage consumers to discard food that is perfectly safe to eat.
A recent poll of more than 2,000 adults showed that most of us discard food we believe is unsafe to eat, which is a good thing, of course, but it is important that we understand what food expiration dates mean before we dump our food — and our money — down the drain or into the garbage. On average, in the U.S. we waste about 14% of the food we buy each year. The average American family of four throws out around $600 worth of groceries every year.
Read the complete article here.
