Posted by Snow in 
The above image should illustrate that as a consumer culture the time has come to shed ignorance in matters of daily consumption and move toward permanent green living.
An ice cream truck, whch costs energy above the basic fuel and pollution cost, operates while the driver leisurely unloads his shipment. The refrigeration unit is open to the air without securing energy loss. More energy will be needed to re-freeze the ice cream containers when they arrive inside, and this trip will be multiplied a dozen times in a day when the temperature will reach 96 degrees.
The practices of everyday lifestyle and extended availability via retail and sales channels continually builds materials waste, instead of delivering beneficial materials products and respecting scarcity of resources. Someday this use of energy will be deplored.
Citizens hundreds of years from now will be amazed people burned fossil fuels (and put themseves in debt to hostile nations to get it), to have 31 flavors of snack food get to a drugstore full of diabetes medication, and sponsor consumption of a product with deleterious health value and debilitating effects on the human body distributed from a dozen vendors to strip malls selling ice cream from the grocery store across the lot.
The full dumpsters, the crowded landfills, the refuse laden barges and and endlessly toiling waste trucks burn resources in the waste removal process, redoubling the consumption rate of what resources and industry delivered materials and goods into the circle of consumption in the first place.
Today’s media speaks of legislation to tax sodas and carbonated beverages which are an acknowledged source of biologic poisoning over time that creates health risks and digestive and circulatory damage. Even manufacturing and industry safegiards are not stopping pollution and the expensive round of cleanup the currend government in the USA is funding.
I like a web site that instructs how to save money and resources and remake household and garage materials into useful items and promote re-use. one such website is EcoRenovator.org.
Once the re-use bug has bitten, the evaluation of a new green blog can quickly separate the wheat from the chaff. and any website that can score a “Favorite” from me is worth saving to my desktop to peruse when a connection is lost or standalone portable computer time is available.
The most recent post I scanned had some beguiling and strategic ideas about recycling from Japan. Fees are general deterrents for people to use less, recycle more, and acknowledge the truth of green living as a manner to respect the environment which sustains us all. Labor for recycling sorting is aved at the start point, with expanded separators and curbfront home waste bins.
Packaging instructions and recycling requirements in labeling are strictly policed. One recycling tenet is so transparently suggestible that every taxpayer and sustainability advocate alike should email their congressman or City Council this paragraph:
“Point of sale disposal: When you buy a tea or some other drink from a machine you don’t have an option to throw it in the trash, there is only recycling. At convenience stores, you have 5 or 6 different bins, with only one set aside for burnable trash. If you can’t burn it, it can be recycled, and will be”.
If you’ve ever read anything about Japan, you know their intelligence and materials management has always been a brutal struggle against reduced natural resources, a growing population, and some short ends of the stick in world history. If the Japanese re-use and recycling practices observe these tenets, why shouldn’t global sustainable purposed recycling and re-use standards be established as norms?
RSS Feed