Clipmarks | babs99's Environment collection

Paper takes up 40% of landfills

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 07:46:45 GMT

clipped by: babs99
clipper's remarks: paper does not biodigrade without oxigen

What product is taking up the most space in US landfills?

The item most frequently encountered in MSW landfills is plain old paper—on average, it accounts for more than 40 percent of a landfill's contents. This proportion has held steady for decades and in some landfills has actually risen. Newspapers alone can take up as much as 13 percent of the space in US landfills.

Organic materials, including paper, do not easily biodegrade once they are disposed of in a landfill. Paper is many times more resistant to deterioration when compacted in a landfill than when it is in open contact with the atmosphere. Research by William Rathje, who runs the Garbage Project , has shown that, when excavated from a landfill, newspapers from the 1960s can be intact and readable.

Practical statistics for paper consumption

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 07:45:02 GMT

clipped by: babs99
clipper's remarks: These statistics ar more user friendly and refer to daily life

Clip Source: www.uaacog.com

*If you had a 15-year-old tree and made it into paper grocery bags, you'd get about 700 of them. A supermarket could use all of them in under an hour! This means in one year, one supermarket goes through 60,500,000 paper bags! Imagine how many supermarkets there are in the U.S.!!!

*The average American uses seven trees a year in paper, wood, and other products made from trees. This amounts to about 2,000,000,000 trees per year!

*The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years.

* Each ton (2000 pounds) of recycled paper can save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, three cubic yards of landfill space, 4000 kilowatts of energy, and 7000 gallons of water. This represents a 64% energy savings, a 58% water savings, and 60 pounds less of air pollution! **

* The 17 trees saved (above) can absorb a total of 250 pounds of carbon dioxide from the air each year. Burning that same ton of paper would create 1500 pounds of carbon dioxide.

Plastic Bag Free Nations: China joins in

Fri, 09 May 2008 14:52:34 GMT

clipped by: babs99

Clip Source: www.thedailygreen.com

China has never been considered an environmental role model. Given a population of 1.3 billion, unprecedented carbon emissions and a slew of recent lead-toy scandals, many would say the country stands as a — if not the — prime example of environmental failure.

Yet, in a bolt from the blue, it looks like the red has embraced green.

Yesterday, China’s State Council put a nationwide ban on plastic bags. The cabinet has demanded all stores (from major supermarkets to small shops) go plastic bag-free after June 1.

According to the Daily Mail, China uses more plastic bags than any other country. China squanders 37 million barrels of crude oil on plastic bag production every year. The nationwide ban will no doubt help correct China’s tarnished image, especially before the Beijing Olympic Games.

With nations from Ireland to Uganda — and now China — topping the bag-ban list, lets hope the United States will make moves to follow the trend.

Vultures endangered have an effect on deseases spread rate

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 13:41:30 GMT

clipped by: babs99

Clip Source: environment.newscientist.com

India has the most cases of human rabies in the world, and the dogs are not helping. "Sometimes you can see they are rabid," says Cunningham. They also carry distemper, which threatens wild dogs such as the Indian dhole, as well as endangered tigers and Asiatic lions.

These dogs have attacked and even killed children, says Cunningham. They prey on wildlife such as deer, and they carry diseases.

"Ironically, even though it is farmers using diclofenac that are killing the birds, when we say we are working on vultures, farmers thank us and ask us to bring them back," says Cunningham. Livestock carcasses now fester on village dumps, feeding rats and supportinggrowing packs of feral dogs.

"But it takes time," says Cunningham. The birds take best to captivity if caught young, but they don't become sexually mature until the age of five. Then they can need four years of trying and failing before they manage to mate, lay an egg, get it to hatch and raise the chick.

Memory storage demands equals CO2 of airlines

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 01:17:41 GMT

clipped by: babs99

Clip Source: environment.newscientist.com

The report, An Inefficient Truth states that with more than 1 billion computers on the planet, the global IT sector is responsible for about 2% of human carbon dioxide emissions each year – a similar figure to the global airline industry.

The energy consumption is driven largely by vast amounts of customer and user data that are stored on the computer servers in most businesses. The rate at which data storage is growing surpasses the growth in the airline industry: in 2006, 48% more data storage capacity was sold in the UK than in 2005, while the number of plane passengers grew by 3%.