HOW TO SAVE THE PLANET
How To Save The Planet
Everyone would like to help the environment, but it often seems like there
are too many things to do, and not enough time to do them! There are thousands
of ways in which we can help, without doing very much at all. It’s all
about changing habits and thinking a little bit differently. Its also about
having to change things in order to reverse the damage mankind has inflicted
on this earth. If we’re not part of the solution, then we’re part
of the problem.
Each week I will be offering a simple idea that everyone can adopt and use.
Please help make this a success by reading it out to your students when you
have a spare moment. It could spark a class discussion or inspire a topic or
piece of work in a particular subject. Above all, it will show the children
that they are central to the future health of our planet.
Thank you for your help.
Nick West
Paper – how much do we really need?
Despite our size, in the UK we still manage to be the world’s fifth
highest paper users. Last year alone we managed to get through 12.9 million
tonnes – over half of which was imported. Yet we only recycled 38% last
year.
One tonne of paper from recycled pulp saves 17 trees, 3 cubic yards of landfill
space, 7,000 gallons of water, 4200 kWh (enough to heat a home for half a year),
390 gallons of oil, and prevents 60 pounds of air pollutants.
100 million trees are used each year to make junk mail, 44% of which goes straight
into the rubbish bin unread. This year you could receive around 400 pieces
of junk mail. You can stop this by making a phone call. See the number below.
But recycling paper isn’t just about saving trees. Energy consumption
and pollution savings can be huge: every tonne of recycled paper saves 32,000
litres of water and enough electricity to power an average house for six months.
In addition, recycling creates three times more jobs than incineration.
How can you make a difference?
•
Save all your paper at home in a box. When the box is full, empty it into carrier
bags, and then take them to the recycle bank next time you go to the supermarket.
Don’t forget to reuse the bags too! Go to www.recycle-more.co.uk and
select the ‘bank locator’ to find your nearest recycling facilities.
•
Use the blue wheelie bins provided by the council. In a few months time, every
household in the East Riding will have a blue bin.
•
Use 100% recycled paper for all your general use. It costs a little more, which
is unfortunate because it doesn’t cost any more to produce, but suppliers
charge more because it isn’t a high volume-selling product. Write to
your local Member of Parliament to ask why this is the case.
•
At school, instead of screwing up used paper and throwing it in the bin, keep
it flat and place it in one of the recycle boxes provided. Can’t find
one? Ask your teacher if they can get one for the classroom.
•
Re-use paper. It sounds obvious, but many of us don’t. Use both sides
of the sheet. Make up a memo pad by cutting used A4 sheets into quarters; then
staple them at one corner. It could be used for telephone messages, shopping
lists, to do lists, lists of lists!! Reload your printer at home with paper
that has been printed on one side.
•
Only print out work at home and school when you absolutely need to. Select ‘File’ then ‘Print
Preview’ every time you are about to print. We waste thousands of sheets
of paper each week at school by unnecessary printing.
•
Use old newspapers for compost or animal bedding.
•
Re-use old envelopes.
•
Cut up old cards to make gift tags.
•
Eliminate junk mail by calling 02072913310, or by registering with the Mailing
Preference Service, Freepost 22, London W1E 7EZ. Your name and address will
be removed from the direct mailing lists.
•
Recycle your phone directories. There are now special banks for these so don’t
put them in the paper bank. Find out where your nearest directory recycling
points is at www.directory-recycling.co.uk or call 01676 533 832.
•
If you want to help in school, join the Recycling Team. See Mr West if you
are interested.
•
Recycle all other packaging at your local council recycling facility, but wait
until you have a carload. Remember, cars emit poisonous greenhouse gases.
Packaging – a load of rubbish?
Do you think twice when you buy a fish that is on a plastic tray, inside two
separate plastic bags, that fit inside a cellophane wrapped cardboard box?
Or a bottle of mineral water made from five separate pieces of plastic? A staggering
amount of packaging waste is produced in the UK each year – enough to
fill 1.5 billion dustbins – most of which ends up in landfill sites where
it can remain for hundreds of years. But why do we now have so much more packaging
to throw away?
Urbanisation and the increase in exotic consumer goods have lead to longer
distances between producers and consumers, increasing the need for packaging
to maintain freshness.
There is plenty we can do:
•
Buy local fresh produce; fruit, vegetables, meat and fish.
•
Don’t buy products that use excess packaging.
•
Look for packaging that is made from recycled materials, or that is biodegradable.
•
Re-use carrier bags as often as possible.
•
If you are throwing away packaging, squash it up, so that it takes up less
room in the landfill.
•
Avoid buying milk and juice cartons made from ‘paper’. They are
made up of 75% paper, 20% polyethylene and 5% aluminium foil – a nightmare
to recycle – and the majority are incinerated or put into landfill.
•
Buy refillables such as washing up liquid, dishwasher soap and floor cleaner.
Visit www.ecover.com for more information.
For cosmetics and creams, take part in the Body Shop refill scheme that gives
discounts on products when you take your bottle back to be refilled instead
of buying a new one. Visit www.bodyshop.org.uk for more information.
•
Recycle all other packaging. Visit http://www.driffieldschool.net/eco-site to find out how you can do this.
Buy locally produced goods
By buying locally you support your own community and its economy, and help
reduce the massive and unnecessary CO² emissions from food transportation.
In 1996, the UK imported 434,000 tonnes of apples, 202,000 tonnes of which
were from outside the EU. The distribution of 1 kilogram of apples from New
Zealand creates its own weight in CO² emissions. Meanwhile, over 60% of
UK apple orchards have been lost since 1970.
If your parents shop at a supermarket, ask them to choose products that have
been produced in the UK. Otherwise, support your local butchers, greengrocers,
fishmongers and bakers. Try to visit the farmers’ market at Driffield
showground on the first Saturday of each month. It sells locally grown produce
and crafts. There are also many farm shops in the area. Money spent is going
into the pockets of local businesses, not global corporations. For more details
of where to buy local produce, visit www.bigbarn.co.uk or
www.farmersmarkets.net.
What’s the point of buying meat or vegetables that have travelled halfway
round the world to get onto your plate when we can have fresh produce grown
just a few miles away?
Support your local farmers.
Water
What do you, the trees, and a hamster have in common? Give up? You all need
water. All living things must have water to survive, whether they get it from
a water fountain, a rain cloud, or a little bottle attached to the side of
a hamster cage.
It might not seem like it, but water is the most necessary nutrient of them
all - so necessary that people can't survive for more than a few days without
it. More than half of the weight of your body is water - if you weigh 60 pounds
(27 kilograms), fewer than 25 of those pounds (11 kilograms) are minerals and
other solid stuff. The remaining pounds are water.
It rains so much in the UK these days that you might imagine we should never
be in short supply. Yet we use water in so many ways that the average person
in the UK now washes away a staggering 1050 litres of water a week.
The result of this heavy usage is a lowering of the natural water table, and
although we are capable of building more and more reservoirs to look after
our needs, these disrupt both natural hydrological systems and local wildlife.
In addition, transporting water from reservoirs to meet local needs uses vast
amounts of energy, as well as adding to the complex infrastructure of piping
that crosses our land.
Much of the water we use, too, has undergone quite a transformation since it first fell from the sky. Used water is treated with chemicals, which find their way back into the environment when we use it a second time. Even ultra violet light is now part of the used water treatment process.
We need to use less! – but how???
• Use short bursts of water when brushing your teeth. This can save
80% of what you usually use.
•
Ask your parents to put a brick in the toilet cistern. Every flush uses 12
litres of water. With a brick in your cistern, you can save 3000 litres per
year.
•
Bathe less and shower more.
•
Get dripping taps fixed.
•
Only use a washing machine when you have a full load. A single washing machine
cycle uses up to 100 litres of water. For the average family, that’s
26,000 litres every year.
•
Use rainwater for flushing the toilet, washing clothes and watering plants.
Contact the Centre for Alternative Technology for advice: www.cat.org.uk.
•
In some areas of the UK more than a third of water is lost through leaking
pipes. Find out how well your local water authority is performing by visiting
www.ofwat.gov.uk. If your supplier’s record is bad, write to them and
ask why prices must keep rising if the company won’t invest in water
conservation.
•
Help bring clean water to the billion people who need it. Over a billion people
in the world don’t have safe water to drink. That’s one sixth of
the world’s population. For more information about how to help ease the
global water crisis, visit www.wateraid.org.uk.
Computers – a harmless machine or an ecological nightmare?
Everything has an ecological ‘footprint’, that is they have an
impact in some ways on the environment. This may be the materials they are
made from, the energy they use, or what happens to it when its life expires.
Most of us can operate a computer these days, and it is difficult to imagine
how we coped without these amazing machines.
Computers are all around us, and we’re constantly upgrading and replacing
them. But it takes a lot of natural resources to make a computer. Seven litres
of crude oil are used to make the plastic inside just one system. Old computers
can cause problems too. Hazardous computer waste includes lead, and the nickel
and cadmium in the batteries used in laptops.
California’s Silicon Valley, home of the computer industry, has the highest
concentration of toxic waste sites in the USA. The average life of a computer
is about two years, and few are reused. When thrown out and dumped in landfill
sites, they create hazardous electronic waste (e-waste). As an example, 250
million obsolete computers generate a huge amount of e-waste:
•
181 tonnes of mercury
•
544 tonnes of chromium
•
861 tonnes of cadmium
•
450,000 tonnes of lead
•
1.8 million tonnes of plastic
And that’s not all:
•
More than 375 million used printer cartridges are thrown into landfills each
year.
•
One laser printer cartridge contributes approximately a kilogram of plastic
and ink to landfills.
•
Manufacturing one laser printer cartridge requires almost 3.5 litres of oil.
•
Computers and cell phones contain potentially toxic elements such as zinc,
nickel, lead, copper, cadmium, beryllium, arsenic, and antimony.
•
Screen savers sometimes use more energy than when the computer is in use. If
it is left on overnight, it wastes enough energy to laser print 800 A4 pages.
SO WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT?
•
When you’ve finished on your home computer, switch it and the monitor
off.
•
Recycle your old computer either for resale or re-use by schools and charities,
such as Computers for Charity (www.computersforcharity.org.uk). You can also
donate old computers to Computer Aid International (www.computeraid.org), which
has so far sent over 4000 computers to schools and community groups in Africa,
Latin America and the Caribbean.
•
Look for the Energy Star symbol when buying computer appliances. This is a
United States rating system that also applies to goods sold in the UK. These
are very efficient appliances, and save money by using less electricity.
•
Always check word-processed work carefully and print preview it before printing
out. But always ask yourself ‘do I need to print this?’ beforehand.
•
Use an encyclopaedia or other book to help with homework or to find out other
information. That’s how it was done before computers arrived!
Energy
Do we really need to use so much Energy?
Each one of us is responsible for global warming. Quite simply, it is the
greatest environmental threat facing the world and it is happening at a faster
rate than ever predicted. The amount of oil used over the next ten years will
exceed all the oil consumed in the first fifty years of the twentieth century.
Major changes need to come from government and industry, but we all have a
part to play in slowing down global warming. One quarter of the UK’s
overall CO2 emissions come from our homes. An average house produces 6 tonnes
of carbon dioxide every year, more than the average car!
We need to conserve energy to slow the deterioration of the ozone layer.
Why?
Because we need the ozone layer to protect us from the harmful effects of ultra-violet
radiation from space.
Why should we be bothered about the ozone layer anyway?
Climate change is one reason, which we shall explore at a later date.
The main property of the Ozone is that it acts like a sunblock, filtering out
the dangerous ultra-violet rays from the sun. Humans and animals exposed to
excessive UV light can develop cancers, their skin ages more quickly and their
immune systems are reduced. Crops are also damaged by UV, as is phytoplankton,
which is the foundation of the ocean food chain, and the most worrying effects
are from UV-C (a very dangerous form of UV rays) that can alter and destroy
DNA and proteins. We will have to wait many years to realize the full consequences
of this.
Dramatic loss of ozone in the lower stratosphere (the second major stratus
(layer) of air in the atmosphere) over Antarctica was first noticed in the
1970s by a research group from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) who were
monitoring the atmosphere above Antarctica from a research station. Over Antarctica
(and recently over the Arctic), stratospheric ozone has been depleted over
the last 15 years at certain times of the year. This is mainly due to the release
of manmade chemicals containing chlorine such as CFC's (ChloroFluoroCarbons),
but also compounds containing bromine, other related halogen compounds and
also nitrogen oxides (NOx). CFC's are a common industrial product, used in
refrigeration systems, air conditioners, aerosols, and solvents and in the
production of some types of packaging. Nitrogen oxides are a by-product of
combustion processes, e.g. aircraft emissions. To find out more about the ozone,
go to www.atm.ch.cam.ac.uk/tour/
Convinced yet? Then read on to find out what you can do…
The good news is we can do just about everything to save energy! Here are just
a few tips in no particular order:
Switch off lights; don’t print out documents when you don’t need
to; turn the heat down; close doors; wear more clothing in cold weather; use
a draught excluder; shower instead of bathe; use less bath water; don’t
leave hair straighteners on; don’t leave the fridge door open; turn TV’s
music systems and monitors off instead of leaving them on standby; boil only
the amount of water you need when making a hot drink; ask your parents to join
car share schemes to get to work; use buses; watch less TV; use energy saving
light bulbs; ask your parents to buy ‘Green Energy’. To find out
what other things you can do, go to http://www.est.org.uk.
And finally, care enough to do something.
Extracts from ‘Go Mad – 365 Daily Ways to Save the Planet’ courtesy of Think Publishing. Copyright permission granted.