Guerrilla Gardening
You may not even know it, but there could be an underground army in your neighborhood — people operating under a cloak of anonymity, working slightly outside the law, all for one simple cause: Beautifying their community.
It’s called guerrilla gardening — the practice of taking a tiny bit of control over the local environment by planting seeds in an untended place. Here’s how it works:
- The guerrilla gardener identifies an unused lot or vacant property that’s neglected and would look so much better with some flowers, grass, or other non-invasive, native plant life.
- Whenever they walk past the abandoned area, they’ll drop some seeds around, or throw seed balls, which are seeds and soil wrapped in a biodegradable capsule.
- After a few weeks and a good rain, plants should start growing, and that vacant lot will be a lot more pleasant to look at. || Read more »
Heat-Driven Air-Conditioning
This shiny tangle of pipes and ducts at a facility of the power company Industrielle Werke Basel in Basel, Switzerland, is an air-conditioning system that is actually driven by heat. Likewise, heat actually helps to cool banks, hotels, and offices in the Adelgade district of Copenhagen, a T-Mobile data center in Munich and Fumincino Airport in Rome.
The company that engineered all of these systems, Thermax of Pune, India, markets them as one of its “sustainable solutions” for today’s environmental concerns, but the technology—absorption chilling—has been in commercial use since the 1920s. Like standard air conditioners, absorption chillers rely on a refrigerant with a low boiling point. When the refrigerant evaporates, it removes heat from the air. Standard air conditioners then change the refrigerant gas back to liquid using an electric compressor. But absorption chillers rely on thermal compression to restart the cycle; they need only heat—no moving parts—to drive the operation || Read more »
Paper Recycling Facts
- To produce each week’s Sunday newspapers, 500,000 trees must be cut down.
- Recycling a single run of the Sunday New York Times would save 75,000 trees.
- If all our newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year!
- If every American recycled just one-tenth of their newspapers, we would save about 25,000,000 trees a year.
- If you had a 15-year-old tree and made it into paper grocery bags, you’d get about 700 of them. A busy supermarket could use all of them in under an hour! This means in one year, one supermarket can go through over 6 million paper bags! Imagine how many supermarkets there are just in the United States!!!
- 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.
- Approximately 1 billion trees worth of paper are thrown away every year in the U.S.
- Americans use 85,000,000 tons of paper a year; about 680 pounds per person.
- The average household throws away 13,000 separate pieces of paper each year. Most is packaging and junk mail.
- In 1993, U.S. paper recovery saved more than 90,000,000 cubic yards of landfill space.
- 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.
- The construction costs of a paper mill designed to use waste paper is 50 to 80% less than the cost of a mill using new pulp.
