Going Green and Clean...
This week’s tip: Reduce your use of packaging materials.
• Limit your use of bottled water. Research shows that the quality is not necessarily better than tap water. Furthermore, America’s use of plastic water bottles requires the use of more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel approximately 100,000 US cars for a year.
• Buy bulk products. It saves CO2 and money that would be wasted in the packaging process. If everyone bought 15% of their groceries in bulk, it would be equivalent to taking more than 850,000 cars off the road for a year.
• Buy concentrated products – they require less packaging and less energy to transport.
• When it’s time for gifts, consider a gift of an activity, class, or service. There’s no packaging involved at all!
Sen. Tom George on health care
Our community's "safety net"
What's shaking downtown
More places to see and be seen
Want to be a leader?
This week’s tip: Clean out your catalogs.
Go to catalogchoice.org for a free service that helps you unsubscribe in just three easy steps. Be sure to have your catalogs with you -- you’ll need information off the address label.
Each year, 19 billion catalogs are mailed to American consumers.
What’s the impact?
• Number of trees used – 53 million trees
• Pounds of paper used – 3.6 million tons of paper
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This week's tip: Change to CFL (compact fluorescent) lighting.
The incandescent light bult will be phased off the U.S. market beginning in 2012 through 2014 under the new energy law approved by Congress. This new energy-efficient light souce uses 75% less energy and lasts 5 years instead of a few months.
Getting started...
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This Week's Tip: Use alternative gift wrapping and cards.
If every family in the US wrapped 3 gifts in alternative wrappings, we could save enough paper to cover 45,000 football fields. Get creative!
• Try colorful new dish towels.
• Use fabric scraps.
• Wrap with the comic pages of the newspaper.
• Reuse wrapping paper received - with a touch up of the iron if needed
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This Week's Tip: Be Responsible in Your Use of Paper
• Recycle your junk mail, newspapers, and other paper materials.
• Avoid paper plates.
• If you do want to use non-ceramic dishes and flatware, find recycled and biodegradable items (www.recycline.com, www.greenfeet.com and www.biodegradablestore.com).
• Use cloth napkins (several times before washing, if possible).
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Going Green and Clean...
It can be as simple as taking your own shopping bag into the grocery store or as complex as getting an energy audit at home or at your business, but to put Kalamazoo on the LEEDing edge of environmentally progressive communities, everyone's going to have to pitch in. The 20 and 30 somethings who will be moving back into this region will expect us. The good news: We have a lot of room for improvement. Stay tuned here for how Kalamazoo's doing and things you can do to help make Kalamazoo green and clean.
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