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| Go Green | Reduce, Re-use and Recycle |
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Reduce Reducing our consumption of as many goods and services as we can will make a positive contribution to global warming and the preservation of life on our planet. If we can cut down on the amount of plastic we must manufacture, or the number of trees we need to cut down or the amount of metal we need to mine and convert to products, we will contribute greatly to the continuation of life on planet Earth. Similarly, reducing the bath water temperature by one degree saves a lot of energy. Wearing a jersey indoors when you are cold also reduces the need for additional energy to heat the house. Reduce the amount of garbage that you send to the landfill. Separate your garbage and arrange for a local small entrepreneur to collect it. Re-Use Re-use of products which we have purchased makes it possible to reduce the need to make more products. Simple exercises such as using your peanut butter jar to contain other products eliminates the need to manufacture a new special container. Re-Cycle There are many products which we simply use and then discard once we are done with them. What happens to these used products? Most find their way into landfills all over the earth. Many of them begin to leach undesirable and toxic pollutants back into the soil. These filter back into our drinking and irrigating water making us ill or at least unhealthy. Start be separating your garbage. You need your municipal bin, a worm farm or composter and four additional bins, one each for paper, metal, plastic and glass. Then you use your municipal bin for all the "toxic" garbage that cannot be recycled or composted. Vegetable matter goes into the worm farm or composter and other materials as per the four designated bins. There are many small entrepreneurs that will collect from you for a small fee and remove the separated garbage. They will make a few cents on the garbage at the scrap dealers and the materials will be recycled into new products. Most products have special recycling procedures to render them either harmless or re-usable. Take compact fluorescent lamps as an example. There is a special process involved. Recycling of CFLs is an important facet as the CFL contains mercury. Mercury is toxic although breaking one CFL is not going to cause any major damage. It is however worthwhile to leave the room for a while after breaking a CFL so that the mercury vapour has time to precipitate out of the atmosphere so that you don’t breath it in. Then use some rubber gloves and a dustpan and brush to pick up the bits – don’t use a vacuum cleaner because that will just distribute the vapour again. Put the remnants in a bag and discard with your hazardous waste. Better still, take CFLs to Pick n Pay or Woolworths and place them carefully in the bin provided. They will be properly processed.
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