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Green Facts
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Washing your clothes in cold or warm instead of hot water saves 500 pounds of carbon dioxide a year, and drying your clothes on a clothesline six months out of the year would save another 700 pounds.
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Glass can be recycled over and over again without ever wearing down.
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A steel mill using recycled scrap reduces related water pollution, air pollution, and mining wastes by about 70%.
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One recycled aluminum can will save enough energy to run a 100-watt bulb for 20 hours, a computer for 3 hours, or a TV for 2 hours.
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A laptop consumes five times less electricity than a desktop computer.
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Bamboo absorbs 35% more carbon dioxide than equivalent stands of trees.
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Recycling 1 million laptop computers can save the amount of energy used by 3,657 homes in the U.S. over the course of a year.
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Every week about 20 species of plants and animals become extinct.
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The World Health Organization estimates that 2 million people die prematurely worldwide every year due to air pollution.
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Americans use 100 million tin and steel cans every day.
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Current sea ice levels are at least 47% lower than they were in 1979.
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States with bottle deposit laws have 35-40% less litter by volume.
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It takes 6,000,000 trees to make 1 year's worth of tissues for the world.
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Nudge your thermostat up two degrees in the summer and down two degrees in the winter to prevent 2,000 pounds of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere.
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82 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. come from burning fossil fuels.
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Recycling for one year at Stanford University saved the equivalent of 33,913 trees and the need for 636 tons of iron ore, coal, and limestone.
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If every U.S. household turned the thermostat down by 10 degrees for seven hours each night during the cold months, and seven hours each weekday, it would prevent nearly gas emissions.
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A single quart of motor oil, if disposed of improperly, can contaminate up to 2,000,000 gallons of fresh water.
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Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year.
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Refrigerators built in 1975 used 4 times more energy than current models.
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Due to tiger poaching, habitat destruction, and other human-tiger conflicts, tigers now number around 3,200—a decrease in population by about 70% from 100 years ago.
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Rainforests are being cut down at the rate of 100 acres per minute.
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American workers spend an average of 47 hours per year commuting through rush hour traffic. This adds up to 23 billion gallons of gas wasted in traffic each year.
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You will save 300 pounds of carbon dioxide for every 10,000 miles you drive if you always keep your car’s tires fully inflated.
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Turning off the tap when brushing your teeth can save as much as 10 gallons a day per person.
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You’ll save two pounds of carbon for every 20 glass bottles that you recycle.
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In the United States, automobiles produce over 20 percent of total carbon emissions. Walk or bike and you'll save one pound of carbon for every mile you travel.
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77% of people who commute to work by car drive alone.
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Recycling 100 million cell phones can save enough energy to power 18,500 homes in the U.S. for a year.
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Americans throw away more than 120 million cell phones each year, which contribute 60,000 tons of waste to landfills annually.
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For every 38,000 bills consumers pay online instead of by mail, 5,058 pounds of greenhouse gases are avoided and two tons of trees are preserved.
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Shaving 10 miles off of your weekly driving pattern can eliminate about 500 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions a year.
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Less than 1% of electricity in the United States is generated from solar power.
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A tree that provides a home with shade from the sun can reduce the energy required to run the air conditioner and save an additional 200 to 2,000 pounds of carbon over its lifetime.
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Americans throw away enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial fleet of airplanes every 3 months
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In California homes, about 10% of energy usage is related to TVs, DVRs, cable and satellite boxes, and DVD players.
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Recycling aluminum saves 95% of the energy used to make the material from scratch.
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You will save 100 pounds of carbon for each incandescent bulb that you replace with a compact fluorescent bulb (CFL), over the life of the bulb.
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An aluminum can that is thrown away instead of recycled will still be a can 500 years from now!


No ‘Poo… what's the longest you've ever gone without using shampoo? I'll admit it—on a bike trip I once went 11 days without showering, and my hair became an oily, knotty mess! That's why I was surprised to hear that there are many people who happily go without shampoo for weeks, months...

We'd like to think that when we pass from this Earth, our environmental footprint goes away too. The unsettling truth is that even in the afterlife we can pollute. In the United States, the most common type of funeral is a burial with embalming and open-casket visitation. However, this tradition didn't begin until the Civil War, when bodies...
For those who live in big cities, noise can be a source of constant annoyance and problems. Even within the walls of an apartment, it is rare to be completely insulated from the regular interruption of sirens, construction work, loud neighbors, and more. This is referred to as “noise...
It has been estimated that 41% of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives and that 21% of Americans will die of the disease. You’ve been told that genetics and certain lifestyle choices increase your risk of becoming part of that statistic, but you might not have heard that our environment is also a leading contributor...
The first environmental problem with smoking is the process required to make cigars and cigarettes. In the United States, tobacco, a plant relatively sensitive to disease, requires the use of more pesticides per acre than most other crops, amounting to 27 million pounds of pesticides each year. While this is bad for the environment, the...
Conventional dog food contains pesticides, chemicals, additives, and preservatives that are harmful to your pet and the environment. Several brands of pet food have even been recalled as not safe for consumption. By feeding them natural or organic foods, you will be reducing the amount of toxins ingested by your pet and released into...
Despite our society's over dependency on prescription medication, there still remains a great deal of interest in allergy relief minus meds which only mask the problem instead of cure or control it. However, thanks to on going research and interest in natural living, there is now a growing list of natural ways to alleviate allergies without...
Many of us tend to over look the environmental impacts or threats within the healthcare industry as we depend on it for our well-being. I was shocked when I found out how much unnecessary pollution goes into our Nation’s healing process. An organization working to combat many of these issues, Health Care Without Harm, offers some pretty alarming statistics: The...
You bike to work, you buy organic potatoes, you even anticipate the day you’ll drive a hybrid car. So when your knee gives out after too many miles of mountain biking, you might think twice about the doctor’s recommendation of getting a new artificial knee. Can’t you just recycle your old one? In a sense, you can. Biologic—not bionic...