Sunday, January 6, 2013

Reducing Your Carbon Footprint: Part 2

Firstly, I would like to wish you a Happy New Year!! I know many of you are probably getting started with your New Year's resolutions and this New Year, I would highly appreciate it if you could add this to your resolutions: Make the world more environmental friendly!
Hopefully you have read my first part to this topic because I am going to be continuing from where I left in the first article. If you haven't that's okay, you can click it on the right if you would like to view it.

Keep your refrigerator and freezer full
  • A full freezer is better than an empty one. The refrigerator arguably sucks up more electricity than anything else in the house, that is why it is important for it to work efficiently.
  • The science behind this advice is that, when the fridge door opens, warm air enters; the refrigerator uses energy to cool the warm air so if it was empty to begin with, that means more warm air is entering , therefore it is going to require more energy to cool it.
  • On the other hand, if it was full, that means less warm air is going to displace the cold air inside, therefore, less energy is used to cool the refrigerator.
Use both sides of a paper
  • This is a simple tip to understand. Using less paper helps save trees; it saves energy used to manufacture and transport the papers, and this also prevents huge amounts of waste.
  • Therefore, whenever you can, please use both sides of a piece of paper and please set your print settings to double sided when printing.
Minimize use of the car
  • This year please make an effort to use your car less. There are many options you could try.
  • You could use try public transportation, biking and even walking. If you must use the car, try to carpool and reduce the amount of trips (described in Part 1 of this topic).
  • This change will definitely improve the planet's health and YOUR health too.
Try buying second-hand items
  • Purchasing second-hang items is more environmental friendly because you avoid a huge amount of carbon emissions when you don't buy something new.
  • Therefore, if people start buying more used items, companies would reduce their manufacturing rate and this would greatly lower carbon emissions.
Buy long-lasting bulbs
  • When buying light bulbs, your best option is to buy CFLs (Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs). These bulbs are long-lasting and this makes them better for the environment.
  • Tungsten bulbs on the other hand are more wasteful because they quickly stop working.
  • CFLs are therefore more efficient and also save you money because you don't have to replace them regularly.

1 comment:

  1. You raise issues that all sound 'common sense' yet the reality is that consumers keep following old school habits. With printing, regardless of today's age and technology that promotes 'paperless' transactions, and online document review and filling of forms without necessitating the printing of hard copies that are later trashed and add to the pollution and continued deforestation for commercial paper production, old habits of printing still dominate. I hope 'old school' readers that still believe in hard copies read this blog. On long lasting light bulbs, I like the policy position taken by the power utility in Zimbabwe of offering consumers subsidized CFLs. Though this was done to reduce per capita electricity consumption as an adjustment to the nationwide power shortage, it has the added environmental benefit described in this post.

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