Staying Green
Summer for the Simple, Eco-Friendly Tips by Will Bass I
t’s hot outside, and that means cranking up the air conditioning, relaxing indoors, tending the fast-growing lawn and garden and enjoying backyard barbecues— activities that can all contribute to more carbon emissions. Follow these tips to keep your summer green and simple. Clear your home of clutter. If you recently relocated or were too busy for spring cleaning, you may have stacks of boxes and packing paper, old computers and house- hold items cluttering your indoor environment. Placing them on the curb ultimately puts them in the landfill. A better solution is contacting a local business that will come to your home for a small fee and pick up recy- clable, reusable items.
Barbecue with clean-burning grills, not charcoal.
Charcoal is a dirty fuel that expels 11 pounds of CO2 every hour it burns. Approximately 2 billion people (about one-third of the world’s population) use charcoal or other biomass sources as their primary household fuel. In de- veloping countries, this high demand harms the environ- ment. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, charcoal traders are illegally entering protected forests and chopping down trees, destroying the native habitat of the mountain gorilla.
Help reduce demand by using clean-burning grills that cook more efficiently and use less fuel.
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Kill your weeds, but kindly. Despite being banned by the European Union in 2004 because of links with breast and prostate cancer, deformed hearts and impaired kidney and digestive functions, Atrazine remains a widely used herbicide. It’s popular because it can permeate the tough, waxy leaves of weeds, but it also ends up in ponds and streams.
Be gentler to the environment by pouring vinegar or boiling water over weeds. Don’t blow off your leaves. A gas-powered leaf- blower emits as many tailpipe emissions during one hour of use as an automobile traveling across 350 miles—and it’s noisy. About 30 percent of the fuel required to run a blower comes out of its tail pipe, unburned. Worse, these offenders don’t even remove leaves, they just move them around, along with dust, mold, pesticides and pet waste. All this—plus their noxious emissions—ends up in the air we breathe. A better solution is to use your leaves as natural
fertilizer. Chop them up with a mulching lawnmower, or compost them.
Keep cool while cutting back on the AC. The central air conditioning (AC) unit in your home likely uses chlori- nated fluorocarbons (CFCs) or hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) as coolants, compounds that damage the ozone
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