reduce, reuse, recycle

I was intruiged by the booklet that comes along with recycling services here in West Hollywood. You can recycle almost anything and everything here. For me, it's a dream come true, and so is living with my equally eco-friendly roommate. She doesn't preach her practictes, nor does she even awknowledge them for the most part, but she just does them routinely out of concern for her own "footprint." I respect her a lot for the little things she does, and in turn it encourages me to do more. Her sister has a compost pile in the backyard, so we have a sealed compost jar on the counter to put our scraps in. I read a statistic that this alone can reduce your trash/garbage volume up to 70% a year! That's incredible! We produce approximately a bag of garbage every couple weeks. It's incredible.

On top of recycling and composting, the little booklet/manual encouraged people to call those who are distributing junk mail and get them to stop! If you do this, not only will you get back 70 hours a year you waste sorting thru junk mail, you'll also save water! About 28 billion gallons of water are wasted in producing and recycling junk mail, that you don't even look at! More than 100 million trees are destroyed for the paper that hardly touches your fingertips. On average, an adult receives 41 pounds of junk mail a year! It's such a disgusting waste of resources.

Even if you think, well at least I'm recycling, you're still not getting at the source. Junk mail uses inks with high concentrations of metals, making them difficult to recycle. Here is where I got the facts: http://www.41pounds.org/impact/. Go forth and be educated. 41pounds offers a service of contacting dozens of direct marketers on your behalf, reducing your junk mail and conserving trees, water, preventing carbon dioxide from being released, annnnd donates part of the money to environmental organizations of your choice! Or if you want to save money, send me your mail and I'll call them for you! You think I'm joking. I think my mom told me a box is a flat rate of $8 or so... so stuff all the junkmail info in the box, plus some cookies, and I'll do it for you. haha. Anyways, just putting it out there to help awareness. Junk mail can be anything from credit card offers, to catalogs you no longer want to be receiving, to any other mail you don't want.

It's fun and interesting to live green. try it!