Jul
28
A lot of books, articles and web pages have already been published to provide information on environmentally responsible lifestyle. Though being a local real estate expert gives me plenty of changes to talk about the many ways of green living with my clients, my topic today will be a bit more specific. In this text, I will try not to repeat all the tips on eco-life, you have probably heard them many times before anyway. Today I would like to contemplate on the three very common resources which people from the modern countries usually take for granted: food, water and electricity.
Food
As I hope that most people don’t just throw away paper, glass and metal waste but recycle it, the rest of your household rubbish will be mainly groceries. The bulk of the food that we throw away is in most cases in perfect condition and in some cases even in the original wrapper or box. The shocking reality is that between 20 and 30% of all food purchased by Canadian families is wasted later. Together with the food thrown out in shops and restaurants, it makes between 7 and 14 billion tonnes of food wasted annually. In Canadian dollars, that’s $3 to 5 billion per year.
Now you are probably shocked by these figures, aren’t you? With so many organizations trying to help people affected by lack of food, while at the same time so much of it is being wasted right under our noses. But wait before you start packing the groceries you are not going to consume and sending it to places full of hungry people. There are some other tips you might want to consider instead of throwing the food away. 1. Try using leftovers. For example if you had some rice remaining from yesterday’s supper, you could have prepared stuffed peppers today. 2. A good way of preventing groceries going past the expiry date is sorting your food cabinet by this criteria: older food, that is going to expire soon, is stored in the front, while the longer lasting products can stay in the back of the shelves. 3. It may happen that you know beforehand that there is some food you are not going to be able to use before its expiration date. Instead of throwing it out, try to find a local charity or soup kitchen and bring your food there when it’s still serviceable. Let some people eat it – famine isn’t only to Africa. 4. If you have some leftovers anyway, try mulching it instead of just throwing it away. Always try to think in the way that groceries just shouldn’t be dumped. If you don’t have a garden yourself, try to find someone who does and can do the mulching.
Water
There are plenty of ways to prevent wasting water and you can probably name many of them yourself. One problem that comes to me when thinking about sensible water usage is the way we manage human waste: toilets. We got used to using toilets so much that we no longer think of them – as long as they function the way the are supposed to. However, have you tried to estimate how much water your household needs every month for flushing the lavatory? Wow, that’s a lot of water, isn’t it? But it doesn’t need to be that much, there are some methods of decreasing the amount of water needed for every flushing. There are two different ways to achieve that. 1. There are new kinds of toilets available, that need just the minimum amount of water necessary. You might think that there is not much to choose from when buying a new toilet, but just stop by at your nearest shop and see for yourself, you might be surprised! 2. Another way of decreasing the amount of water for flushing is to put several plastic bottles filled with water into the tank of your toilet. You might have to experiment a bit before you find out the right amount of water needed for the toilet to keep functioning fine.
Electricity
Just like with water, many advices on electricity waste prevention are accessible only and elsewhere. But now let’s focus on tumble dryers, as I identify these myself as one of the biggest energy-eaters in our households. The popularity of tumble dryers comes from the fact that modern people want everything to be done in the shortest time possible, regardless of the volume of resources that are wasted in the process of speeding things up. It is quite obvious that in our current lifestyle, there is not enough time for washing our clothes manually, and that dishwashers do really save some water. Though the pluses of a tumble dryer might be less obvious. Would it be such a great problem if we just waited 1 – 2 days for our clothes to get dry? For people who are trying hard to make their lives less of an ecological liability, using a tumble dryer is acceptable only in emergency cases. Even a better decision is to get rid of the dryer at all, or sell it. Except for the environment, you will save some money on your electricity bills as well.
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