How green are you? Kristen Saacke Blunk, extension associate and director for the Penn State Agriculture and Environment Center, said that despite environmental progress during the past few decades, few people are doing everything they can.
How green are you?
We're talking green as in helping the environment and ourselves.
Kristen Saacke Blunk, extension associate and director for the Penn State Agriculture and Environment Center, said, "A lot has happened in the last 50 years since the '70s when the Clean Water Act was enacted."
Still, Blunk said, "Few people are doing everything they can do everywhere."
But they can make a difference with choosing things they can do and making that commitment to do them.
Blunk shared statistics about recycling and cutting pollution. Recycled products include clear and colored glass, No. 1 and 2 plastics, newspaper, office paper, aluminum, steel and cardboard.
Blunk said some people question if the trucks that collect recyclables burn more energy and produce more pollution than the recycling saves. According to a Morris Study in Popular Mechanics in November, it takes 10.4 million British thermal units to manufacture products from a ton of recyclables, and 23.3 million Btu to manufacture products from a ton of virgin materials. It takes another 0.9 Million Btu to collect, haul and process a ton of recyclables. The net energy saving is 12 million Btu per ton.
An area of reuse is textiles. Blunk said 12 million tons of textiles enter our municipal solid waste stream per year, and account for 5 percent of our total municipal solid waste. About 2.5 billion pounds, or 10 pounds per person, in the United States are recycled. We export 61 percent of the clothing recovered from second-hand stores to foreign countries.
Growers can make all kinds of environmental choices. Besides growing plants organically, rain barrels and rain gardens help to preserve our resources.
Gardeners also make choices to recycle when they make compost.
U.N. scientists cite livestock and transportation as most problematic of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Farmers in the Netherlands are finding ways to capture methane from manure, burn it, creating energy to run the farms and sell electricity back to the grid, Blunk said.
Here's a surprising fact: Blunk shared a quote from Dr. R.K. Pauchari of the Nobel Prize-winning United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "Consuming less meat would have more of an effect on reducing global greenhouse gas emissions than switching to a hybrid car."
How can that be? As the demand for meat increases, so does the increased clearing of land for pastures, and the clearing of forests for land to grow food.
"Ask yourself how this is affecting the environment," Blunk said. "Discover the life cycle of the choices that we make, the things that we buy, and the actions to which we commit ourselves."
If this is overwhelming, she recommended, "Make a choice, do it well and move on to the next thing."