Learn Green, Live Green

January 2008 • Choosing environmentally-friendly transportation
33	percent you can lower your gas mileage during highway driving by not driving aggressively (speeding, rapid acceleration and braking).
5	percent you can lower gas mileage around town by not driving aggressively.
14	million Americans that take public transportation daily.
40	percentage of US reliance on foreign oil would decrease if one in ten Americans used public transportation daily.
79	the number of times safer it is to ride a bus over riding in your own automobile.
855	millions of gallons saved (equal to 45 million barrels of oil) from people taking public transportation each year. This is roughly the energy needed to power a quarter of all American homes annually.
6,000	the difference in pounds of global warming pollution that a diesel school bus emits over a natural gas school bus.
	If one in five Americans used public transportation daily, the carbon monoxide emissions saved would be greater than the combined emissions from all chemical manufacturing and metal processing industries.
(Information provided by the U.S. Department of Transportation, American Public Transportation Association, United States Environmental Protection Agency and www.fueleconomy.gov)

February 2008 • Reduce, Reuse, Rethink
•	The average American generates approximately 4.6 pounds of solid trash per day.
•	Every year, the United States generates approximately 230 million tons of trash.
•	Americans' total yearly waste would fill a convoy of garbage trucks long enough to wrap around the Earth six times and reach halfway to the moon.
•	Americans are generating waste products faster than nature can break them down and using up resources faster than they can be replaced.
•	By comparison, the average North American consumes ten times as much as the average person living in China and thirty times as much as the average person living in India.
•	Since 1950, people in the United States have used more resources than any generation who ever lived before them.
•	At the consumption level of the average American, at least four additional planets worth of resources would be needed to support the planet’s 6 billion inhabitants.
•	Indiana is one of the leading importers of waste in the country with more than 1.5 million tons coming in each year.
•	About 48 million tons of food are thrown away in the United States each year.
•	More than 20% of the food we buy gets thrown away.
•	Printing and writing paper equals about one-half of U.S. paper production.
•	Americans throw away enough office paper each year to build a 12-foot high wall stretching from New York to San Francisco — approximately 10,000 or more sheets per person.
•	The United States alone, which has less than 5% of the world's population, consumes 30% of the world's paper.
•	Reducing paper use reduces greenhouse gases: 40 reams of paper is like 1.5 acres of pine forest absorbing carbon for a year.
•	It takes more than 1½ cups of water to make one sheet of paper. (Picture a typical soda can.)
•	Over 40% of wood pulp goes toward the production of paper.
•	The costs of using paper in an office can run 13 to 31 times the cost of purchasing the paper in the first place!
•	The U.S. Postal Service delivers more than 87 billion pieces of direct mail (advertising and promotional mail) every year.
•	In 2005, of all waste generated in the United States, 32 % was recycled, 15.9% was incinerated and 52.1% ended up in landfills.
•	See what’s in America’s trash by visiting www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/reduce/catbook/what.htm.
Information provided by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, www.reduce.org, www.esc.mtu.edu and www.learner.org.

March 2008 • Recycle
•	The United States recycles 32.5 percent of its waste, a rate that has almost doubled during the past 15 years.
•	While recycling has grown in general, recycling of specific materials has grown even more drastically: 52 percent of all paper, 31 percent of all plastic soft drink bottles, 45 percent of all aluminum cans, 63 percent of all steel packaging, and 67 percent of all major appliances are now recycled.
•	Twenty years ago, only one curbside recycling program existed in the United States, which collected several materials at the curb. By 2006, about 8,660 curbside programs had sprouted up across the nation. As of 2005, about 500 materials recovery facilities had been established to process the collected materials.
•	Recycling, including composting, diverted 82 million tons of material away from landfills and incinerators in 2006, up from 34 million tons in 1990.
•	For every ton of paper that is recycled, the following is saved: 7,000 gallons of water; 380 gallons of oil; and enough electricity to power an average house for six months.
•	You can run a TV for six hours on the amount of electricity that is saved by recycling one aluminum can.
•	By recycling just one glass bottle, you save enough electricity to power a 100-watt bulb for four hours.
•	In 2006, a record 53.4 percent of the paper consumed in the U.S. (53.5 million tons) was recovered for recycling. Paper recovery now averages 360 pounds for each man, woman, and child in the United States.
Sources: www.gogreenintiative.org, www.epa.gov, www.paperrecycles.org

April 2008 • Renew
•	A renewable resource is a natural resource that can be used to benefit people and can then be replaced for other people to enjoy.
•	Renewable energy sources include solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, hydro and ocean.
•	Unlike non-renewable sources, most renewable sources do not directly emit greenhouse gases.
•	Five generations (125 years) ago, wood supplied up to 90 percent of our energy needs. Due to the convenience and low price of fossil fuels, the use of wood for energy has fallen in the United States.
•	Renewable energy currently supplies 9 percent of our energy supply. If we exclude hydropower, renewable energy supplies only two percent of the nation’s electricity needs.
•	Overall consumption from renewable sources in the United States totaled 6.8 quads (quadrillion British thermal unit, or Btu) in 2006, or about 7 percent of all energy used nationally.
•	Consumption from renewable sources was at its highest point in 1997, at about 7.2 quads.
•	The growth in renewable energy generation over the past decade has been significant – approximately 30 percent since 1990.
•	Continued research has made renewable energy more affordable today than 25 years ago. o The cost of wind energy has declined from 40¢ per kilowatt-hour to less than 5¢. o The cost of electricity from the sun, through photovoltaics (literally meaning "light-electricity") has dropped from more than $1/kilowatt-hour in 1980 to nearly 20¢/kilowatt-hour today. o The cost of ethanol fuel has plummeted from $4 per gallon in the early 1980s to about $1.20 today.
•	Today, the U.S. Department of the Interior’s public lands produce 17 percent of the nation’s hydropower – which is virtually 100 percent of all residential electricity use in the state of Washington, or 27 percent of all West Coast residential electricity use.
•	The public lands produce approximately 10 percent of all domestic wind energy and 48 percent of our nation’s geothermal power.
Sources: Energy Information Administration, U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Department of Energy

May 2008 • Nature’s Partners
•	Common beneficial organisms include ladybugs, spiders, centipedes, dragon flies and ground beetles.
•	In nature, there are no pests. Humans label “pests” as any plants or animals that endanger our food supply, health or comfort.
•	In the United States, pesticides are used on 900,000 farms and in 70 million households.
•	Using beneficial organisms can cut down the use of pesticides.
•	Plants in the cabbage, carrot and sunflower family will especially attract beneficial insects. Fennel, calendula, coriander, dill, and cosmos are also all considered good plants for attracting beneficials.
•	Herbicides are the most widely used type of pesticide.
•	Agriculture uses 75 percent of all pesticides.
•	A total of 85 percent of all U.S. households have at least one pesticide in storage, and 63 percent have one to five stored.
•	A Minnesota survey found that, on a per-acre basis, urban dwellers use herbicides for lawn care at rates equal to those used by farmers for food production.
•	At the end of 2001, there were approximately 195 registered biopesticide active ingredients and 780 products.
•	According to David Pimentel, entomologist at Cornell University, over the past 50 years, pesticide use has increased 30 times and toxicity of pesticides more than a hundredfold.
•	Many pesticides are losing their effectiveness as the bugs and plants they are designed to eradicate develop resistance. Already 504 insect and mite species, 150 plant diseases, and 188 weed species have developed resistance.
•	Farmers still lose about 20 per cent of their crops to weeds and insects, the same proportion as they lost in 1930.
Sources: U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, World Wildlife Fund and the University of Minnesota.

June 2008 • Breathe Easy
•	Leaving your car at home twice a week can cut greenhouse gas emissions over 1,500 pounds per year.
•	The average adult breathes about 3,400 gallons of air a day.
•	In the United States, we spend about 80 to 90 percent of our time inside buildings; therefore our potential exposure to harmful indoor pollutants is significant.
•	People with asthma are the only segment of the population that has been identified to be the most acutely responsive to ozone exposure.
•	Ozone can irritate the already sensitive airway of someone with asthma.
•	When ozone levels are high, more asthmatics have asthma attacks that require a doctor’s attention or the use of additional medication.
•	Asthma afflicts about 20 million Americans, including 6.3 million children.
•	Since 1980, the biggest growth in asthma cases has been in children under five.
•	In 2000, there were nearly two million emergency room visits and nearly half a million hospitalizations due to asthma, at a cost of almost $2 billion – causing 14 million school days missed each year.
Sources: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

July 2008 • Tread Lightly
•	A faucet with even a slow drip takes 10 to 25 gallons of water. Just think, 15 drips per minute adds up to almost 3 gallons of water wasted per day, 65 gallons wasted per month and 788 gallons wasted per year!
•	Taking a shorter shower can conserve a lot of water. A five-minute shower takes 10 to 25 gallons of water.
•	Use the restroom before you fly. Each airplane flush uses enough fuel to drive a car for six miles.
•	Air travel results in nearly two times as much global warming pollution as intercity bus travel.
•	Rail produces slightly more greenhouse gas emissions than buses.
•	Cars, trucks and motorcycles produce three times the pollution of buses.
•	Low tire pressure wastes over 2 million gallons of gasoline in the U.S. every day.
•	Keeping your tires properly inflated raises your car’s gas mileage by about 3.3 percent.
•	Generally, each 5 mph over 60 mph you go is like paying an extra 20 cents per gallon of gas.
•	Nearly 97 percent of the world's water is salty or otherwise undrinkable. Another 2 percent is locked in ice caps and glaciers. That leaves just 1 percent for all of humanity's needs – all its agricultural, residential, manufacturing, community and personal needs.
•	On average, 50 percent to 70 percent of summer household water is used outdoors for watering lawns and gardens, so think before you water your lawn.
•	Running the water while brushing your teeth wastes up to 4 gallons a minute.
•	A ton of recycled paper equals or saves 17 trees in paper production.
Sources: www.tampagov.net, Earth 911, United States Environmental Protection Agency, www.indianalivinggreen.com