Scholarship Blog for www.CastleInk.com on the topic of recycling #CastleInk
There are 365 days in a year and people ideally brush their teeth twice a day. According to the Daily Green website (http://www.thedailygreen.com/going-green/tips/tap-water-conservation-tip), turning off the faucet while brushing our teeth twice a day could save as much as 8 gallons of water per day. This approximation (assuming 365 days/year) means that we have the potential to save 2,920 gallons of water per year. If I believe I have been brushing my teeth this way for at least 10 years, I could have already saved 29,200 gallons of water from being sent down the sink. If I continue to brush my teeth the same way (which I will) and live to be over 90 years old (that is 63 years from now), I will conserve up to 183,960 more gallons of water. That means that I could likely conserve over 200,000 gallons of water in my lifetime just by turning off the faucet when I brush my teeth.
There's another little thing I do that I believe makes a difference. If I'm at school, drink a can of Mountain Dew, and cannot put it in a recycle area (for whatever reason), I will carry it home in my purse so it gets recycled. I strongly believe that we should all recycle when we can. According to the Earth911 website (http://earth911.com/recycling/facts-about-aluminum-recycling/), people usually drink more than 2 beverages at work and only 50.7 % of the aluminum cans used in year 2009 were recycled. It seems like a simple task to recycle aluminum cans, so I am shocked that everyone is not recycling their aluminum cans.
Maybe people do not know how much energy they are saving by recycling aluminum cans. Earth911 states that recycling one aluminum can saves the amount of energy that could run a television for 3 hours by not having to manufacture a new aluminum can instead. That means that if people drink 2.5 cans of soda at work/day, then each person saves enough energy to run a television for 7.5 hours a day. This means that a single person recycling 2.5 cans of soda at work/day for 5 weekdays can power a television for 37.5 hours. Assuming 50 weeks/year (alloting a 2 week loss for vacation), an average person choosing to recycle their aluminum cans stands to conserve 1,875 hours of television-running energy per year of employment. That means that if a 25-year old recycles their cans (just at work) until they are 65 years old (standard age of retirement), a single person saves the amount of energy necessary to run a television for 75,000 hours.
Love Your Mountain Dew and Love Your Planet!
Now, I have attended multiple colleges over the years. My first college had this printing system where before anyone's print jobs, a cover page with our name would print first followed by what we needed printed. I collected the cover pages, flipped them over, and used them for my homework assignments. I started doing this primarily for my math classes. I had been having trouble at the beginning of my college career with Calculus 2. My professor offered me the suggestion to use white printer paper to perform math problems because a white piece of paper often can open our minds psychologically better than lined paper. Once I knew about this study strategy, I applied it whenever possible.
I have followed this paper-recycling suit at my current institution as well. My current institution does not have named cover pages that I recycle, so it's a little different. Whenever I print out research articles for assignments that I do not need to keep for anything, I save that paper and I have used the blank side for my homework whenever I can. It's actually quite challenging trying to conserve paper when taking engineering classes because many classes require students to do their work on one-sided engineering paper. However, whenever an engineering class did not have that paper requirement, I tried my best to conserve paper and recycle it. I was able to do this for my water resources engineering class, which might be part of the reason why it was my favorite class I have ever taken. I feel that engineering students should be learning how to be environmentally-friendly throughout their education so as to produce conservation-minded engineers geared towards sustainable practices.
Water Resources Homework: Blank Sides of Previous Research Article
Do Your Homework and Save the Trees!
What does a piece of paper cost in energy? According to the PaperCut website (http://www.papercut.com/products/ng/manual/ch-sys-mgmt-environmental-impact.html), the manufacture of one piece of new paper takes 17 Watt hours and a piece of recycled paper takes 12 Watt hours. If we assume that the student uses 500 pieces of new paper per year, that person's paper required 8,500 Watt hours or 8.5 kilowatt hours. If they bought recycled paper, that paper saves 5 Watt hours of power per sheet. the student saves 2500 Watt hours or 2.5 kilowatt hours. If they use 250 pieces of new paper on both sides for the 500 pieces of paper instead, they use 4.25 kilowatt hours in manufacturing. If they use 250 pieces of recycled paper on both sides for the 500 pages, they use 3 kilowatt hours in manufacturing. Hence, a student stands to save 5.5 kilowatt hours of energy by using both sides of recycled paper. According to Concordia Electric, this amount of energy could run an air conditioner for over 4 hours (Source: http://www.concordiaelectric.com/forms/kWh_Usage.pdf).
There are so many superhero movies that have been released in theaters over the last 5 years. These superheroes perform many death-defying feats in order to save a handful of people. Yet, being a hero for all of our posterity could be as simple as doing little things consistently for a long length of time. Turn off the faucet, recycle those cans, and reuse your paper to become a hero for the future's children who will still have playrounds and parks to play in instead of landfills. The little things can make a difference. Save the snails!
By the way, The Lorax is an awesome environmentally-friendly movie. I highly recommend watching it if you want to see a mainstream environmentally-heroic movie. I hope that environmental mindfulness will prompt the moviemakers to make a Captain Planet movie. "Go Planet!"
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