Day 138 of our Green Year: Spreading the message of Think Water

A few days ago, Layla and I saw a very interesting television commercial that had a grandfather and grandson in a ghost town. It used to have gold, but that dried up and the people left the town. The grandfather then told the kid that in the future, water will be as precious as gold and we should take care of it now.

It was a great commercial that really made you think, and throughout this green initiative, we have spent several of our blog posts talking about going green by saving water. Just yesterday we saw our neighbor watering their lawn as it rained, and it was a horrible thing to see. We would have said something, but as the man was well into his old age we didn't think it would go very far (sorry to all those elderly individuals who care for the environment, I know you are out there).

The commercial was part of the UN Water For Life initiative, which can be viewed at this website and it is a very important initiative that we should all look at when we turn on the tap. All of this is for the International Decade for Action "Water for Life", which runs from 2005 to 2015. During the first UN decade on water, which ran from 1981 to 1990, more than one billion people gained access to safe drinking water. This second decade initiative is just as important and that is why Layla and I are devoting this post to spreading the message of the UN Water for Life and ThinkWater.ca.

Water is very important, and without it all life on earth will cease, so treat it as a precious resource.

Day 79 of our Green Year: Green The Toilet

One of the biggest water wasters in the house is the toilet. This is something we all use, multiple times a day, which we have become so accustom to that any place that does not have a flushing toilet is considered to be 'a backwater shack'.

However, how can you go green with your toilet? Well, there is the obvious tip of 'when it is yellow, let it mellow, when it is brown flush it down', but what else can you do to conserve water? You really need to think of ways to conserve water with the toilet because it uses 20 liters of water every time it is flushed. So, for one person, who uses the bathroom five times a day, and flushes every time, they flush 100 liters of water down the toilet, literally. For a family of four, that can be over 500 liters depending on how often it is used!

So, what are some other solutions? Here is something that we will be doing during Our Green Year in our house.

First, we are putting a brick, or at least a plastic bottle full of water in the back of the tank. This will actually cut down on the flush of water by a quarter, or even one third. When you do this, just make sure you don't impede the flushing mechanism.

We rent, so we cannot get a low-flush toilet, but it will be on our list when we do buy a house.

What else can you do? Have any suggestions, let us know!

One thing I would like to talk about now, is the Alberta government's decision to cut greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2050. There are several problems with this, and most of it is fluff with no substance from a government that is trying to make it look like they care about the environment. First, they are using carbon capture technology that has not been completely researched for long-term effects, and they are putting $2 billion into it. Second, I do not understand why governments like Alberta's insist on setting goals that are four decades away. Nearly every climate change scientist has stated that immediate action is needed (AS IN RIGHT NOW) to ward off climate change. There is no time to waste, yet the G8 countries and Alberta feel that lowering emissions by 1.19 percent a year until 2050 is a good plan. What is needed is a 50 percent reduction now, not later. We are nearing the tipping point, and the time to 'wait and see' or slowly lower emissions is long gone. This is just another reason why Layla and I are boycotting all things Albertan.

Day 32 of our Green Year: Reusable Takeout

When you go out for something to eat and you bring home what is left in a Styrofoam container, what do you do with it? When you go to McDonald's or Subway, what do you do with the paper wrapping, plastic bags and more?
If you are like most people, you simply throw it away and before all of this, Layla and I were the same way. However, Our Green Year is all about changing the way we deal with our day-to-day lives and understanding how everything we do affects the environment.

So, as part of our Green Year, Layla and I have decided to do away with these containers. From now on when we go out for supper and there is food left over, it goes in a Tupperware container. When we go out to Subway, as we sometimes like to do, we will be putting the subs, without the paper, in the containers. Doing this can eliminate large amounts of waste in your home because you only use the paper, bags and Styrofoam for a few hours at most. By spending only $10 to $20, you can get the containers you need to never worry about how your food wrapping is affecting the environment.

You should probably get used to not having take-out containers, the Styrofoam ones at least. San Francisco has banned them out right, as has China, and I am sure the rest of the United States and Canada won't be far behind.

Thank you again to the Trail Daily Times for their wonderful story on us today. It is nice to see we can get the word out on what we are doing.

Remember, we will be posting pictures of our readers doing green things, so if you have any, send them to us at crwbaird@gmail.com and if you have any suggestions, let us know.

Day 26 of our Green Year: Limiting Our Showers

Wow, only a few days before we hit our first month of Our Green Year. Things are going well, we have our story in The Province (the largest paper in British Columbia) tomorrow, and we have been getting a lot of hits from Treehugger.com, so it is nice to be mentioned there as well.

Today, we decided to save some water, and the best way to do that is by limiting your showers. Typically, people will take a 10 to 15 min shower, and this wastes about 150 to 250 liters of water each time. Now, it is entirely feasible to have a shower, get yourself clean and wash your hair in five minutes, and when you do this you save 75 to 175 liters of water as a result. That may not seem like much, but here is a quick little lesson on water wasting:

• If you have a 20 min shower, you waste 300 liters of water. Multiply that over a week and you waste 2,100 liters of water. Multiply that over one year, and you waste 100,800 liters of water!
• If you have a 10 min shower, you waste 150 liters of water. Multiply that over a week and you have 1,050 liters of water. Multiply that over one year and you waste 50,400 liters of water.
• Now, if you have a five minute shower, then you use 75 liters of water. Multiply that over a week and you get 525 liters of water. Multiply that over one year and you will only use 25,200 liters. In fact, a five minute shower per day for a MONTH will use the same amount of water used in a 20 minute shower per day for a WEEK.
  

The water savings, which translate into money savings for you, amounts to 75,600 liters of water saved a year if you switch from a 20 minute shower to a five minute shower.
In our own house, we averaged 15 min showers, which came to 225 liters of water. Each day that meant we used 450 liters of water for the shower, which comes to 151,200 liters of water. Switching to five minute showers will save 145,800 liters of water each year here.

To ensure we follow this, we have bought an egg timer that will allow us to know when our five minutes is up.

Some more tips for saving water in the shower is to put a bucket in the shower with you. Let it fill up, then use that bucket to water your garden. Do not leave it in the shower if you are washing your hair or using soap.
You can also only shower a few times a week, like every second day. If you do that, you cut as much as 57 percent on your water.
Don't forget about showering together, that can save water too!

Day 15 of our Green Year: No more bottled water

We have hit our two-week mark and are very happy with the progress we are making with our Green Year. For today, we have decided to rid ourselves of bottled water. Why have we chosen to do this for our fifteenth day? Well, bottled water is a huge environmental problem for the world right now, yet people prefer to have bottled water instead of tap water. Thirty years ago if you told people we would buy bottled water, they would call you nuts, now it is the norm. So, what does bottled water do to our environment?

Every single year, 1.5 million tons of plastic is used to bottle 89 billion liters of water. This is an immense amount. This amounts to the same amount of water that flows over Niagara Falls over the course of two entire days. When you have seen Niagara Falls and the 500,000 liters of water that flow over it every second, you realize just how much water that is.

In the United States, the Earth Policy Institute has estimated that the process to make the plastic for water bottles, burns 1.5 million barrels of oil, which could power 100,000 cars for a year. This is made even worse when you realize that 90 percent of the plastic bottles are not recycled, and sit in landfills where they will slowly decay for centuries.

Instead of using bottled water over and over again, you can simply have one bottle that you clean out, which you fill with water when you need it. There is no reason to have so many water bottles being thrown out over the course of a year, it is the utmost in waste and a huge problem for the environment.

No more water bottles will be entering this house.

Day 6 of our Green Year: Improving the Air with Saplings

For Day 6 of our Green Year, we decided to make things a bit greener in our area. As a result, we have acquired seven saplings that we are going to be planting later this week to help improve the air, take some CO2 out of the atmosphere and make things a bit easier on the planet.
These trees will be planted later this week near some of the trails that hikers use around our town. However, we may put one or two in our yard.

You may be asking the question of how planting trees can help the environment, so here are some bits of information about trees and all they do for the environment, and us.

1. Trees absorb carbon dioxide, remove the carbon and release oxygen back into the air. This means, no trees, no oxygen, we all die. In fact, one acre of mature trees absorb the same amount of CO2 in one year, that a car being driven for 26,000 miles produces.
2. Trees placed around a home in a strategic manner keep it cool and cut summer air conditioning needs by up to 50 percent.
3. Trees reduce runoff by breaking rainfall, which allows the water to flow down the trunk and into the earth below the tree. This prevents stormwater from carrying pollutants into the ocean.
4. Trees shield people from UV rays. The most common form of cancer in North America is skin cancer, and trees reduce UV-B exposure by 50 percent.
5. Studies have found that patients in hospitals with views of trees at their window heal faster. Children with ADHD have fewer symptoms when able to see trees, and mental fatigue is reduced on individuals who have trees outside their windows.
6. Homes and neighborhoods with trees in front of them have been shown to lower the violence of an area near the home.
7. Trees increase property values by up to 15 percent when planted in strategic locations around the yard.

Carbon Removed Each Year By Seven Full-Grown Trees: 182 Pounds
Amount of Oxygen Provided by Seven Full-Grown Trees: Enough for 21 People

Day 4 of our Green Year: Storing Snow

We are just about one week into our Green Year, and today we took the advice of someone who has read the blog and began storing snow.
Yes, it may seem odd that we are storing snow, but the truth is that it is an excellent way to save water for the summer.
When people water their lawns, they can waste between 50 and 500 gallons of water. Some water in the afternoons, when most of the water evaporates, while others water their lawn too much. Typically, your lawn needs only one inch of water per week. This means that if you have a rectangle lawn (for simplicity's sake) that is 15 by 35 feet, you will need 271 gallons of water per week to water it. However, your lawn can survive on less, so watering your lawn as little as 100 gallons of water per week should be fine.
To that end, we have begun gathering up snow, which we will store in a 71 gallon rain barrel that can be bought from Canadian Tire for about $70 to $90. While we fill the barrel with snow, rain will also keep it full. This means that if we can maintain the barrel with enough rain water so that it is full twice a month, that is 142 less gallons of water we will be using on the lawn each month.
We have not bought the barrel yet, and are just using some containers we have around the house instead. They may be small, but every single drop of water helps and it is another drop less that we use from the watersheds in the area.

It should be noted that when we store our water, we will be purchasing a mosquito net so that no mosquito can get to the water to lay its larvae. You should never let still water exist in your yard, unless it is covered or protected from mosquitoes, who will use it as a breeding ground.

A Shout Out!
Thank you to everyone who has read the blog and sent us e-mails. In particular, Min, Jay and Sue have all told us they will be implementing some of the ten things you can do to save the environment. Every big change starts small, but overtime it grows larger and larger until it cannot be denied. We look forward to receiving more comments and feedback in the future.

Water Saved With Two Small Containers: 5.3 Gallons (small but a start)