Carbon Fast For Lent

I am hoping to inspire others to move past giving up chocolate or camel rides for Lent, and to ascend toward something more useful - giving up carbon. We are truly addicted, as the following posts will prove. All content is subject to copyright - Leslie Holly, 2009

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Location: Upstate NY, United States

Trying to do my part to voice ideas and solutions to problems we can all solve if we try

Friday, January 23, 2009

Reduce Paper Use 10%

Each person in the US produces 730 pounds of waste paper per year. This works out to 1 pound per person per week. Since only 1/3 of the newsprint is recycled, 500,000 trees are cut down each year to make up for the 2/3 that isn’t recycled back into newsprint.

Every year, 535 million trees are cut just for the US paper demand, using over 12 billion gallons of petroleum products. We can reduce that significantly.

It is reported that making 1 ton of paper from virgin pulp uses up to 72,000 gallons of water, whereas producing recycled paper only needs a tenth the water, 60% of the energy and not even 50% the chemicals.

Newspapers – Recycle them! There is nothing like the feel of a newspaper to get at least some of your daily news, but there is no need to toss them away. Recycle. Use under mulch in your flower beds as a weed block.

Printing – everyone has a home printer that can print on both sides. Use this option at all times. Make sure you truly need to print something before you hit that button. All too often, it’s looked at and then thrown out within an hour. Buy paper with recycled content.

Magazines – Share subscriptions with family members or friends. Go to the library to read the most popular magazines. Mother Earth News uses all recycled paper in their magazine. Ask the same of your magazines.

Request mail-order companies to take you off their list. If you did this with all catalogs, you could save 400 pounds of paper per year. Go to CatalogChoice.org or send your address label with a letter to the company. It may take up to 2 mailing cycles, but persistence will pay off.
How To Get Off Mailing Lists by the USPS
How To from Mindfully

Tissue products – this includes napkins, paper towels, packaging and toilet paper. Americans use over 50 pounds of tissue products per year. In comparison, India uses 7 pounds per person.

Use cloth napkins. You can get at least 50 washings out of a cloth napkin versus a single use of a paper napkin. A friend of mine wound up with a few dozen guest-towels so uses those. I have a great deal of cotton fabric, so I made a few dozen.

Use cloth rags instead of paper towels. Old t-shirts, cotton sheets, flannel shirts are all great rags in the making.

Use Recycled Content – if every home used just one package of 100% recycled content toilet paper, 1.4 million trees would not be cut down. If you did the same for napkins, it would be 1 million trees.

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