Reduce Your Chemical Exposure 10%

There is no quantitative way to show a 10% reduction in your use of chemicals. But 250 million tons of hazardous waste is produced in the making of our consumerism lifestyle.

Go unscented. Why have a dozen different scents from your shampoo, soap, laundry detergent, deodorant, hair products and make-up competing for your attention? What is the point of scented toilet paper? Buy unscented toilet paper, tissues, fabric softener, dishwashing detergent, laundry detergent, soap, deodorant, shampoo, hairspray, make up, hand lotion, toothpaste, etc. You get the idea. They're called "second hand scents".
Fabric softener/dryer sheets – Don’t use them. Cut them in half.
Use Baking Soda - Use ¼ C of baking soda in the wash instead. Using the baking soda will allow you to use less detergent as well.
Air Fresheners – even those like Febreze do little for you. Spray the Febreze on a hard surface and then look at it after it dries. Touch it. It’s not nice. And you’re spraying it all over everything frequently, sometimes daily.
Scented Candles – some are fake scents, some aren't. Both are being inhaled. Did you know that many of the oils used in scented candles are damaging teenage boys' ability to produce testosterone? Ditto with soy candles. Ditto plug-in air fresheners?
Your cookware – is it nonstick? Did you know that when the surface of that pan is heated hot enough to make an omelet, it is releasing toxins in the air 10x greater than originally reported to the government? Use olive oil on regular steel pans. The food will taste better as well.
Cleaning Supplies - Look at the list of ingredients. You’re touching them, inhaling them and maybe swallowing them. There is always a safer alternative. Go to Greener Choices for more information. Learn more about home chemicals here
Prepared foods – those canned tomatoes – look at their ingredients. It isn’t just tomato. Look at the can. It isn’t just metal. It’s lined with a chemical called Bpa – bisphenol-A, which is being linked to all sorts of health issues, particularly involving infants. An article here
Plastic containers – when heated, they leach out many toxins, most of which are considered cancer causing. Article here
Each bottle your water comes in uses 2 ounces of oil to make and ship. Each one! Don’t buy bottled water at all. Use filtered water from YOUR tap, not the manufacturers’.
Make Up - The Environmental Working Group found that 80% of all tested products contained at least 1 substance linked to cancer. Most women use at least 1 make up product a day on the largest organ of the human body – the skin. Learn more at Safe Cosmetics, EWG, and Cosmetic Database. An article on safe cosmetics

Do you really want all of this?

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Reduce Water Use 10%

Potable water is probably the one resource we take the most for granted. But what our recent weather patterns have shown – and just looking at our local rivers and streams – is that we are over-using. We will run out if we continue our wasteful ways, and water will be as expensive as oil. Between our industrial farming using 80% of our water and each person using about 80-100 gallons per day, we’ll need to change our ways.

This number does not include the amount of water used to produce our electricity. Returning to the electricity portion of the Fast, Americans use more than 10,000 kWh per year. That many kWh use 160,000 gallons of water to produce. This is an average – it may be more or less, depending on the source of your electricity. Nuclear uses the most while solar uses the least.

This number also excludes the water used in the energy needed to produce everything we buy. Just to make an ordinary light bulb, 4-6 gallons of water are used.

Leaks – They account for 25% of home water use. You’re leaking if you turn off all your water sources and your water meter reading changes. Find them and fix them.
Showering – Change your showerhead. Standard showerheads pump 5 gallons per minute. Reduce your use by half by changing to a low flow head.
Reduce the flow yourself. Don’t turn the flow to its highest setting. This reduces the amount by half.
Reduce the time. Most people take 10-minute showers. Reduce your time by a minute.
Toilets – We Americans use the toilet 6 times per person per day. How many of those times do you really need to flush? Reduce the water volume. Old toilets only need half the water used so put plastic bottles into the tank to reduce the amount used per flush.
Kitchen – Most dishwashers in use now can handle dishes straight from the table. Don’t rinse. Run the dishwasher only when full.
Clothes – Wash them only when they are truly dirty. You can wear something twice before washing. Try to convince a teen of that, but it’s true. Wash only full loads. If you have a suds saver option, use it! This will save 40% of the water used on clothes.
Gray Water – This includes water from the sink, dishwasher, clothes washer, shower and rain. The easiest to work with is rainwater. Either use rain barrels for outdoor watering, or divert the water from your roofs into your flowerbeds. You will save up to 30% in water use.

Our rainwater is flowing to the ocean more rapidly than ever recorded. This is due to impermeable surfaces such as rooflines, driveways, roads and parking lots. Half of all private property is covered with impermeable surfaces. Commercial land is 80% covered in this manner. This means water rushes directly into the waterways, rather than being absorbed by the land, creating artificial drought in even normal conditions. There are no steady flows anymore. Just extremes.

We can change this by reusing our gray water, even if it is only our rainwater, by diverting it to our lawns and garden beds.

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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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Reduce Natural Gas Use 10%

Americans have been reducing their Natural Gas use, even with more options available to use it, while maintaining a very slow increase in electricity (that does not correspond with the reduction of natural gas use). As of 2007, the average US home used 980 therms (ccf) of Natural Gas per year. The less you use something, the more difficult it is to cut down on the use. However, there is always a way!

Did you know that natural gas is used to make the fertilizer for your lawn and industrial farmers? Manufacturing 1 ton of anhydrous ammonia fertilizer requires 33,500 cubic feet of natural gas.

Clothes Dryer – Use the clothesline. Dry like-weight fabrics together. Use low heat setting. Use moisture sensor rather than timer. Dry only full loads.

Furnace – Turn down 2 degrees. Use programmable thermostats to lower temperate 5-10 degrees when you’re not home are asleep not using that particular zone.

Oven – Ignore the preheat cycle. Everything except cookies can easily go in prior to the oven being at full temperature. This will also save at least 5 minutes baking time. Turn off for the last 5-10 minutes of the baking/roasting. Don’t use the auto-clean feature.

Stove – cover everything you cook. It takes far less energy to cook when the heat isn’t escaping out of the pan. Use the lowest possible heat setting - Less heat rises uselessly around the pan. Use your microwave to start the cooking. Use it to fully cook vegetables.

Water Heater – Decrease shower time, take cooler showers, don’t run water the entire time you are washing or shaving, turn volume of shower down. Use cold water for your laundry.

From current personal experience – this will save you 10%-15%.

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Reduce Your Gasoline Use by 10%

Americans are addicted to their gas. Period. We drive an average of 12,000 miles per year, which is nearly 33 miles per day. With 240 million cars on the road, that’s a lot of gas. So how can we improve mileage? We all know the drill: Keep your tires properly inflated, get your car tuned up, get a clean air filter, empty the trunk of extra weight, get rid of the roof rack when you’re not using it. But there are other things you can do that may take just a little practice, but are simple, saving you TIME and gas.

Combine your errands. I know one person who must leave the house at least 5 times per day, every day. But if all of those trips were combined into 1, the savings would be at least 20% for gas and who knows for time. The act of combining your errands into a single outing will save you an average of 5%.

Make right turns only. UPS began this practice back in 2004, saving them 3.1 million gallons of fuel each year. It saves them time, fuel and insurance due to far fewer accidents. The saying goes – 10,000 sailors can’t be wrong. What about 80,000 UPS vehicles?

Don’t warm your car up. If the temperature is below freezing, the engine needs only about 1 minute running time prior to driving. If the temperature is above freezing, the engine needs no time to warm up. Oil has changed substantially since the early days of automotives. There is no need to warm it up and re-lubricate the inner workings of your engine.

Review hyper-miling. Visit Hyper-Miling on ways to increase your car’s mileage. Don’t drive like speed racer, and other simple, but effective ways to be nicer to your car and your gas bill.

Don’t drive 1 day a week. Ask your boss if you can work from home 1 day per week. Or, don’t travel any on a weekend day. Either of these choices will cause you to plan your week differently, but you might actually find it very enjoyable.

Use the car with the better mileage for the longer trips. In-town driving is a great equalizer of autos. But the highway miles can really show the hog from the miser. So if you have one commute that is long and another that is short, use the miser for the longer commute. It will save you incredible sums.

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Reduce Your Garbage 10%

Every man, woman and child in the US produces 3-5 pounds of garbage a day. How horrific is that? Every 10 pounds of garbage that goes to the landfill costs 100 pounds of carbon emissions.

What can you do?

Recycle. Broome County, NY has a list of all the items you can recycle both to the curb, and taking up to the landfill or participating store directly. By recycling alone, you can reduce your garbage by 50%.
Reduce – buy in bulk, don’t buy anything individually wrapped – you can do that. Buy items with the least amount of packaging. Reduce what you do use – napkins, paper towels, snacks, bottled water, etc.
Reuse - did you know the average time a plastic grocery bag is used is all of 12 minutes? Plastic in the form of grocery bags, water bottles and packaging is 20% of what enters our landfills. If you have to use plastic products, reuse them as often as you can before throwing them away.
Here is a list of links for reusing just about everything...
Compost – over half of the food you throw away can be composted in your back yard, or your neighbor’s, if you don’t want to. It’s incredibly simple. Just go to Compost Info for 7 different methods.
Recycling Events. Organize weekly recycling events at your church. The following are mere suggestions, but are easily formed.
Week 1 will be Old Cell Phones and Ink Cartridge Week. Locally there are many organizations taking both as part of their fundraising efforts. If you need help locating one, your church may know of one, or call your local council of churches.
Week 2 will be Sneaker Week. Bring all old sneakers/athletic shoes, plus a $1 donation for shipping. These will be sent to Nike for their program to make the shoes into athletic mats/playgrounds. Ship to the Nike Reuse a Shoe program – http://www.nikereuseashoe.com/ has details of where to ship or drop the shoes off.
Week 3 will be Small Appliance Week. Only the following appliance can be collected during this week. Computers, monitors, printers, laptops, keyboards, radios, stereos, modems, televisions, VCRs and fax machines. Church members will take these items up to the landfill for proper disposal.
Week 4 will be Batteries, Oil, Antifreeze and Fluorescent Bulbs Week. Please have all of these in non-leaking containers. All will be taken to the appropriate drop-off locations for proper disposal. You can find drop-off locations for all of these at the link at the top of the page.

You may also participate individually by going to the recycling website for dates and additional items to drop off at the landfill or participating businesses.

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Reduce Electric Use By 10%

The most comprehensive reduction is through Electricity. With our lives immersed in it, the task of reducing by 10% for the 40 days of Lent may seem too large a task. But truly, it’s the simplest to reduce.

The average home in the US uses over 10,000 kwh per year. This works out to 1174 kwh during Lent, which makes your goal of reduction 117 kwh. That is very simple!

The following list shows just some of the possibilities in a common home. I’ve done the math to bring the use of each object down as far as possible, and most to the 10% goal.

Coffee Maker – Average use is 30 minutes per day, use for only 15 and unplug when done.
Clothes Washer – Wash only full loads.
Clothes Dryer – Dry only full loads. Dry like-weight fabrics together. Use low heat setting. Use moisture sensor rather than timer. Use a clothesline.
Computer – Turn off at night and when you won’t be using it for more than an hour. Turn off completely for 1 whole day per week.
Dishwasher – Use only when full. Do not use the heated dry option.
Electric Blanket – Use 1 less day per week. Turn down 1 notch the other days.
Furnace – Turn the heat down 2 degrees. Use programmable thermostats to lower temperate 5-10 degrees when you’re not home or asleep or not using that particular zone
Hair Dryer – Average use is 15 minutes per day. Don’t use 1 day per week.
Oven - Ignore the preheat cycle. Everything except cookies can easily go in prior to the oven being at full temperature. This will also save at least 5 minutes baking time. Turn off for the last 5-10 minutes of the baking/roasting. Don’t use the auto-clean feature.
Portable Space Heater – Turn it down 2 notches. Don’t use 2 days per week.
Refrigerator/ Freezer – Keep it full, using water-filled containers. Clean the coils.
TV – The average use is 4 hours per day. Turn off for 1 day per week. Read a book!
VCR – Unplug when not in use. Use 1 less day per week.
Waterbed – Covering it alone will save 15%! Use the heater 2 fewer hours per day.
Water Heater – Decrease shower time, take cooler showers, don’t run water the entire time you are washing or shaving, turn volume of shower down. Use cold water for laundry.
Unplug all chargers and small appliances when not in use.

Taking these actions will reduce your electric use 155 – 200 kwh for the 40 days.
And while you may not have all of these items in your home, chances are you have 90% of them, and this will bring you to the goal of 117 kwh for the 40 days.

We all get magazines and books we keep meaning to read, but never find the time. Turn the computer off, turn the TV off, turn the VCR off and read them! Play a board game with your kids. Have a conversation with your family. I am sure you will find yourself far more relaxed the next day, as well as having consumed far less electricity. Just reducing the noise in the house will be peaceful.

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Canticle Of The Sun

St Francis of Assissi wrote this shortly before his death. It sums up very well why we, as humans, need to take responsibility for our actions.

Most high, all powerful, all good Lord!
All praise is yours, all glory, all honor, and all blessing.

To you, alone, Most High, do they belong.
No mortal lips are worthy to pronounce your name.

Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures,
especially through my lord Brother Sun,
who brings the day; and you give light through him.
And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor!
Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.

Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars;
in the heavens you have made them bright, precious and beautiful.

Be praised, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air,
and clouds and storms, and all the weather,
through which you give your creatures sustenance.

Be praised, My Lord, through Sister Water;
she is very useful, and humble, and precious, and pure.

Be praised, my Lord, through Brother Fire,
through whom you brighten the night.
He is beautiful and cheerful, and powerful and strong.

Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Mother Earth,
who feeds us and rules us,
and produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.

Be praised, my Lord, through those who forgive for love of you;
through those who endure sickness and trial.

Happy those who endure in peace,
for by you, Most High, they will be crowned.

Be praised, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death,
from whose embrace no living person can escape.
Woe to those who die in mortal sin!
Happy those she finds doing your most holy will.
The second death can do no harm to them.

Praise and bless my Lord, and give thanks,
and serve him with great humility.

There are many other biblical and religious quotes, phrases, and such that could be posted here. But this one just seems most appropriate.

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