Washington Recycling

OK, to piggyback off of the earlier post, I have chosen to look at the Washington State Recycling Association. Their Hot Topics area has links to very nice information sheets on various recycling topics like recycling glass & plastic, recycling paper to save water, etc.

This is a site that has good local information for exploration.

Recycler

OK, so this is news that is a month old, I only read it today so I am sharing it today. Seattle University was named the Recycler of the Year by the Washington State Recycling Association. Here is a link to the article about this and what the University did to earn the award. Some of what was highlighted was previously posted here at Enviro-Sustain about Bon-Appetit catering company.

Onearth

Onearth is the journalism arm of the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC). In general this site seems to be currently dominated by the gulf oil spill but there are some interesting areas of the site that drive down to more specific interest areas.

I looked around a little yesterday and more today and found a few interesting bits. This one is about the beetle infestation in the western US forests.
Another one I read was a Q&A with an author who wrote a book called: Bottled & Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water.

Pacific NW | Chefs now offering low-carbon diets to help save the planet | Seattle Times Newspaper

Pacific NW | Chefs now offering low-carbon diets to help save the planet | Seattle Times Newspaper

EPA Sustainability Continued

As I mentioned yesterday, I am highlighting a different area of the EPA Sustainability website. Today I looked at the Water & Ecosystem Services section of the sustainability site.

I looked at the infrastructure for water and wastewater section and I didn't know that much of our infrastructure for this was built for and during the population boom after World War II. There is also information about how the funding for upkeep and new facilities is becoming what they call an Infrastructure Gap.

I continued to look around the site and I ended up on the sustainable agriculture section since I have read and learned so much in the last month or so about sustainable farming.

As I dug down through the links on the site I found myself in an area about organic farming and I was intrigued to know that organic farming has taken place since the 1940s. I also thought to myself that it was interesting that it didn't mention when organic farming stopped and when non-organic farming took over prominence in the past. It was also interesting that over 40 agencies/groups certify products as organic but they don't use the same set of criteria, hmmm I say.

As with yesterday's post, these are the areas I happend upon and I am sure in your exploration you will see topics and areas that are more interesting to you.

EPA - Sustainability

There are several sections of the US EPA website that I have begun to explore and one to highlight today is that of Urban Sustainability and the Built Environment.

It may or may not be a surprise to you that 80% of Americans live in urban areas.

Another interesting statistic for those of you who have done the ecological footprint calculator. Buildings account for more than 40% of energy consumption. This might be part of the reason why no matter what I did on the quiz, I still scored 3.7 Earth's.

Further exploration of the tabs on this site brought me to areas such as Smart Growth and Environmentally Preferable Purchasing. There are many others but I will let you explore what you find most interesting to you.

Sorry for the short post but as much as I like sharing what I find interesting, this is a government website and thus is not the most exciting site and I want you to enjoy it so I thought allowing you to seek out your own topics was the best way to go.

I think I will highlight a different section of the website on sustainability tomorrow since there are several areas.

Green Blogs

OK, after an extended pause here at Enviro-Sustain while I did World Cup Weekend at the other blogs, I am back and ready to share more great green resources.

I have found myself lately reading articles about healthy eating. Here is one about what is in your food that doesn't really need to be. I was interested in the 39 ingredients in Doritos. Here is another post from 2 weeks ago about unhealthy food.

That was not what I wanted to post about for today though. I wanted to look at a couple of the blogs that are compiled by Yahoo Green. One of them I had not explored previously is called ecogeek, which for people who know me would guess I was intuitively drawn to. In fact, I found the information and blog posts to be very interesting. A couple of them were on wind power and I learned quite a bit.

The other blog I would like to spotlight today is titled The Green Cheapskate. It sounded like a fun title and the posts are pretty fun (and useful) as well. The two that I looked at today were titled 50 Healthy Foods Under $1 per Pound and 10 Things I Learned While Living Without Running Water. As you can imagine a bunch of veggies cost less than $1 per pound but also eggs, oatmeal and pasta. As for living without running water, I learned a few things while traveling through Africa a couple of years ago. I agree that toilets are an engineering marvel and that clothes don't generally need to be washed so often. I think that #3 on the countdown - Cold water is so much better than no water, and HOT water is very, very special - could really be #1 on the list.