A Green Blog (by DeBass Recycling)

A good pool cover can reduce heat evaporation by up to 95%.  This alone only could save an average of 1,000 gallons of water a month.  If you get a clear solar cover you’ll also save a bundle of energy.  The tiny bubbles in solar covers trap and transfer the sun’s heat to your pool - keeping the water 10% warmer.  This effect will substainationally reduce your heating charges.

In the $17 Billion business of home gardening, there is one home gardening tool that does more harm to the environment in just 30 minutes than your car does to the environment in 2 months.

In fact, gas powered leaf blowers may be the single biggest polluters on earth.  One California study showed that running a two-stroke gas powered leaf blower produced the same amount of CO2 pollution as driving a car for a half an hour and that’s not even the amazing part.  Along with the noise, leaf blowers make winds of 150 miles per hour.  That’s like having a category 5 right in your hand.  Those kind of winds tear gardens up and dry lawns out.  And they don’t remove leaves,  they just move them around and up, along with dust, mold, pesticides, and pet waste.  This stuff ends up in the air we breathe and, get this, with a two-stroke engine about 30% of the fuel actually comes out of the tail pipe unburned.  That fuel ends up in the ground and in the air.  When you think about it, in a lot of ways leaf blowers are pretty hard on the whole world.  In fact, it’s hard to think of a single redeeming feature about leaf blowers.

SOLUTION:

Consider using your leaves as natural fertilizer.  Let them lie as is or chop them up with a mulching lawnmower.  Another option is to put your leaf blower aside and use a rake instead.

Want a greener yard? Consider turning to an ancient and simple technique for keeping your landscape healthy: rainwater harvesting and storage. Not only is it pretty simple, but it’s also probably one of the cheaper ‘green’ ideas you can institute in your home and why not when water is FREE!

HOW IT WORKS:

In the simplest set-up, a rain barrel with an open top is placed underneath a gutter downspout, catching rainwater runoff from the roof. In more complicated (and more expensive) set-ups, a larger storage capacity barrel system is created underground. This set-up can hold anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousands gallons of water.

To determine how much rainwater you’ll need to store, use this simple calculation.

1) Determine the size of your lot in square feet. If you have a pool that takes up the majority of your back yard, divide this number by 2.

2) Determine the size of your home in square feet. If your home is a two-story home, divide this number by 2.

3) Subtract your answer in STEP 2 from your answer in STEP 1.

4) Multiply your answer in STEP 3 by 0.093. This will give you approximately the number of gallons you use each time you water your lawn. You’ll want to multiply this number by at least 3 to determine how much rainwater to store as you’ll need to get through those dry periods. Given the smaller sizes of lots these days, a typical rain water system for a house on .25 acres is about 1600 gallons.

CONVERSION TIPS:

1 acre = 43,560 square feet

1 square meter = 10.764 square feet

WHY IT WORKS:

You’d be surprised how little rain you need to fill up whatever storage contraption you create. In fact, the overflow of a roof when it’s raining is tremendous! While the potential runoff during a storm depends on several factors, such as roof size and composition, according to Texas Cooperative Extension - a rough estimate is that for every 1,000 square feet of roof, 1 inch of rain can result in 600 gallons of water. Given that average home uses anywhere from 500 to 1300 gallons of water each time they water a lawn, you can easily seen how a rainwater harvesting system can save you money while giving you better results.

MAKING YOUR OWN RAINWATER BARREL:

The easiest way to get your own rain barrel is to just purchase one flat out, but with rainwater barrels costing $150 + it’s worth it to find a solution for an eighth of the cost. For about $20, plus a little do-it-yourself effort on assembly, here’s how you can make your own.

STEP 1: Purchase a 55 gallon plastic barrel from your local feed & supply store. Because these barrels are used to ship food safely, they are opaque and rigid enough to serve as rain-catching containers and dark enough to keep out light – inhibiting the growth of algae. Plastic barrels also don’t have the rust problem of metal barrels.

STEP 2: Cut a hole in the top of the barrel to allow rainwater from downspouts on your roof to flow inside. Be sure to cover the hole with a fine-mesh screen to keep out debris and – most important – mosquitoes.

STEP 3: Drill another, smaller hole a few inches from the top of the barrel to allow overflow to escape. A hose can be attached there to direct overflow away from the house’s foundation.

STEP 4: Drill a hole a few inches from the bottom of the barrel for the spigot. It should be high enough to allow sludge to settle without blocking the outlet.

STEP 5: Install a spigot from the hardware store in the hole. When your ready to water your plants or grass, attach a garden hose to the spigot. To improve the gravity feed on the barrel, set it on top of a stack of cinder blocks raising it at least one foot of the ground.

Find more information on creating your own rain barrel, visit the Texas AgriLife Research & Extension Urban Solutions Center in Dallas at dallas.tamu.edu (click Water Conservation Practices).

THE COST:

Professional installation of a 1600 gallon system is roughly $1,000. While it’s difficult to justify a rainwater tank on cost savings alone, consider this. As our society grows, so does our demand for water. Given that clean water is a limited, natural resource and there are currently no real solutions for purifying our used water, there’s a general benefit to the planet for using a FREE resource like rainwater for items that don’t need purified water. In fact, studies have proven that plants grown better, fuller and greener with rainwater than they do with purified city water. Besides, think of all the money you can save by no longer having to use a professional lawn service to green up your yard!

The Central Air Conditioning unit in your home or office is killing Christmas. Here’s how it works:

1. Most Central Air Conditioning units use a chemical man-made compound that helps to transfer heat out of the air (i.e. cool the air). The most commonly used compounds are chlorinated fluorocarbons (CFCs) or hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs). These compounds when disposed of damage the atmosphere - specifically the ozone.

REMINDER: The ozone filters harmful UV rays from the sun. Without it, we’d all get terrible sunburns.

2. The AC unit then hits the planet with a double whammy. It uses alot of energy to be powered, and the generation of that power results in huge emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the earth’s atmosphere. In fact, all of the AC units in the world combined emit roughly 100 million tons of CO2 every year into the atmosphere.

As we destroy the atmosphere, we destroy the ozone - allowing more harmful UV rays in from the sun and thereby warming the planet. And as our planet gets warmer, we use more AC air to cool off and it quickly becomes a vicious cycle.

So how does all of this effect Christmas?

Well, as the planet gets warmer, so do the places where Pine Trees and Evergreens grow. The biggest enemy of our beloved Christmas tree is the pinebark beetle. When it gets cold, the beetles die. But when it’s warm - they thrive and turn our beautiful, potential Christmas trees into sawdust.

SOLUTION:

• Write to your local government supporting bans against harmful substances like (CFCs and HCFCs) and push for them to be replaced with more earth-friendly ones.
• Replace existing incandescent light bulbs in your home and office with Compact Fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs). They use less energy, light just as well as traditional bulbs, last much longer (roughly 13 times longer), and save money (replacing just 2 incandescent bulbs can save you $4 a year).
• Turn off lights in rooms around your home and office (e.g. copy room) when they’re not in use - it not only uses less energy, but it keeps the AC unit from having to work as hard.
• Go easy on the thermostat. Set the temperature a few degrees cooler in the winter (and wear a sweater if necessary) and warmer in the summer.

The average person will flush their toilet 140,000 times in their lifetime. Now consider the average toilet can use up to 7 gallons of water per flush - that’s a whole lot of water that gets used over our lifetime. Combine that with the billions of flushes that occur every day around the world and you can quickly see how your toilet impacts the environment. And with global warming, water shortages will only get worse. But inefficient toilets do more than just reduce our lovely natural resource - water - they pose a second, natural problem - waste.

Every day in the USA 1 million miles of sewer pipes carry 50 trillion gallons of waste to 20 thousand sewage treatment plants. The sludge left over from these plants could be used as a good safe fertilizer, but when combined with the harmful chemicals used in the sewage industry we can only dump this sludge into landfills.*

*This calls for a little background history… Years ago, the government used to advise us to flush old prescriptions and pills down the toilet. What they found over time however, is that these pills when mixed in with sludge, caused the bacteria in the sludge to mutate and become resistant to antibiotics. As a result, sludge companies started adding chemicals to the sludge to kill these mutant bacteria.

SOLUTION:

So what can you do? Well there’s 2 things.

1. Reduce Your Water Use

Toilets made before 1994 can use up to 5 times more water than newer models and therefore have a terrible impact on our water resources and your water bill. Make sure you replace them with low-flow, high efficiency toilets. And if you really want to make a difference, you could even consider purchasing a composting toilet which will take you completely off the water grid altogether. These toilets run off electricity, use much less water (0.13 gallons per flush), and transfer the waste directly to an underground composting tank to be used for great fertilization. And the best thing about it… is that it’s completely odorless and only needs to be emptied 2 times a year. The price? $2,000 vs. the average $20,000 septic tank system.

2. Fight for Greener Sludge Control

Press your local government to find more earth-friendly ways to take care of the sludge in your city. For example: in Utah, they actually burn their sludge to kill off the harmful bacteria. The good thing about this is that it releases the same amount of CO2 into the air that would be released if the sludge just sat over time in a landfill.

YOUR IMPACT (The Math):

Regular toilet = 7 gallons per flush

Low-flow toilet = 1.6 gallons per flush

Average person = 5 flushes a day

RESULT: 27 gallons of water saved a day (or 788,400 gallons of water saved over a lifetime)