Environment - Step 6: Recycling Unwanted Electronics thru Fundraising

Each year, American discard millions of unused cellphones, printer cartridges, and other electronics. Now there are ways to keep these items out of the landfills and to raise money for your local school or organization. There are many different programs that allow non-profits to collect these castoffs and turn them in for money. I'll outline a couple of them below.

EcoPhones
I'm the fundraising co-chair of my daughter's preschool. I have to admit - I hate fundraising, but I was hoping to find some way to tie this position in with some kind of environmental fundraiser. I was so happy when I found EcoPhones while searching on the web one night! EcoPhones (http://www.ecophones.com/) is a company that allows organizations to send in not only ink jet cartridges and cellphones, but digital cameras, digital picture frames, laptops, DVDs, and other electronics in exchange for some much needed cash. And they accept items even if they are not working (albeit for a reduced price - but it still gets the item recycled and out of the landfill!). They even pay the shipping costs, so all the organization has to get are boxes to ship the items in and newspaper to cushion the items during shipment. For new items, EcoPhones actually refurbishes and resells them; older items are broken apart and recycled. We are kicking off our first collection drive this coming week; I'm excited to see what we collect! I have a cell phone and a bunch of ink jet cartridges to donate myself!

Staples
Staples offers a program called Recycle for Education, which offers $3 per qualifying printer cartridge to registered preschool and school programs. To find out more details, visit http://www.staplesrecyclefored.com/.

Others
Here's a list of a few other programs that you may want to consider:
*Cartridges for Kids (http://www.cartridgesforkids.com/) - which also collects various unwanted electronics besides printer cartridges.
*Cartridge Fundraising (http://www.cartridgefundraising.com/)
*Funding Factory (http://www.etcep.com/) - which accepts cellphones & printer cartridges

What better way to raise money for your school or club than by keeping unused electronics and printer cartridges out of our landfills!

Take Care, Kara

Environment: Step 3 Revisited

While reading last Sunday's newpaper, I found out about a junk mail reduction site that offers its services for free! It's called ProQuo (http://www.proquo.com/) and it offers a way to manage exactly which businesses can still send you mail offers, while eliminating tens of pounds of unwanted junk for your mailbox. Since I had already signed up for Green Dimes service, I haven't spent any time checking ProQuo out. But, if you have little to no money to use for environmental causes or if the additional benefits of the Green Dimes or 41Pounds service are not how you want to spend your environmental budget, ProQuo could be the answer for you! Now everyone can stop unwanted junk mail from coming to their house, thereby saving their own time and the Earth's resources!

Take Care,
Kara

Environment - Step 5: Get Rid of Unwanted Stuff in an Enviro-Friendly Way

When I was in my mid-20s, I bought my grandparents' house - as is. And by "as is", I mean with most of their stuff still in it. My grandfather had had a second stroke that left him wheelchair-bound, and my grandmother, at 87, was in no position to take care of him or their house by herself. So, they moved into a senior community that had independent living facilities through nursing home care. My grandmother moved into an independent living apartment that only required a few pieces of furniture to fill it; my grandfather went into a nursing home room that already equipped. Everything else was left behind in the house. Relatives did take some stuff, some stuff I knew right off the bat that I wanted to keep, and I got help gathering up all of the leftover furniture and putting it into the garage for the Salvation Army to pick up. But, there was small stuff lurking everywhere in the house. But since I had space to store it, I didn't agressively go through it and purge unnecessary things. Then my husband and I got job offers in another city and had to move all of this crap with us. And our new house didn't have nearly as much storage space as my grandparents' house had. So the time had come for me to actively go through this mess. And I did it through these 4 environmentally friendly ways:

eBay
Hey, why not recycle and make money at the same time? There were a few books of my grandfather, mostly textbooks over 60 years old, that I researched on eBay and found that there was a market for them. Not only did I sell all but one of them, I knew that books that my grandfather loved (but I had no use for) got into the hands of people who would love them, too.

Garage sale
Our development holds a bi-annual garage sale and after sorting through all of the stuff and determining what we didn't want, we found that a large portion of it was sellable. So, we registered with the HOA to be a participant in the garage sale and got lucky that a lot of people came out shopping. We made around $330 that day!

Donation
The remaining items that we didn't sell, we donated to local charities (we made sure to keep detailed records of what we donated so that we could claim these items on our taxes). If you live in the DC area, a number of charities will actually pick up your items right from your doorstep, which is not only convenient for you, but also saves on CO2 emissions (since the charity's truck will pick up items from all donating homes in your area, instead of each separate home driving to drop off their items at the charity's HQ). These charities include the Lupus Foundation of America (http://www.lupuspickup.org/) and Vietnam Veterans of America (http://www.vvapickup.org/). You don't need to be home when they pickup your donation; you just need to place your items on your front porch. They will leave a donation receipt on your front door knob.

Freecycle
For those items that are highly usable, but not accepted by charities, I use Freecycle to find them good homes. The types of things I'm talking about are unused, loose diapers; unused food; leftover shower gel, shampoo, conditioner, perfume, etc; candles; used binders and other office supplies; and the list goes on. To find a Freecycle group near you, go to http://www.freecycle.org/. There you will find links to all of the local groups' Yahoo! groups, which you will need to join in order to participate. Once you join, you will receive an email from the group moderator about format and content guidelines for posts. You may be thinking, aren't you afraid about meeting up with perfect strangers to give them stuff? I was, but I never meet in person to hand stuff off - I just put the stuff out on my porch and let them pick it up when it's convenient. Plus, the people who are part of my local Freecycle group are focused on trying to get good stuff! To date, I've posted 60 items/groups of items to Freecycle, with all but a few being taken.

So, the next time you need to get rid of some stuff, try to use one of these 4 ways which get the items reused by those people who need or love them.

Take Care,
Kara

Environment - Step 5: Recycle Dry Cell Batteries

I've been saving all of my used dry cell batteries for a while, hoping to find some place to recycle them. Some electronic stores, like Radio Shack and Best Buy, used to accept them for recycling, but now these stores only accept rechargeable batteries. After looking around for a while, I found Battery Solutions, Inc. (http://www.batteryrecycling.com/). For $0.85 per pound plus shipping charges, you can send all of your dry cell batteries to Battery Solutions for recycling. Not too shabby.

I know, I know, I should be using rechargeable batteries and I was for a while, but they didn't work out very well. It seemed after a couple of recharges, they really didn't hold their charge that well. Nothing like having a screaming kid with a toy that ran out of juice AGAIN! So, I switched back to dry cell. It's so expensive to change to rechargeable batteries, so I really want to research all of the different options before I try them again.

Take Care,
Kara

Environment - Step 4: Give Sears a Piece of Your Mind!

Did you know that Sears (and Land's End, which they now own) is the leading catalog distributer, sending out approximately 425 million catalogs each year? And that these catalogs contain almost no recycled content? There's an organization who is working to get Sears to change their ways - Forest Ethics. Through their Catalog Cutdown campaign (http://www.catalogcutdown.org/), Forest Ethics is getting the word out about Sears and its deplorable environment policy. Forest Ethics previously completed a successful 3 year campaign to get Victoria's Secret to make changes to its catalog production so that it was more environmentally friendly (though, I hear that Victoria's Secret can still be a royal pain about stopping the distribution of their catalogs to your house). What can you do to send a message to Sears about changing their practices? First, you should stop their catalog from coming to your home through any of the junk mail elimination services I talked about in the previous post. Next, go to the following link: http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/281/t/3931/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=13412 and send an email to the CEO of Sears. The site has a set message that you can send either unedited or with personal statements added. I added the following paragraph to the bottom of my email:

"I am posting a link on my blog to let my family and friends know about your poor environmental practices and to ask them to cancel your catalogs and send you an email. Hopefully through the sheer volume of our collected voices, you will finally hear what the consumers are asking for. If you do not change soon, I will be forced to boycott your store."

Finally, tell your friends about this problem and get them to send an email to Sears' CEO as well. You will actually be asked to do just that after sending your email to the CEO - the Catalog Cutdown website has a convenient form which you can use to send a pregenerated email to 5 friends and family members.

If you want to say thanks to Victoria's Secret for changing its policy, you can sign a petition at http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/273837425. The deadline for the petition has passed, but let your voice be heard anyway. Hopefully the additional signatures will be sent to the CEO of Victoria's Secret at a later date.

While its not possible for many of us to join demonstrations to protest the many injustices being done to our planet, here's one way to protest from the comfort of your own home.

Take Care,
Kara

Environment - Step 3: Eliminate Junk Mail!

I absolutely hate junk mail! I get so much in the mail that it has become a part-time job just to sort through it and recycle it. I've always wanted to get rid of it, but wasn't sure how - then, I found a few different environmental sites which provide junk mail elimination services. I was so excited!! The first site is Catalog Choice (http://www.catalogchoice.org/). Catalog Choice allows users to eliminate all unwanted catalogs from their mailbox for FREE! All you need to do is create an account, individually select the catalogs that you would like to cancel, and let Catalog Choice do the rest. You can even eliminate catalogs still being delivered to past residents. If the catalog that you need eliminated isn't listed on the site, you can request that they add it - they will contact the company to see if they are willing to be added to the list. And did I mention that this is all done for FREE!! So, everyone out there, even if you don't have any spare money to sign up for some of the other services that I'm going to mention, please, oh PLEASE, sign up for this service!

Now, Catalog Choice is great, but it only eliminates catalogs, which is only a fraction of my junk mail problem. I swear, I get about 3 credit card offers every day, plus solicitations from non-profits that I will never donate money to. I was wondering what to do about this problem when Oprah (man, you gotta love her) gave me the answer. She recently had a rerun of her Earth Day show (for more details, go to http://www2.oprah.com/tows/pastshows/200704/tows_past_20070420.jhtml), during which she played a clip of Matt Damon recommending Green Dimes (http://www.greendimes.com/). Green Dimes offers two levels of service - Free Me ($20), which is their basic junk mail elimination service (eliminates mail for both current & past residents), and Green Me ($42 including shipping), which includes the Free Me service, plus a mini environmental starter kit of 2 CFLs, an environmental kids book by Mercer Mayer, a t-shirt, and a reusable grocery bag. By signing up for one of these services, you can eliminate up to 90% of your junk mail and have between 5 to 10 trees planted on your behalf. Right after signing up, Green Dimes gets you removed from many of the major junk mail lists and plants 5 trees for you. Then, you can request specific catalogs and non-profit solicitations be cancelled - Green Dimes will plant 5 trees for your first 5 requests (10 trees - a nice start to offsetting your annual carbon footprint).

Similar services are provided by 41Pounds (http://www.41pounds.org/). For $41, 41Pounds eliminates your junk mail for 5 years and donates approximately a 1/3 of your fee to a non-profit environmental group of your choice. The main difference between Green Dimes and 41Pounds is that 41Pounds will not cancel non-profit mail for you (which is a big reason why I decided to go with Green Dimes - not only do I hate sorting through all of the requests, but I don't want to see a non-profit waste its precious dollars on these mailings).

If you don't think junk mail is that big of a problem, get your eyes on these stats:
* 19 billion catalogs (yes, that is a 'b') are mailed out each year in the US, which uses up 53 million trees (because almost none of the catalogs utilize recycled content)
* 5.2 million tons of CO2 is released into the environment just in order to make the paper for these catalogs - that doesn't even count printing, collating, delivering, recycling, etc.
* Each US adult receives an average of 41 pounds of junk mail each year.
* $320 million of local taxes are spent to dispose of junk mail each year instead of providing parks, libraries, health care and other valuable services
(resources: Catalog Choice, 41Pounds)

In the age of the Internet, there really is no need to keep receiving catalogs and junk mail. When people need goods and services or want to donate to a special cause, they just hit the computer and search for them. Do your part - sign up for one of these services today. Not only will you help save the Earth's resources, you will also save time by not having to sort through all of that unwanted junk mail every day!

Take Care,
Kara

Environment - Step 2: More about your carbon footprint & Carbonfund.org

After figuring out my carbon footprint the other day, I thought I had a good idea of what my impact on the Earth was. Wrong! As I was researching different ways to reduce or offset this footprint, I found out that the carbon footprint that I calculated is only related to my family's direct energy usage and only accounts for 40% of our total carbon footprint. What comprises the other 60%? Our direct & indirect economic exchanges. So, in order to tabulate your family's entire CO2 output, you need to multiple the number generated by the calculator on American Forests website by 2.5. For instance, my family's impact based on our annual energy usage was 31.2 tons; therefore, our entire footprint would be equal to 78 tons CO2. Wow, that's a lot!

In order to be what's called "carbon neutral", our family would need to reduce or offset our entire carbon footprint, all 78 tons of it.

Now, you may be asking what it means to offset your carbon footprint. This means funding projects which eliminate an equal amount of CO2 which you are responsible for emitting. This can be through tree planting or funding alternative energy generation projects (e.g. wind towers).

While my family can't afford to offset our entire carbon footprint all at once, I decided that we would offset it over the course year. First up was offsetting the annual CO2 output from our cars. There are a number of sites that you can use to purchase offsets, the two most popular being Terrapass (http://www.terrapass.com/) and Carbonfund.org (http://www.carbonfund.org/). I decided to go with Carbonfund.org mostly based on price - I was able to purchase offsets for both our cars for $54. You can purchase offsets for any portion of your carbon footprint from Carbonfund.org; their going rate is $5.50 per metric ton of CO2 to be offset. For instance, since our two cars had an annual CO2 output of a little less than 10 tons, we were able to purchase offsets for $54.

I know that paying for these services can be difficult, so think about reducing a little of your footprint each month through offset purchases, instead of doing it all at once. If we don't do it, the Earth won't be left for our kids.

Thanks, Kara

Another New Year's Resolution - the Enviroment! (Step 1)

My husband and I have been slowly trying to reduce our impact on the environment, but I have decided that this year I'm really going to face this issue head on. I'm going to be posting tips on here about things you can do to reduce your energy needs, to clean up toxins in your home, and to cut back on your usage of our natural resourses.

The first step to getting a handle on the environmental issues that are literally choking this planet is to understand your part in hurting Mother Earth. While there are a number of ways that we all contribute to polluting the planet, one part of your contribution that you can easily tabulate is your Carbon Dioxide (CO2) output or "footprint". To get an idea as to your family's CO2 footprint, you can use the Climate Change Calculator on American Forests website (http://www.americanforests.org/resources/ccc/). If you do not know your annual usage for one of the emission sources, the calculator can fill it in with the national average for you. I did this yesterday to find out what my family's CO2 emissions were; below is the data I entered and what the calculator tabulated:
* Electricity: 12044 kWh/year (2006 total from electricity bill) = 18066 lbs CO2 = 27 trees
* Natural Gas: 993 Therms/year (2006 total from gas bill) = 11659.8 lbs CO2 = 17.4 trees
* Garbage & Recycling: used national averages = 7971.5 lbs CO2 = 11.8 trees
* Mower: 30 gallons of gas = 750 lbs CO2 = 1.1 trees
* Vehicle 1: used national average for minivan = 11210.7 lbs CO2 = 16.8 trees
* Vehicle 2: used national average for midsize sedan = 10168.3 lbs CO2 = 15.2 trees
* Air Travel: 5 flights/year (husband traveling for work) = 1824.9 lbs CO2 = 2.7 trees
** TOTALS: Annual CO2 emissions = 31.2 tons Need to plant 93.6 trees to negate

Needless to say, I was shocked. But, it's better that I know so that I can do something about it. And I will post here what I'm doing to help the environment - hopefully you can adopt some of the ideas yourself! Because we all want to leave our kids a beautiful planet!

Take Care,
Kara

Happy 2008!

Wow, we can't even believe that it's a new year. Unfortunately, a lot of things have been going on in both of our lives that have made it difficult to really start writing our book. So, while I have nothing to report on the book, I'd like to take the time to talk about our New Year's resolutions for this year. Both Melinda and I have decided to loose weight this year and get back into shape after having our kids. We've both joined the Oprah/Bob Greene One Million Viewer Challenge. I'm not sure what Melinda's goal is, but my goal is to get down to 130 pounds, which means loosing about 25 pounds. My exercise of choice is walking, so my husband, my daughter, and I went sneaker shopping since I was in desperate need of good walking shoes. I've been wearing my pedometer for the past 3 weeks and have been shooting for 10,000 steps a day. If I haven't been able to go outside to walk, I set aside some time to walk in this loop pattern that I've created inside my house. Starting tomorrow, I'm going to do start doing the steps in part one of Best Life diet (you can read these at: http://www.thebestlife.com/ms/mvchallenge/challenge_1.html). I already do a number of these steps, but I need to start doing all of them (like skipping the weekend glass of wine and stopping the late night snacking!).

While my husband and I have been eatting more healthy options over the past year, I want to go even further, plus start logging what I'm eatting. I also need to get my daughter eatting healthier as well - I'd actually be happy if she ate anything other than chicken nuggets, fries, and pizza! She is the finickiest eatter and I need to find some way to break that.

I also want to get exercising more - both with and without my daughter. A new family yoga studio opened up in our development that has classes for parents & children to go to together. My daughter just loves yoga and is so excited about going to an organized class, so we will be trying that out this year. She will also take swim classes this summer & fall. Not sure what else we will do with her, but I'm going to be looking!

Hope everyone had a wonderful New Year's celebration and is looking forward to an exciting 366 days (leap year this year!).

Take Care,
Kara