Monday, December 15, 2008

Eco Update #2

Alright, I want to prepare you for this. We at the Garden Gables Inn have made a revolutionary and unprecedented ecological decision. It took a lot of hard work and dedication to make this happen. Months of planning, debating, conference calling, consulting, and editing have finally come to fruition. Are you ready?

We started recycling.

Boring, I know. I’m sorry! Big, awesome, exciting things will come, I promise. But how else was I supposed to get excited about recycling? Its... recycling. But it’s something that we weren’t doing, was easy to incorporate, and has a big impact. I didn’t even know how big until I started this post. How big you say? I’m so glad you asked...


-Recycling aluminum saves 95% of the energy used to make the material from scratch. Energy savings from recycling aluminum in 1993 alone were enough to light a city the size of Pittsburgh for six years.

-Recycling 1 ton of paper saves 17 mature trees, 7,000 gallons of water, 3 cubic yards of landfill space, 2 barrels of oil, and 4,100 kilowatt-hours of electricity — enough energy to power the average American home for five months.

-Glass never wears out -- it can be recycled forever. We save over a ton of resources for every ton of glass recycled: 1,330 pounds of sand, 433 pounds of soda ash, 433 pounds of limestone, and 151 pounds of feldspar.

-26 recycled PET bottles equals a polyester suit. 5 recycled PET bottles make enough fiberfill to stuff a ski jacket.

-If every American household recycled just one out of every ten HDPE bottles they used, we’d keep 200 million pounds of the plastic out of landfills every year.

Holy carrots!

I know that when I’m at home and I open up a can of soup, it sometimes seems like way too much work to rinse it out and walk it over to the recycling bin. But statistics like this help me realize that every little bit actually means something.

So even though recycling seems like a silly, insignificant, and common change to make, it’s worth posting about. Because it really isn’t silly or insignificant. And if it seems common, that’s great! I’m all for good things being common.

With Love,
~Brande N.

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