Sing Club QLD Education Site

Posts Tagged ‘organic’

Happy New Year!
It’s not too late to make your recycling resolutions.

The holidays are finally over and we can all hopefully begin slowing down and getting our lives back to normal.

If your home is like mine, the holidays left you with a huge mess. Empty boxes and torn wrapping paper litter the floor after the kids excitedly open their gifts. It’s so tempting to gather it all up and through it in the outside garbage bin.
But this is a great opportunity to not only recycle, but to reuse. Almost all of the wrapping paper and boxes can be recycled, so consider keeping your contribution out of the landfill. And for the reuse possibilities…they are practically endless. I’m pretty sure that most of the ribbons I use have been used for several years. And many of the boxes that hold the gifts are great to use for packaging gifts next year. Do you realize that many stores now CHARGE you for a gift box? Sheesh, I’ll save mine for next year, thank you. Not to mention the gift bags. I LOVE getting my gifts in those pretty little bags. Especially since I know I will be using it for someone else’s gift somewhere down the road. Do you know how much those things cost? They are outrageous. No way would I throw them away. They are too valuable.

Now what are we to do with the tree? If you use an artificial tree, it’s a pretty easy decision. You fold it up and store it for next year. Simple. And if you are lucky enough to live in a warm environment and purchased a live tree including the root ball, you can get to work planting it in your yard to enjoy for years to come. But what about cut trees? Most communities offer some sort of Christmas tree recycling. The lucky ones have curbside pickup to recycle their trees. The rest of us need to decide what to do. What convinces me to haul the tree to the recycling facility is a couple of things.
I was willing to haul it home after I purchased it, so I can just as easily take it to be recycled.

Some communities use the old trees to shred and cover pathways and trails through parks. This helps to repair and reduce the damage we create as we enjoy our hikes.

Some communities turn the old trees into mulch and then provide it to the public for free! What a deal. Spring is just right around the corner, by the way.
Read the rest of this entry »

Many people use a vast array of chemical-laden household cleaners and products around the home on a daily basis.

What they may not be aware of is the fact that many of these chemicals can be damaging to their health when inhaled. Apart from the inhalation aspect, skin irritations often occur when coming into contact with many chemical cleaners.

Many disinfectants contain phenol ( aka carbolic acid ) or cresol. These can attack the central nervous system, liver, kidneys, spleen, and pancreas.

How can adding a load of chemicals to your home environment be good for your health and cleanliness. They may kill off the germs, sure, but human beings are gradually going to kill themselves off too, if they continue in this way. Many people aim to keep their homes a germ-free environment, but if our homes are kept so germ-free that our immune systems no longer have to work as hard, we run the risk of weakening our immune systems.

Another chemical-laden ( and one of the most dangerously toxic of all ) household product is oven cleaner. I have never personally used the stuff, as I remember the fumes when my mother used it when I was a child, and that alone was enough to put me off for life! How right I was. Many oven cleaners release fumes which may affect the respiratory system, and contain ammonia and lye, which eat the skin. I prefer to use baking soda and water, sprinkled inside the oven and left overnight. In the morning a good scrub finishes it off a treat. It does a wonderful job. Also you don’t get any chemical residue odour the next time you use the oven.
Read the rest of this entry »

Most of us feel guilty if we do not take the trouble to wash and sort all those reusable plastics, papers and tins. We do this to avoid throwing them in the bin which then ends up in the landfill sites around the country. But how useful is recycling and can it really solve the “waste crisis”?

UK households generate a staggering thirty million tonnes of rubbish a year, of which sixty per cent comes from packaging. There has been a lot of publicity recently about waste that has been put out for recycling ending up in landfill sites. It is also clear that an increasing amount is being shipped to other countries to dispose of. It can be cheaper to transport it to other countries than to recycle it or fill up the landfill sites in the UK.

The European Union (EU) has recently ordered the citizens of the United Kingdom to roughly double their recycling rates by 2008. Governments across the European Union and America have announced plans to require more recycling. Unless the UK hits these targets, local council tax bills across the UK will soar unless local authorities hit their recycling targets to enable the UK to hit their targets set by the EU. The UK government already charges tax for dumping waste in landfill sites to encourage us to recycle more and this tax is due to increase.

This will punish local councils which continue to use landfills and council tax payers will pay the price for poor performance by not recycling themselves or by not having the facilities to do this. It’s therefore cheaper to recycle then to dump in the landfill sites. The UK currently recycles 22 per cent of its household waste while some other EU countries recycle more than half. The UK proposes cutting the amount of waste put into landfill sites from 72 per cent today to 25 per cent by 2020.

Some Thing to Think About -The Future?

- Why do we use all that energy recycling paper to save the trees? There is the argument that paper should be recycled so that we save trees and forests but we now grow trees just to produce newsprint and other items. Is it a sustainable resource already?
Read the rest of this entry »