"Going Green!" is a regular section of the PCPC e-newsletter. All our "Going Green!" tips can also be read here, together with other environment-friendly suggestions for our members and their schools.
This is even more important than recycling. A waste-free lunch means you have NO packaging to throw away when you’re done — nothing other than apple cores, banana and orange peels, peach or cherry pits. Use the following to perfect your lunches:
Koru Fundraising is available as a resource for the above products.
http://korufundraising.com/
Believe that you are making a difference…
Regardless of your actions, you are currently making an impact whether it’s negative or positive…choose positive and watch how others follow … set the trend!
A green holiday season may take a bit more advance planning than heading to your local mall, but going green can be a powerful statement of your beliefs by using your spending dollar to send a powerful message.
Reduce, Reuse and Recycle – Instead of buying something brand-new, try making gifts and wrapping by using recycled or salvaged materials. Gift bags can be made by using scrap pieces of colourful cotton cloth. Instead of buying a brand new book, CD or DVD, see if you can find one in good condition at a second-hand book or music store. For those looking for gifts for kids, you can make great sock puppets out of the solitary socks lurking in the bottom of your drawer.
Get creative! Going green means you’re saving useful materials from the landfill and avoiding the environmental impact of buying something brand new.
Give Handmade Gifts – Ask yourself what kind of crafty skills you have, and use those skills to make gifts for friends and family. Most people are delighted to receive a handcrafted gift because of the investment of time, love and creative energy it represents. If you excel in the kitchen, try making preserves, cakes, pies or bread. If you like to work with wood, use your skills to craft CD racks or spice shelves. If you knit, try stuffing a pair of hand knit socks into a stocking this year. If you’re not comfortable making gifts, or simply lack the time, you can give something green by buying products made locally. Buying gifts made by local artisans and craftspeople supports the artists in your midst and boosts your local economy, as well as avoiding the carbon emissions caused by shipping.
Share an Experience – What do you give those people who have everything? Instead of buying them another gadget that they might already have and probably don’t really need, give them an experience. An afternoon of horseback riding, a massage or pedicure, a session in a pottery studio or tickets to a concert or play are all environmentally friendly gift ideas. Many gifts given each holiday season end up buried in the back of the closet by January, and eventually make their way to the landfill, but an experience will last forever in someone’s memory.
With a little creativity and ingenuity, a green gift can be found to suit everyone on your list. Now is a great time to put your environmentally friendly thoughts into practice, and the more we practice living green, the more it becomes a natural way of living.
Third Annual Consumer Guide to Toxic Chemicals in Toys Released 2009 Holiday Shopping Season http://www.healthystuff.org/departments/toys/index.php
As Canada’s largest provider of coffee (covering 80% of Canada’s coffee needs daily) Tim Hortons has a huge responsibility when it comes to the environment!
Tim Hortons is trying to be very conscious of the impact that their packaging and waste materials has on the environment. They are attempting to deal with the litter issue in a variety of ways:
They have anti-littering messages on all packaging, including a ‘Do Not Litter’ message on all take-out cups. Sadly, many people unfortunately do not pay attention to these messages.
Some individual Tim Hortons stores hold local clean-up events and activities in their communities.
Tim Hortons is one of the few, if only, quick service restaurants to offer china mugs, plates and bowls to customers eating in their stores – this helps to reduce paper waste at the store level.
All Tim Hortons stores sell reusable Tim Mugs – and while a Tim Mug may not be a practical solution for the majority of customers, it does provide a good alternative. The incentive for purchasing a Tim Mug is that the customer pays less for their coffee when using their mug.
Tim Hortons is always researching alternative packaging materials, particularly those that are recyclable and/or biodegradable.
When the benefits of changing to greener products or systems are expressed in terms of money, risk or brand, organizations start to sit up and take notice.
Remember: Carbon dioxide and its equivalents, such as methane and nitrous oxide (referred to collectively as CO2e) are the main focus of concern or governments and other organizations. These harmful emissions provide a yardstick by which progress can be measured with respect to climate change. Some activities connected to IT harm the planet and the people on it in other ways as well. Certain manufacturing processes pollute the air, the soil and the water and deplete non-renewable resources. Such actions bring short-term benefits but they’re unsustainable over a longer timescale.
IT-related CO2e emissions alone have been estimated at 2% of the world’s total. Not only can everyone work together to reduce this figure, but IT itself can support the greening of other processes as well (the remaining 98%)!
Don’t restrict your thoughts to CO2 emissions only — think in terms of ‘before, during and after’ a product’s lifetime when considering the impact on the environment. Whether its energy, equipment or ancillary supplies, each comes with:
The good news is that manufacturers are improving their processes at each of these life stages, from minimizing harm ‘before’ use by employing cleaner and leaner sourcing and manufacturing techniques, by designing products that consume less energy and materials ‘during’ use and helping with reuse and recycling ‘after’ use. Manufacturers are also beginning to produce environmental information that you can use when making your buying choices.
The reach of IT is wide, and every element provides an opportunity to reduce environmental harm. Sometimes the benefits accrue immediately and sometimes they take longer. Sometimes you need to change behaviour and at other times you need a change in procurement or operational systems.
A good way to start cleaning up your IT is to include environmental questions in your purchasing requests. You can find many public databases where suppliers offer information about themselves and their products (check out EPEAT and the Carbon Disclosure Project). Many goods come with labels certifying their environmental standards, such as their recyclability, their avoidance of harmful chemicals and their energy efficiency and so on.
Remember: Your aim in purchasing should be to look at the whole life implications of your acquisitions, including the opportunities for reusing or recycling products when you’ve finished with them!
Once you’ve chosen the products that meet your specifications and environmental expectations, you need to think about how they’re used.
Look around any office and you’ll probably see computers and printers lying idle — unless the devices have a recognized environmental certification or label, or they have a sleep mode, they’re burning up at least half as much power when idle as when they’re working flat out.
Tip: When you’re not using them, drop devices into sleep mode, ready for when you come back. Ideally, if you’re going to be away for a while, you can just turn things off. Don’t forget that machines with external power supplies draw current, even when the device itself is switched off. If the charger feels warm, it’s drawing current.
Consider your printers — use draft and duplex modes to optimise your use of consumables and paper. You can review and share documents on screen and print on demand only, reducing the number of unnecessary prints. Many companies have found that consolidating a large number of personal printers into fewer central models can improve cost management, while saving on energy and paper use.
Tip: Think about replacing your monitor screens, especially if they’re cathode ray tubes, which consume power continuously and were designed with no thought to recycling. Instead, buy flat screen monitors that consume little or no energy when in standby mode. Some computers shift to standby mode automatically after a certain period of inactivity.
Most people use either a laptop or a PDA, or both, when they’re on the move. These bring new issues — do you leave mobile phone, notebook and PDA chargers plugged into a live power supply, even when nothing’s being charged? What do you do with your mobile phone at the end of its life? Most people put them away in a drawer ‘just in case’ rather than reusing them or recycling them. Instead, look out for recycling schemes, ranging from bulk collections (ideal for out-of-date office mobiles) to freepost addresses for small quantities. Equipment is refurbished when possible or stripped for precious metals and components when not (remember to include the power supply when returning used equipment).
After you’ve finished with your IT products, what happens when they’re no longer needed? In nature, organic materials rot down and feed future growth, so why not dismantle products at the end of their lives and use the elements as raw materials for future products? Several reputable computer manufacturers use metal and easily-separated plastics in order to maximize raw material reuse.
Remember: It’s important that the environmental costs of recovery don’t exceed the benefits expected. And that, of course, loops back to design in the first place.
The priorities for all material things are reduce, reuse and recycle — in that order of importance. If you can extend the working life of your IT products, you reduce the environmental consequences of mining, manufacturing, packaging, shipping and disposal.
Can you upgrade something rather than finish using it? If you have to replace it, can someone else inside the organization use it? If not, charities and refurbishing organizations may be able to extend the life of the product. Also, waiting at the end of the line, many organizations, including some manufacturers themselves, are willing to take equipment back and recycle the components into new products.
Although IT devices consume energy, you can use them to control energy, particularly electricity consumption.
Tip: You can use IT systems to take care of building management. For example, using movement sensors, thermostats can be adjusted, lights switched on and off, and computers switched off out of hours and reawakened for software upgrades.
This new section of the PCPC electronic newsletter will provide you, your Centre and the families who use your services with the contact information for organizations that care about the environment and it shows in the products and services that they offer!
Your Healthy House
Contact: Stephen Collette, Principal
Telephone: (705) 652-5159 (telephone)
Email/Website: stephen@yourhealthyhouse.ca (email); www.yourhealthyhouse.ca (website)
General Information: Your Healthy House is a company that completes environmental assessments on homes and advises homeowners, builders, designers, architects and medical professionals on how to achieve healthy indoor environments. The work is of particular importance to clients with allergies, environmental illnesses and multiple chemical sensitivities, for whom a healthy house is essential to overall health. Stephen and Your Healthy House also advise corporate clients on energy efficiency and sustainable building.
This new section of the PCPC electronic newsletter will provide you, your Centre and the families who use your services with the contact information for organizations that care about the environment and it shows in the products and services that they offer!
Planet Bean
Address: 259 Grange Road East, Unit 2, Guelph, Ontario, N1E 6R5
Telephone/Fax: (877) 758-2326 (telephone); (519) 837-4297 (fax)
Email/Website: info@planetbeancoffee.com (email); http://www.planetbeancoffee.com (website)
General Information: Planet Bean coffee is fair trade and organic! Fair Trade Certification ensures that farmers are paid a fair price for their goods, those goods are not made using child labour, and environmental sustainability is maintained!
Planet Bean also offers a great fundraiser! They provide order forms and samples (you can adjust for your customers). You collect orders, send them to Planet Bean and they ship the order within two weeks… it’s that easy!
(These tips are based on a list originally developed by the Eco-Efficiency Centre at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia; Adapted for use in Ontario with permission)
This new section of the PCPC electronic newsletter will provide you, your Centre and the families who use your services with the contact information for organizations that care about the environment and it shows in the products and services that they offer!
Real Food for Real Kids
Contact: Lulu Cohen-Farnell, Founder and President
Location: Toronto, Ontario
Telephone/Fax: (416) 410-5437 (telephone); (416) 534-0948 (fax)
Email/Website: info@rfrk.com (email); http://www.rfrk.com (website)
General Information: Healthy catering for kids of all ages!
This issue we will take a look at how simple things that you do when operating your vehicle, can cut down on carbon dioxide.
Congratulations! Every little change you make in your lifestyle helps the planet, and future generations — keep up the great work!
Recycled newspapers end up as everything from toilet paper to roofing shingles… using one tonne of recycled newsprint means that 19 trees are left standing!
Childcare Centres can help children develop a positive and respectful relationship with the natural world, and environmentally-responsible habits for life! Centres can provide endless opportunities to model environmental responsibility, inspiring our fellow members and children to tread lightly on the Earth.
The environmental impacts of running a Childcare Centre are significant: the carbon dioxide emissions from transportation and energy use, the solid waste created, the natural resources consumed for the production of school materials and food, and the water used, to name a few — but by making a few deliberate efforts, we can keep little feet from making big footprints on the Earth!
One great way to kick your Centre’s sustainability efforts up a notch is to designate a Sustainability Co-ordinator within the Centre — this can be a permanent position for one of your families (ensure that this someone is always paying attention to sustainability)!
In deciding which projects to kick start your Centre’s sustainability efforts, you’ll need to consider the need, the time and financial resources involved, obstacles likely to be encountered, and whether the project will get people involved in and excited about sustainability.
The following are some relatively quick and easy projects to consider:
PCPC challenges you to think critically about the environmental impacts of your Centre and to collectively set ambitious goals for ‘greening’. Can you cut your solid waste production in half? Can you eliminate the use of new paper products? Can you off-set your carbon emissions? Can you carve out time every day or every week to let the children explore nature? A Childcare Centre can be an excellent vehicle to inspire environmental responsibility — let’s make the most of this opportunity!
Another valuable resource: http://aeceo.ca/content/how-green-my-program.html
This unique website offers information how to green your program — learn about alternatives and suggestions in four distinct areas of operation: resources, food, waste control, and awareness and education!
Composting, Buying Organic and Water-Conservation…
The new Scotties EnviroCare addresses Canadian consumers’ growing demand for environmentally responsible purchase options without having to sacrifice quality or aesthetics — it is believed to be Canada’s first ever 100% recycled premium facial tissue — this new brand will be packaged in four chic, new and natural designs!
In addition to its 100% recycled fibre content, the new product also features environmentally responsible packaging — with 152 sheets per box, it uses less packaging compared to cartons with fewer sheet counts — and the box itself is recyclable!
Some of you will read the following tips and strategies for both energy and fuel conservation, and think – I do this already! If that’s the case, congratulations; and if not, see how many you can incorporate into your lifestyle…
Ontario residents can soon drop off unwanted computers and assorted electronics at more than 100 new sites, as part of an industry-funded program dedicated to diverting more electronic waste from landfill sites.
Some 17 municipalities, select retail chains and Salvation Army Thrift Stores have been certified to collect junked computer-ware, television sets, and printers and fax machines to bolster existing recycling programs.
The program, run by the Ontario Electronic Stewardship industry association aims to divert an extra 160,000 tonnes of electronic waster over the next five years! About 91,000 tonnes of e-waste is collected in Ontario each year, but only 25 percent is managed appropriately.
For a location near you, visit www.dowhatyoucan.ca, and click on ‘Electronics’.
Absolutely nothing, and that’s why it is important for us to do everything that we can to preserve it for future generations!
Simple things that we can do everyday will greatly impact the current trends that our world is facing with respect to climate change!
The remaining 2009 electronic newsletters created by PCPC will focus on the simple, and easy to do tasks that will not only save you money, but will save our planet!
Replacing older, single-pane windows with new double- or triple-glazed units can save energy if they are installed to include air-leakage control around the frame. However, you can get almost as many savings by adding storm windows as you can with new double-glazed windows, at a fraction of the cost. Again, pay close attention to air-sealing when improving older windows. When it comes time to buy new windows, pay more for more efficient units. Over the long-term, the up-front cost will pay for itself in efficiency gains, and reduced energy use!
Should I be concerned about mercury exposure from compact fluorescent lights (CFLs)?
Fluorescent lamps (those long glass tubes) and compact fluorescent bulbs (the ones that can look like a soft-serve ice scream cone) both require the use of mercury for proper functioning, and should the glass tube of either break, the mercury could be released into the environment, possibly leading to mercury exposure – but that’s the bad news!
The good news, on the other hand, is that CFLs on average contain only 4 milligrams of mercury (compared to about 500 milligrams in older thermometers and anywhere from 3,000 to 20,000 milligrams in most non-electric thermostats), which is enclosed within the durable glass bulb. Manufacturers are aware of this concern and they continue to find ways to decrease this number through advances in CFL technology. However, some mercury is still more than no mercury, so the EPA also put together a detailed guide about the proper disposal and clean-up procedures should a fluorescent light break (to view the EPA disposal and clean-up guide, visit: www.epa.gov/bulbrecycling or www.earth911.com to find local recycling options).
In most homes, heating water is second only to space conditioning in energy use. Low-flow showerheads and faucet aerators can help lower your household water consumption and water-heating demand. So can using only cold water for clothes washing and laundering only full loads. If you have a private water system, conserving water will also reduce your pumping energy requirements and the load on your septic system.
Similar to appliances and electricity, the tighter your home, the less fuel you’ll need to keep it warm. Start by identifying and sealing air leaks, which can be found around chimneys, window frames, and the top of the foundation walls where wood meets concrete, and plumbing and electrical chases. Sealing your home (and office too) against air leaks is the most cost-effective improvement you can make to reduce heating and cooling consumption while increasing your comfort.
Unless they are properly designed, sealed against leaks, and well insulated, heating and cooling ducts can account for tremendous energy loss to the unconditioned spaces which they travel like attics and basements. If you have forced-air heating and cooling, be sure to seal and insulate everywhere you can!
Lowering the thermostat is one sure way to reduce heating costs. On average, you can expect to save about 2% of the energy you use to heat (or cool) your home and office for every degree you lower (or raise) the temperature setting. Use a programmable thermostat and set it to lower the temperature 10°F when you’re sleeping or away from home or the office – or if there’s no danger of pipes freezing, you can turn it off completely (and no, it will not take more energy to reheat the house than you saved by keeping the thermostat turned down).
Wrap your water heater in an insulating blanket and se the temperature as low as possible. Typically, a 1°F adjustment in your water heater’s temperature will result in a 1% change in energy use. You can use a timer to turn an electric water heater off when you don’t need it, but you will gain more in efficiency by using conservation strategies such as low-flow showerheads and insulating water heater tank wraps. If you’ll be away from home or the office for more than a few days, simply turn off the water heater entirely,
Timer controls and occupancy sensors work well on lights that tend to get left on, and multiple lighting circuits help put light only where you need it. Switched wall outlets or power strips allow you to turn thinks off (such as the entire entertainment centre or office peripherals) with ease.
The following four solutions will help you reduce your carbon dioxide output, therefore helping in the fight against climate change!
Use a power strip for your computer, monitor, fax, copier, TV, DVD player, and cell phone chargers, and switch it off when those devices aren’t in use. Most electronics draw power even when they are off, including empty chargers in standby mode!
Change your light bulbs – swap out incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents!
Turn off incandescent lights when leaving a room for even just a few minutes. If you use fluorescents, turn them off if you’re leaving for 15 minutes!
Cancel catalogues and remove yourself from junk-mail lists!
Look for appliances with the worthwhile Energy Star label, and remember this: Be sure to go a step further and check how much energy your desired appliance will use compared to other Energy Star-rated options – there can be a wide range of energy use, even though they all meet the Energy Star standards. A home fully equipped with Energy Star products will operate on about 30 percent less energy than a house equipped with standard products!
PCPC: Parent Co-operative Preschool Corporation
1571
Sandhurst Circle, PO Box 63512, Toronto, ON • MIV 1V0
Tel 416-410-2667 (voicemail)
E-mail nancy@pcpcontario.org
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Website www.pcpcontario.org or
www.pcpctoronto.org
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