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Thursday, October 22, 2009

Ecological Footprint, Reduction Goals and Strategies

It's time to evaluate my progress towards reaching the reduction goals and strategies i outlined at the beginning of the quarter for reducing my ecological footprint. Here is what has been working so far and the challenges that I have faced:
  • Working to keep electricity costs down has been very effective. Turning off lights, unplugging phone chargers and laptop battery chargers, and reducing water usage have all been pretty easy to stay accountable on. One of the challenges, however, is that my roomie owns a very large big screen television that I know eats up lots of electricity. Hence, we have been very cautious to never leave the television on or plugged in when we leave town/ aren't using it.
  • Our house has been very committed to recycling. We have found that most often we take out the recycling more often than the garbage.
  • Cell phones! I still have more research to do on recycling cell phones. I have heard that there are some different locations in town that could help with recycling cell phones.
  • I haven't been grocery shopping for weeks, so I haven't personally been using my reusable shopping bags. However, I keep them in the kitchen so my roomies have been able to utilize them for trips to the grocery store.

I have been successful in achieving most of my initial goals to help with the reduction of my ecological footprint. Another goal that I would like to start for myself is to reduce my use of water for laundry. I can easily oftentimes combine loads with a roomie or with kitchen/ bathroom towels to fully utilize wash and dry laundry cycles.

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