Sustainability Tip of the Week
A Simple Wish for a Better Tomorrow
Town of Bethlehem Compost Bin Sale
The Town of Bethlehem offers its third annual Backyard Composter & Rain Barrel Sale. It is open to anyone in the Capital District.
The pre-order deadline of April 1 will be extended.
For more information and to order visit: https://bethlehemcompostersale.ecwid.com/.
Approximately 40 percent of food in the United States never reaches the table. Every day, Americans discard 150,000 tons of food, from spoiled leftovers to the supermarket produce that has been sitting in the back of the fridge for a month. This mass of wasted resources is unceremoniously trucked off to landfills and entombed alongside plastic wrappers, old toothbrushes, and a menagerie of other byproducts of human excess — a shrine to the mounting impact our booming population has on the planet as it descends into a culture of disposable convenience.
“The volume of trash we’re creating is a problem,” said Sam Wetzel, the executive director of Common Good City Farm. “The most important thing for people to know is there is no such thing as ‘away;’ when things are thrown away they must go somewhere.”
Without oxygen to help discarded food break down, organic materials buried in landfills release methane, a greenhouse gas that can trap 30 times the amount of heat in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.
The EPA reports that landfills accounted for 16% of U.S. methane emissions in 2016, totaling approximately 108 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. As landfills run out of space and the atmosphere continues to heat as the result of human activity, it is clear the one-size-fits-all approach to waste disposal is no longer feasible.
https://www.planetforward.org/idea/composting-as-a-key-to-a-sustainable-future
Faculty, staff and students please share your sustainable ideas for our weekly tip to j.coons@hvcc.edu.
Published: Mon, 30 Mar 2020 11:40:21 +0000 by j.coons