Local Business helps reduce the human footprint

Staples store: How to reduce the human footprint?

Eco-conscious or eco-friendly products with different icons of recycling support low living impact at your house and office.

Office Supplies:

- Papers (100% made of recycled paper) includes: copy and print center paper (services used very frequently), or recycled envelopes, sticky notes.

- Staples notebook: made of sugarcane waste: good quality and durability.

- Scissor made of recycled plastics.

- Besides, they have eco- friendly calendar, art supplies.

- Cleaning supplies: Various types.

Polar-based calculator: Using renewable energy

What I am really interested about is furniture products including lighting.

There is no way for incandescent to survive in this store. All you can find there is CFL bulb

Individual bulb price, life span, lumens (brightness), and wattage/electricity cost (how much electricity it takes to light the bulb)

You'll want to go with the LED. The bulb features a life span of 50,000+ hours versus the CFL’s 8,000 hours and the incandescent bulbs 1,500 hours. Considering the bulb’s low energy expenditure

Costs less over the long term and burns more efficiently. (low impact living)I

nk and toner recycling: Customers bring used empty ink to the store instead of considering it as trash to landfill. Get Staples Rewards!!!

Technology recycling: Drop off anything: cell phone, PDAs, camera, rechargeable batteries.

v Green Copy and Print center

Staples has affiliations with environmental certification: energy star, green seal.

Solutions to Fossil Fuel Over-consumption

As far as we have known, the invention of the internal combustion engine and its use in automobiles and trucks greatly increased the demand for gasoline and diesel oil, both made from fossil fuels. Other forms of transportation, railways and aircraft, also required fossil fuels.

Today, we know what is the relation between greenhouse effect and fossil fuel consumption. When you burn fossil fuels the relating output is HEAT + WASTE GASES. The waste gases can be of several type depending on the hydro-carbon. Carbon dioxide, Nitrous Oxides, and water vapor are listed as greenhouse gases, which have affected us in variety of serious ways.

First of all, what I put in my priority is energy efficiency. It means using less energy to get the same job done. When I looked at the article "As Government Bans Regular Light Bulbs, LED Replacements Will Cost $50 Each" published May 17, 2011 in www,foxnews.com, it said that two leading makers of lighting products are showcasing LED bulbs that are bright enough to replace energy-guzzling 100-watt light bulbs set to disappear from stores in January. "The technology in traditional "incandescent" bulbs is more than a century old. Such bulbs waste most of the electricity that feeds them, turning it into heat. The 100-watt bulb, in particular, produces so much heat that it's used in Hasbro's Easy-Bake Oven. LEDs are efficient, durable and produced in great quantities, but they're still expensive." Thus, this process of saving energy requires people to understand more about energy savings rather than the cost of each.

In the second analysis, what draws my attention is conservation. Unplugging is simply an easy way for everybody to do. Besides, there are a lot of ways to conserve energy rather than waste it, one of the most effective ways is Recycling, which brings a lot of benefits to our environment.

Last but not least, what I would love to mention is clean energy, or renewable energy, including solar energy, wind energy, ocean energy, geothermal energy, and hydrogen energy. Why are those sources very important? Renewable energy technologies are clean sources of energy that have a much lower environmental impact than conventional energy technologies. Renewable energy will not run out. Ever. Other sources of energy are finite and will some day be depleted.

Of course, as a result, it also creates job and supports the economy!

The Human Footprint: Definition and facts

The Human Footprint

Everything you eat. Everything you drink. Everything you use. You entire life's consumption leaves the Earth leaves the lovely Earth a great quantity of "human footprint". Our human footprint doesn’t end after we buy and consume things; the final impact occurs when we discard items – and Americans discard four-fifths of a ton of trash per person, per year.

Oh we create tons of waste! Here are the numbers: Americans generated 251 million tons of trash in 2006, the most recent year for which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has data. Our per ca-pita trash disposal rate was 4.6 pounds per person, per day. Sixty-five percent came from residences, while 35 percent came from schools and commercial locations such as hospitals and businesses.

Does it sound scary?

There is still a lot of information that I can find in the Internet, or we can see in the movie called The human footprint by National Graphic Channel, showing how the human footprint has brought a very bad impact on our Earth including urbanization and transportation. In order to explain those above facts, we can see that the first consequence of urbanization is a modification of natural environments: economic development is usually accompanied by the concreting of surfaces (shopping centers, infrastructures, housing...), which is especially striking in coastal areas (Mediterranean...). Often rampant urbanization leads to an uncontrolled urban sprawl that is not harmonious (warehouses, estates...). This resulted in a reduction and fragmentation of natural areas. Also, urban life is the source of many forms of pollution: pollution of water, which is used, collected, treated and disposed of in the natural environment; pollution of air, by micro-particles, volatile organic compounds and greenhouse effect gases; noise, olfactory and visual pollution...

Talking about transportation, we are facing a big problem. It is undeniable that transport is 98% dependent on oil. It therefore easily becomes apparent that this sector is one of the main emitters of greenhouse effect gases (GHG) and pollutants (carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides...) Every kinds of transportation such as air, marine, land always bring to people all kinds of pollution, which lead to negative consequences.

So what is our method to reduce the human footprint?

Written by Duc Vu
Reference: "Urbanization and transportation" from www.unanpourlaplanete.org