Daily Eco Announcements-Earth Awareness

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Earth Awareness is a segment on the first semester video news given by sixth grade students.  Each day an Earth Awareness idea is highlighted and presented to all students from Kindergarten to sixth grade.  The goal is to increase environmental awareness and to present ideas that each student can do to make a positive impact.  Some of the ideas that are free for all students to participate in are:

• *Lessen your time in the shower by 2 minutes to save water

*Remind your teacher to recycle and turn off the lights when you leave the classroom

*Remind you mom to wash in cold water and use less detergent

*Ask for reusable lunch bags, so you have 0 trash at lunch

 

 

Students also presented earth friendly facts so that they may see the big impact that even the smallest effort can make.  Some examples include the following:

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  *Recycling in the US saves the carbon equivalent of removing 36 million cars from the road (EPA)

 *Recycling one can saves enough energy to run  TV for 2 two hours (EPA)

 *By recycling one plastic bottle you could light a 60 watt bulb for six hours  (EPA)

 *Recycling one ton of mixed paper saves the energy of 185 gallons of gasoline (EPA)

 *$1 trillion worth of food gets lost or wasted worldwide each year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

*Recycling glass instead of making it from Silica sand reduces mining waste by 70%,  water use by 50% and air pollution by 20% (Environmental Defense Fund)

 *Every year nearly 900,000,000 trees are cut down to provide raw materials for American paper and pulp mills. (EPA)  Reducing the paper you use and recycling the paper do use will reduce the number of trees that have to be cut down!

 

• *Every year we generate around 14 million tons of food waste which is 106 pounds of food waste per person 570,000 tons of this is composted for a 4.1% recovery rate. The rest, or 13.4 million tons is incinerated or landfilled and occupies 6.3 million cubic yards of landfilled MSW. (EPA)

 *Americans throw away about 28 billion bottles and jars every year. (EPA)

 

 *Americans make more than 200 million tons of garbage each year, enough to fill Bush Stadium from top to bottom twice a day! (EPA)

 

• *It takes a 15-year-old tree to produce 700 grocery bags. (EPA)

• *The energy we waste using bottled water would be enough to power 190,000 homes. (“Not Disposable Anymore.” P.O.V.’s Borders. 2004. PBS.)

 

• *Last year, the average American used 167 disposable water bottles, but only recycled 38. (Fishman, Charles. “Message in a Bottle.” Fast Company Magazine July 2007: 110.)

 

• *Americans used about 50  billion plastic water bottles last year. However, the U.S.’s recycling rate for plastic is only 23 percent, which means 38 billion water bottles  – more than $1 billion worth of plastic – are wasted each year( Fishman, Charles. “Message in a Bottle.” Fast Company Magazine     July 2007: 110.)

 

• *Making bottles to meet America’s demand for bottled water uses more than 17 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel 1.3 million cars for a year¹. And that’s not even including the oil used for transportation.  (Pacific Institute. “Fact Sheet: Bottled Water and Energy – Getting  to 17 Million Barrels.” December 2007.)

• *According to the EPA, in 2009 2.37 million tons of e-waste was generated in the US alone-only 17.7% was recycled.  Did you know HTES recycles electronics?  That includes old iphones, tablets, DVDs, cell phones,  and laptops.
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