Leaks inside your toilet can waste up to 200 gallons of water per day!

• Toilet leaks are hard to find. They are normally caused by a bad flapper valve, flapper valve seat, a bad ballcock valve, and improperly positioned float arm, or a defective overflow tube.

• Test the toilet by dropping a dye tablet (or 1 drop of food coloring) into the tank. DO NOT FLUSH. Leave 15–20 minutes. If color appears in the bowl then you have a leak and repairs must be made.

A dripping faucet can waste 20 gallons a day.

• Faucet leaks are easy to detect. If it drips, or worse, continues to keep running after you shut if off, it needs to be fixed. If the dripping water is hot, it is costing you to heat the water.

• Water dripping or running from the shower head when the shower is turned firmly off is usually caused by bad washers or seats in the valve. These washers and seats need to be replaced. Also, check for leaks from the tub spout when the tub shower is on. This leak will reduce the performance of a low flow shower head because of reduced pressure to the head and waste water through the spout.

REPAIRS:

Problems with plumbing fixtures may be due to old age and corrosion or wear and tear. Replacement or repair parts can be purchased at a local hardware store. You can make the repairs yourself or consult a plumber. If you need more information, visit them online at: www.ims-awwa.org

Vinegar: Cuts grease, deodorizes and cleans any surface

Baking  Soda: Deodorizes and cleans surfaces to leave them shining; used for scouring

Borax: Launders, softens water, is a bleach alternative, disinfects.

Lemon Oil: Removes stains, deodorizes, shines.

Alcohol: Disinfects, cleans glass and granite.

Hydrogen Peroxide: Cuts mold, bleaches.

Tea: Cleans hardwood floors and woodwork.

The Recipes

General Purpose Cleanser: Mix 1 teaspoon borax with 1 quart warm water; add lemon juice or vinegar

Carpet Freshener: Sprinkle carpet with baking soda and let sit 15 minutes; vacuum.

Wood Floor Cleaner: Place two tea bags in a bucket with boiling water.

Grubby Corners: Mix hydrogen peroxide with baking soda, let sit for 1 hour, spray out.

Stainless Steel: Wipe with undiluted vinegar or lemon oil.

Glass: Mix vinegar or alcohol with water, spray on and wipe off.

Going green: Coca-Cola was the 1st company to have a recycled plastic beverage bottle.

The garbage each person in the United States makes in a year weighs about as much as a soccer team.

Americans throw away enough paper every year to build a wall 12 feet high all the way across the United States.

The biggest polluter of our air is motor vehicles.

Most of the energy used in our homes is for heating.

The ecosystem is a community of animals and plants interacting in the place they live.

Read the plan and then you decide.  Here is an excerpt from the website:TV spot

The Pickens Plan.

There are several pillars to the Pickens Plan:

• Create millions of new jobs by building out the capacity to generate up to 22 percent of our electricity from wind. And adding to that with additional solar generation capacity;
• Building a 21st century backbone electrical transmission grid;
• Providing incentives for homeowners and the owners of commercial buildings to upgrade their insulation and other energy saving options; and
• Using America’s natural gas to replace imported oil as a transportation fuel in addition to its other uses in power generation, chemicals, etc.

Recycling one ton of paper, you save

• 4,077 kilowatt-hours of energy
• 6,953 gallons of water
• 463 gallons of oil
• 17 mature trees
• 3 cubic yards of landfill space
• 2 barrels of oil
• 4,100 kilowatt-hours of electricity
• generates 74 percent less air pollution
• enough energy to power the average American home for five months

Recycling one aluminum can, you save

• enough energy to run a television or computer for three hours
• run a 100-watt bulb for 20 hours
• half a gallon of gas
• us from seeing one less aluminum can 500 years from now

Styrofoam/Polystyrene #6

• It is un-recyclable – you can’t make it into new Styrofoam. The industry wants you to assume it is – DON’T BUY IT!

• Each year Americans throw away 25,000,000,000 Styrofoam cups, enough every year to circle the earth 436 times.

Garden composting is a great example of this natural process. Composting is a valuable source of recycling. It rots down food waste, vegetable peelings, as well as garden waste. Once again, the worms, bacteria, and insects break down the compost pile into reusable soil.

Nature has a very efficient way of handling waste. It is tough to call it waste when it is such a valuable commodity to the life cycle. It is the purest organic fertilizer to nature.

While nature is very good at reuse and recycling, humans can be very efficient at wasting materials. In one day the United States disposes of more 90 million bottles and jars; more than 46 million cans; and over 25,000 television sets (not counting the amount of televisions put into landfills due to the HD change). Although some of these resources are used again, most of them are dumped as garbage. As more and more accumulates, the demand for holes in the ground, landfill sites, in which to deposit waste has grown rapidly. Human waste may travel many miles before it is finally dumped. Domestic waste from New York is mostly transported to landfill sites in neighboring states as well as out to sea.

The Earth’s natural cycles of decomposition and recycling can cope with some human waste. However, the huge amount of waste that humans throw away is overloading the system. The problem is made worse because many of the substances manufactured by humans are not biodegradable. This means that they do not decompose easily. Glass, tin, styrofoam and some plastics are not biodegradable. Some of these take many years to break down and some never break down. Waste materials that are dumped and do not decompose quickly cause pollution. These pollutants cause problems for nature to resume the process of the original idea of organic fertilizer. There needs to be pollution control in order for nature to takes its course by reusing natural waste.

• Don’t accept an extra paper or plastic bag in stores if you’re only going to throw it away. Many stores have plastic bag recycling programs. Bring back plastic bags to the store that offers recycling. You can always purchase reusable bags. Most grocery and department stores sell reusable bags close to the checkout counters or if they do not offer reusable bags, ask the cashier or even the manager.

• Write on both sides of paper; use recycled paper products when you can. The recycled paper products will usually be identified on the front of the packaging or on the back. Many stores offer printer paper, greeting cards, food packaging, stationery, notebooks, as well as other items on recycled paper.
• Buy drinks in returnable bottles whenever possible. Some places do not offer returnable bottles, if they do, return the items to be reused.

• If you enjoy purchasing a cold beverage in a store, you might reach into the cooler and pull your favorite beverage in a plastic bottle. What if you thought for one second the alternatives to that plastic bottle.  You could choose a plastic cup and fill it with a fountain drink instead. This cup can be reused many times and, in most cases, refills are typically more inexpensive than bottled beverages. Reusing items helps with reducing the waste it creates and then these same items can be recycled.

• Avoid buying over-packaged goods. Manufacturers are catching on to reduce the amount of packaging on some items. Various products are now sold in more compact containers. Some are even sold in bulk, therefore, more potential to reduce packaging.

Unfortunately, the goals of package designers are opposite of the goals of waste managers. Packagers want containers that won’t burn, break, crush, degrade, or dissolve, while these are the features waste managers do not want.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhxX1g9A2OM&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxNqzAHGXvs

There are many people that would like to assist in reducing, reusing, and recycling.  Are we asking ourselves when considering to throw away the empty plastic bottle of water in the nearest trash or walk a little further to put in the recycling container?  What would you do?  There are habits we can mold from wanting to start with the small things first. Are we considering walking out of the store with a few items in our arms or are we  accepting another plastic bag?  Do you remember to bring plastic bag back to the store?  The small things.

• Plastics in the U.S. are made primarily (70 percent) from domestic natural gas.
• Plastic shopping bags and product wraps (known collectively as “plastic film”) are commonly recycled at the many collection programs offered through major grocery stores.
• Recycling one ton of plastic saves 7.4 cubic yards of landfill space.
• During Keep America Beautiful’s 2008 Great American Cleanup, volunteers recovered and recycled 189,000,000 PET (plastic) bottles that had been littered along highways, waterways and parks.

http://earth911.com/plastic/plastic-bottle-recycling-facts/

What choices are you going to make today?