Tap vs. Bottled Water

The best way to save resources is to not use them in the first place. One easy way to shrink your global footprint is to not drink bottled water.

Reasons to drink from the faucet:
1. It's free! It costs about $0.49/year to drink the prescribed 8 glasses/day tap water, and about $1,400.00/year to drink bottled. 40% of bottled water is just filtered municipal water. What a scam!
2. 9 out of 10 bottles are NOT recycled. There are 30 million discarded bottles per day in the U.S.
3. It takes 1.5 million barrels of oil to make one year's worth of plastic bottles.
4. It takes fuel and releases emissions to transport bottled water.
5. Disposable plastic bottles can contain toxic substances.

So, instead of spending money for water you could get for free (in addition to utilizing resources unnecessarily), carry a reusable drinking container and fill up at any faucet!

Want to learn more? Check out these news items from NPR.

Black Screens Save Energy

Check out Blackle.com. It's a search engine, powered by Google, but with one small, but possibly important difference: a black background. Black computer screens take less energy than white screens, and so having blackle.com as your homepage or standard search engine could eventually mean energy savings, especially if everyone who uses google switches over. They also have some tips for easy ways to save energy in your home and car, so check out their tips page.

You can't help but wonder... if the site is powered by Google, why doesn't Google.com just switch to a black background?

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's... meteors!

The peak of the Perseids, an annual meteor shower, happens from dawn to dusk on the August 12th-13th. This year the moon is positioned in such a way as to allow the best viewing during the peak of this years shower. In really dark skies you may see as many as 80 meteors per hour!

Meteors are comet dust that burns up as they graze the earth's atmosphere. This particular annual shower has been observed by the people of the earth for more than 2000 years. Get outside on the night of the 12th for an amazing show!