Reduce Your Margins (repost)

One quick and painless way to save resources is to reduce your default margin settings in Word. The current margin conventions are simply that, a convention. Changing your margins to 0.75" all around will reduce the amount of paper you buy, use, and throw away.

Think about this: 8 million tons of office paper are used per year in the U.S. If we ALL changed our margins to 0.75" we would save 380,000 tons of paper a year. This amounts to $400 million dollars of savings, and over half the number of trees found on Rhode Island. Per year.

And don't feel badly about stiffing the paper industry. They are the third largest industrial generator of global warming pollutants, the number one industrial cause of global deforestation, and the number one consumer of the world's fresh water.



So change your margins at home, change them at work, tell your friends, and sign a petition to get Microsoft to change the default settings on their programs. Save some trees.

To learn more, check out some of these links: Climate Change: Changing the Margins, changethemargins.com, Penn State Green Destiny Council

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.