Living green is about using and conserving, rather than throwing away. The early Americans from the Native Americans to the farmers, used every part of the plants grown or gathered and the animals hunted. Nothing was thrown away. Today, living green means using fewer prepared, wrapped and packaged products.

Buying food fresh and preparing it at home means less packaging being thrown away and less waste to pollute the environment. Preparing and eating fresh foods as much as possible means the food hasn’t lost the nutrients naturally present in the food.The full Continue Reading »

More than one billion bottle of water are sold in the United States every single week. Only a small amount of these bottles are recycled. The remainder ends up in landfills or contaminates the earth as litter.

Approximately 22 percent of plastic water bottles are recycled. These bottles are sorted, crushed and bundled at recycling centers. The bundles are purchased by companies that cut them into flakes and sell them to other companies that make recycled plastic products. Continue Reading »

The standard diet of a sea turtle consists mostly of algae, sea grasses and other vegetarian food sources. Unfortunately, sea turtles and other marine animals often ingest plastic litter that makes its way into oceans and other bodies of water. According to the United Nations, the trash that settles in oceans kills more than one million seabirds and over 100,000 sea turtles and mammals every year.

Marine animals and seabirds often confuse big chunks of plastic with squid or jellyfish. Smaller pieces may be confused with fish eggs and other tiny food sources. The volume of litter in our oceans is Continue Reading »

The oceans which cover the majority of our planet are in constant motion, except for areas within the centers of water structures known as ocean gyres. Ocean gyres are created in areas where multiple ocean currents intersect and react with each other, creating massive areas of water rotation. There are five major ocean gyres on our planet and when we refer to the “Pacific Garbage Patch” we are focusing on an area within the North Pacific Gyre.

As the rotational currents Continue Reading »

Plastic has been identified for many years as a problem in landfills. This is because it can take thousands of years for many plastics to biodegrade. This problem has developed over the last five decades and has been addressed in many ways. People do support the effort to recycle and the number of plastic containers that are being recycled has increased. Municipal landfills have been able to recover some plastics, while consumers have begun to Continue Reading »