So as our blogging for this semester comes to a close, I have decided to pick a different topic next semester for my passion posts. I hope that all those who have been reading my posts felt a little bit more informed about the environment as much as I learned while I was writing them. For my last post about the environment I’d like to give a few websites that might substitute my environmental posts with their own.

1. Tree Hugger

This website is a very good website to find green technology and news about new advancements in green technology. It covers not only technology, but also recent business, scientific advancements, social aspects and other categories for news about the environment.

2. Meet The Greens

Do you know a youth or adolescent that wants to know about the environment? Or do you know a youth or adolescent that you think should know more about the environment? Then you should try meetthegreens.org. Meet The Greens is an organization that is partnered with TED (what a coincidence) and National Geographic and was created to teach a younger audience about the environment. The site is very interactive and teaches about the environment in fun filled ways such as games, videos, and activities. Check it out c: 

3. The Daily Green

A branch of the good housekeeping website, The Daily Green is a column that provides news articles about green related things, posts with tips and facts to live a green life, as well as advice for those who don’t know how to tackle living a more environmentally friendly life.

With these three websites, I wrap up my blog post run about green living. The past however number of weeks we blogged have been a lot of fun, and I can’t wait to think of a new topic to make more blog posts about. These three sites have a lot of really great information about the environment, so if you’d like to keep up with more green living posts and information, I definitely think you should check them out c:

For this week, I will be sharing some interesting environmental facts. Now that the semester is almost over, to be honest, I have sort of exhausted the topics that I can write about in a passion post. So I am more or less going to be ending this environmental series this semester and starting afresh next semester. However, I will do my best to make these last two weeks still count and make some awesome posts about the environment. Here’s a list of facts I have compiled from the site earthecho, huffingtonpost, and theworldcounts.

Cool and/or interesting facts about the environment:

1. 27,000 trees are cut down per DAY in order to make toilet paper. (Something to keep in mind the next time we all complain about how thin and hard the dorm TP is)

2. 40% of all bottled water sold is actually just tap water put into bottles

3. During the time it takes you to read this sentence, 50,000 12-oz aluminum cans are made. (Copied word for word from earthecho for effect)

4. American businesses use enough paper to circle the earth 3 times

5. 75 thousand trees could be saved if we recycled all the New York TImes daily papers.

6. 97% of the world’s water supply is ocean water, another 2% is frozen in the Arctic…as of now. We only use 1% of the Earth’s water supply.

7. One supermarket uses and average of 60,500,000 paper bags a year.

8. A glass bottle take 4 thousand years to decompose

9. Paper can only be recycled six times, because after the sixth time, the fibers are unable to hold together anymore.

10. Rainforests are cut being cut down at the rate of a hundred acres per minute.

11. Plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kills approximately 1 million sea creatures annually.

12. 35% of landfills are packaging materials.

13. The US is the number 1 producer of trash. Each person is estimated to generate 1,609 pounds of waste. That is 40% of the world’s waste made by 5% of the world’s population.

Since our RCL blog post this week was based on TED talks, I decided that I would just go ahead and look up some TED talks about the environment. When I looked up keywords like “environment” or “green” the TED website gave me a playlist of 12 talks that were about sustainability by those who build and create. These talks cover a wide variety of topics such as architecture that repairs itself, fungus based packaging material, and even creating buildings that encourage healthy germs and bacteria.

As I did not have the time to watch all 12 talks, I had other work to do unfortunately, I chose one that seemed interesting to me. I chose a TED talk given by Dan Phillips titled, “Creative Houses from Reclaimed Stuff.” Now I had never heard of Dan Phillips, so when I clicked the video I was surprised to see a cute, old man who did not really fit what I know to be a builder or a contractor.

Dan Phillips giving his TED talk. Isn’t he just so precious?!

Dan, builds houses from materials that have been thrown out and sit in a landfill for all of eternity. He takes things such as eggs, pieces of woodcutters, the murky window panes that are on the front door of most middle class suburban homes, and more to build houses for people to live in.

One of Phillip’s creations, a roof made entirely of discarded license plates.

While most of his talk was based upon why humans throw out so much instead of reusing materials that were otherwise fine to work with, he took some time during his presentation to talk about how he does his work. He also explained some of the houses he has built and what they are made from.

All in all, this talk wasn’t entirely on sustainable living and living green, but it did show a very interesting topic that helps the earth. I recommend this talk to anyone who likes psychology as well because he delves a lot into the psychology of why we view things as broken if there is a blemish seen on it (ie a scratch or a crack). He’s also very witty and funny which makes him very easy to understand and relate to.