- In WISCONSIN, we generate 4.6 million tons of trash and recyclables each year. That’s enough to fill a typical city street over 4 feet deep with trash (curb to curb) for 575 miles! If you remove the recyclables, only 357 miles would be filled with trash.
- In the UNITED STATES, we generate enough trash and recyclables each DAY to fill 72,450 garbage trucks that hold 9 tons of trash each (which means 26,444,250 garbage trucks in a YEAR). Recyclables would fill 27,531 garbage truck each DAY.
- The average person in WISCONSIN generates 4.7 pounds of trash (residential and their share of commercial trash) each day and recycles 1.9 pound of that trach per day.
- The average person in the UNITED STATES generates 4.7 pounds of trash each day and recycles 1.4 pounds of that trash per day.
News Bits: “Is This the World’s Best ‘Greenest Companies’ List?”
Read GreenBiz.com Senior Writer Marc Gunther’s take on a newly released “100 Bes
t” list…
“I’m skeptical about efforts to rank and rate green or sustainable companies, and I have been for a time. [See 100 Best Corporate Citizens? What a CROck!] It’s terribly difficult to compare big and small companies, retailers with manufacturers, software firms with oil companies, etc. We once tried at FORTUNE, and gave up because we decided it couldn’t be done right.
“Having said that, I’m impressed with the rigor and methodology used by a Canadian magazine called Corporate Knights to produce its 8th annual list of Global 100 Most Sustainable Companies, which it calls “the most extensive data-driven corporate sustainability assessment in existence.” The ratings are transparent and they encompass social as well as environmental metrics, among them energy, carbon, waste and water productivity, diversity and employee turnover, safety and, interestingly, the ratio between CEO and average worker pay — a revealing metric that most such rankings do not include.”
Source: Greenbiz.com
News Bits: Climate in the Classroom
Climate in Classrooms
27 Jan 2012
Read the full post at Dot Earth.
There’s much to explore about the challenges in teaching about the evolving relationship between people and their climate.
This subject was once pretty straightforward. After all, it was a relationship that was largely a one-way phenomenon. Climate changed. People adapted or moved. (The extraordinary books of Brian Fagan are an ideal guide.)
As humanity’s growth spurt plays out, the accumulating greenhouse gases from fossil fuel combustion — along with the impacts on clouds or sunshine from other emissions and impacts from land surfaces — have made this a two-way relationship. And that makes teaching about this subject particularly challenging, given the durably wide range of perceptions not just of the science, but of how to respond to it.
Source: Environmental News Bits
Go Green: Careers and Job Opportunities
Looking for Career Opportunities in the ‘Green’ Sector?
Check here on Wednesdays for links to websites listing green jobs and internships!
GreenBiz.com’s green jobs and career center lists current jobs and internship openings in solar and renewable energy, cleantech, green building, sustainable businesses, socially responsible organizations and more. The website’s Green Career Center also has some good resources for learning about available options for growing a career in the green economy.
Website: http://jobs.greenbiz.com/