Energy savings with just the flip of a switch!

Turning off the lights in rooms before you leave can have a significant impact on the amount of wasted energy in your apartment or house. We often do not realize how many lights we leave on every day when we may not even be in the room!

It is estimated that you can reduce your CO2 output by up to 110lbs over the course of just one week by participating in this one simple action. You can also save approximately $5 each week you do this. These values can obviously vary depending on the type of lightbulbs you use and how many you have throughout your home. However, this small effort can translate into significant energy savings and environmental benefit if more people take part in this sustainability action.

Challenge: 

We challenge you to turn off your lights whenever a room is not being used for the next 2 weeks and see how easy it can be to incorporate into your routine! 

Tips:
-Allow more natural light into your house by opening blinds or curtains. It is much less harsh than many artificial lights and it's free!

Additional Information: 
To find out more on the benefits of turning out the lights you can visit the following sites:

Maritime Eletric 

Energy.Gov

 To accept the challenge click here

Reduce your laundry cost!

Clothes washing is another one of the largest sources of water waste in households. Environment Canada states that up to 20% of the water usage in Canadian homes comes from doing the laundry Environment Canada - Wise Water Use. There are many things you can do to save energy and water waste when it comes to laundry without reducing the quality of the cleaning that you get out of it.

By washing your clothes on the cold water cycle and hanging up more of your clothes to dry you can cut back on energy waste and save yourself money! Even doing this for seven days can reduce your CO2 footprint by 11 pounds and earn you savings of $1 or more. Up to 90% of the energy used during a wash goes to heating the water if you choose a hot water cycle. Hot water can also cause colours to fade and clothes to shrink or stretch Maritime Electric - Energy Saving Tips. We often wash our clothes far longer than is necessary as well. Unless they are completely covered in dirt, the minimum cycle time is sufficient. 

Challenge:

For two weeks, we challenge you to use cold water only in your clothing washes and reduce the time of your washes to the minimum required cycle time to get your clothes clean. 

Tips: 
-If you can, place as many of your wet clothes next to a heating source in your home to dry, that way you save the energy that would otherwise be used in a dryer.

-Use detergents that are less harmful to the environment as well!

-Reuse articles of clothing. You save water, money, and your clothes will maintain their shape and colour much longer.

-Do only full loads of laundry, you save much more water this way.

Additional Information:
For more ideas on how you can reduce your environmental impact when doing laundry visit these sites:

You Sustain 

BC Hydro 

 To accept the challenge click here

Reducing your energy drain

All around our apartments and houses we have a multitude of electronic devices plugged in at any given time. Most of the time we don't even think about how this could be affecting our energy costs. Even though your electronics are 'turned off' they generally still use some standby power if they are left plugged in. This is commonly referred to as 'phantom' energy usage. As we accumulate more and more electronic devices in our homes and workplaces this phantom electricity usage can become a larger source of energy waste.

The government of Canada is also looking at ways to combat standby energy use by implementing energy-efficiency regulations for manufacturers. These regulations encourage development of low energy use technology which will help to decrease energy consumption while in standby mode and also when the devices are being used. Natural Resources Canada provides a detailed list of home appliances and devices that fall under these regulations:  NRCAN Energy Efficiency Regulations

Every bit of energy that you save does count! Environment Canada has many suggestions pertaining to energy usage that will help save you money as well as protect the environment: Environment Canada Eco-Tips. 

Did you know that between 5 and 10 percent of you total energy usage per year comes from these electronics that are plugged in all the time? This can add up to 100-200$ extra on your annual energy costs!

Challenge:

We challenge you to unplug your small appliances and electronic devices between uses for 1 month and see how easy it can be to reduce your energy consumption!

Tip: 
-devices in close proximity can be plugged into power bars which can be shut off at the flip of a switch making this task much easier.

Additional Information:

To find out more about which energy sapping devices are costing you money check out these websites:     

CBC News

Natural Resources Canada- Canadian Big on consumer eletronics 

Natural Resources Canada- Satndby Power 


Maritime Electric

 To accept the challenge click here

The Lunchbag Challenge

The amount of waste related to food is much more vast than we tend to acknowledge. Food production, food packaging, and food transport are all part of a large network of industries that, working together, ultimately result in what you find on your plate as you tuck into a meal. We tend to not think about the vast amount of time and energy needed to provide daily conveniences such as fast-food restaurants that many people rely on for their lunchtime meals.

In 2003 Statistics Canada estimated that approximately $63 billion was spent by Canadians on food and non-alcoholic beverages in stores. 20% of that total was attributed to prepared foods, dairy, and eggs. From these statistics we can see that there is a reason to reduce our consumption of pre-packaged foods. 

Packing your own lunch reduces the amount of waste you produce from non-reusable lunch items such as paper or plastic wrappers, cups, plates, straws etc. When you pack it yourself you reduce your CO2 emissions by 44.6lbs and it can save you approximately $20. Waste free lunches reduce your total costs by as much as 40%. Make sure you use a reusable lunch container, and reusable food containers as well. Try introducing non-pre-packaged foods into your lunches to reduce the amount of plastic and paper waste. 

Challenge:

Pack your lunch everyday for month and see how you can save! Make an attempt to buy local and organic if you can because both of these choices are a result of low-energy input in the production and transport process. For those times when you cannot pack your own lunch try to reduce the amount of waste created when you buy your lunch. Also make sure to properly sort any waste that you do make!

Additional Information:
Here are some further resources on food sustainability:

Carbonrally

David Suzuki Foundation

Statistics Canada  

 To accept the challenge click here

Bring your own Mug

Paper and cardboard make up over 40% of the solid waste buried in North American landfills. Of that 40%, a disproportionate amount is attributable to disposable coffee cups

The word “paper” might suggest that the paper cup is easily recycled and that it is not as bad as its plastic cousin. However, most paper cups are coated with a plastic resin (i.e., polyethylene) for durability and convenience, therefore making both their composting and recycling impossible and all of those cups end up in landfills.

-        Green Global USA’s Coalition for Resource Recovery estimates that if all paper cups were recycled, 645,000 tons of waste would not end up in landfills.

-       Did you know Canada disposes of more coffee cups per year than there are people in China, and that’s just  mere 30 million people out of nearly 7 Billion on the planet? 

-       Coffee is the #2 traded commodity in the World and the #1 is Crude Oil.  Oil is everywhere, in our cars, in our power plants, in pipelines, refineries, tankers, and sand. There’s really only one use for coffee and 64% of Canadians say they drink it everyday, averaging 2.8 cups, with 88% saying they drink it at least once per week. Our individual acts, our morning routine, results in 2.25 Billion cups consumed each year worldwide.

-       - Well for many, it’s in a paper cup. In fact, Canada produces 1.6 Billion Paper Coffee Cups per year, which takes 350,000 trees and 400 million gallons of water to produce. One study found that the city of Toronto produces 1,000,000 coffee cups per day alone. Not only do we consume the coffee, we consume all the materials and energy used to make the disposable cups.

-       The average coffee cups is used for 10 to 15 minutes, after which it spends around 500 years in a landfill.

Talkin` Trash with UHN

It's time to rethink a little about our way we drink the beloved coffee every day. You can start putting you mug with your lunch bag to make sure that you will not forget it .So every time you want a coffee you will not need to use a paper cup.

The Challenge and CO2 emissions

During 1 week we challenge you to use 5 less disposable coffee cups. Doing this little change, you will reduce CO2 emission by 1.25 Ibs per week.

Do not be discouraged thinking that your change will not make much difference. After all, you can invite more people to participate of the sustainable challenges and they can make the difference together with you.

Ps.:  Based on an April 2000 Starbucks/Alliance for Environmental Innovation Joint Task Force report, the CO2 emission is about 0.25 Ibs per medium-sized coffee cup.. That includes both the CO2 released when fossil fuels are burned to create the energy needed to manufacture the paper in the coffee cup and then manufacture the coffee cup itself. It also includes the energy used to transpot the cups from the factory to the coffee shop. 

  To accept the challenge click here

More Information:

Talkin' Trash with UHN

Our World

Report of the Starbucks Coffee Company

Carbonrally 

Print Less

                                                                                                     picture: http://green.harvard.edu/

We all know of the need to print important documents, assignments, research and other things. However, have you ever stopped to think how many times you printed something unnecessary that after a few days you did not use anymore?

-       Paper and paper products accounts for more than 1/3 of all Canada’s waste.

-       Canada uses 6 million tons of paper and paperboard annually. Only 1/4 of Canada’s waste paper and paperboard is recycled.

-       Approx. 324 L. of water is used to produce 2.25 pounds of paper.

-       As many as 24 trees are required to make one ton of paper.

-       Global paper use has grown more than six-fold since 1950. One fifth of all wood harvested in the world ends up in paper. Pulp and paper is the 5th largest industrial consumer of energy in the world, using as much power to produce a ton of product as the iron and steel industry. In some countries paper accounts for nearly 40 percent of all municipal solid waste.

-       Average worldwide annual paper consumption is 48 KG per person.

After read these information, what about think before you print in the next time? Besides the number, I bet you had not thought of how much energy is spending in papermaking. Manufacturing paper requires energy. That paper starts as a tree. The tree gets harvested, transported some distance to a plant to get sliced up into chips. Those wood chips are then transported to a pulp mill, which can be thousands of miles away. At the pulp mill, the wood chips are ground into pulp, which gets bleached and washed and sent to the paper mill to be made into paper. Eventually, the paper is cut into the right size sheets for your laser printer, packaged, and then shipped — again, maybe thousands of miles — to your local office store.

The Challenge and CO2 emission

As each ream (500 sheets) of copy paper used is responsible for 30.5 pounds of released CO2 reducing your use of paper by just one quarter during 1 month will save 7.6 pounds pf CO2.

Remember, recycling is good but reducing the amount of paper you use to begin with is even better. You’ll save money and reduce carbon.

To accept the challenge click here

What changes we can do:

Reduce

·         Only print what's necessary.

·         Make the point size smaller in your documents to reduce the number of printouts.

·         Send people PDFs instead of printouts.

·         Don't overprint: find out how many people need to receive what you are sending out.

·         If you are printing a document to review, edit, or make comments, make them on-screen instead. You can do this with the “Track changes” and “Insert comments” features in Microsoft Word. Speaking of Word, another way to get more words on a page (and therefore use less paper when you finally print) is to decrease your font size and change Word’s “generous” default margins so that there isn’t as much white space surrounding your text.

·         If you really have to print, do it on both sides of the paper.

·         Some printers have a booklet setting which prints two-up pages on both sides of the paper, effectively giving you four on one sheet of paper- a 75% reduction.

Reuse

·         Use the other side of printed sheets when documents are drafts, so you can make notes, for example. Once you`ve used both sides of the paper, then you can recycled it.

·         Cut scraps of paper and use them as notes.

·         Donate your old books, trade and consumer magazines to your local library.

Recycle

·      Recycling saves 3 to 5 times the energy generated by waste-to-energy plants, even without counting the wasted energy in the burned materials.

Making a ton of paper from recycled paper saves up to 17 trees and uses 50 percent less water than does creating paper from virgin pulp

·         Recycling 1 ton of mixed paper saves the energy equivalent of 185 gallons of gasoline

·         Recycling 54 KG of newspaper will save one tree.

Global consumption of wood fiber for papermaking can be cut by more than 50 percent, reports a new study by the Worldwatch Institute. This reduction can be achieved through a combination of trimming paper consumption in industrial countries, improving papermaking efficiency, and expanding the use of recycled and nonwood materials, according to Janet Abramovitz and Ashley Mattoon, co-authors of Paper Cuts: Recovering the Paper Landscape

More Information:

  Governmentof Canada, Digital Collections

 Environment Canada

 International Institute for Environment andDevelopment

ID2 Communications

Clean Air Concil 

Boston University Sustainability 

Go Green Hosting

CarbonRally

Cut down your shower time!

In 2004 Environment Canada estimated that the average Canadian domestic water use per capita was approximately 329 litres of water a day. Most people would never think they would use so much water everyday! Most municipalities charge a flat rate per household for water meaning everyone pays the same no matter how much water they've used. Households that are not linked to a municipal water supply have their own wells to draw from and therefore do not have to pay this fee. In both situations there is really no financial incentive to reduce water consumption.

What about the environmental cost?

Our fresh water resources seem like an inexhaustible supply considering we here in Canada have access to 7% of the world's entire renewable fresh water supply. However, as our population expands and water demand increases, we are starting to see the effects of the stresses we are putting on our fresh water systems. On PEI we rely solely on groundwater for our source of freshwater. As a province whose major industry is agriculture we must be careful not to contaminate this supply with pesticides and fertilizers, or draw too much for field irrigation. When we combine the increased water usage by a growing industrial sector and growing population we put a great strain on these groundwater sources. For example, in the summer of 2012 the Winter River watershed that feeds the groundwater supply for PEI's capitol city almost ran dry with over-consumption of water Click here for the full story. With a changing climate that could bring much drier conditions we must learn to change our habits concerning water usage. 

What can we do?

There are many ways in which we can reduce our water consumption at home on a daily basis. Showering is one of the activities that uses up the largest amount of fresh water in our daily activities. Environment Canada estimates that 35% of water usage in Canadian households is used for showers and baths Environment Canada - Wise Water Use. Did you know that shortening your shower by even a minute or two can save over 500 litres of water a month? 


Challenge:
We challenge you to reduce your shower time to under five minutes and to take only one shower per day (depending on whether you're planning to go to the gym or not) for 1 month.

If you have other ideas about ways to reduce your water consumption, don't be afraid to incorporate those into the challenge too and be sure to share your thoughts on how you keep your water consumption low at https: UPEI Student Sustainability Challenges 


Additional Information:
You can find more information about water conservation here:

https://www.ec.gc.ca/eau-water/default.asp?lang=En&n=F25C70EC-1

http://www.canadianliving.com/life/green_living/water_saving_ideas_for_every_household.php

http://www.water-matters.org/topic/water-conservation/household-tips

 To accept the challenge click here