Or try FishPhone, a project of the Blue Ocean Institute that allows you to send a text message with the word “fish” and the species name to the number 30644. You will immediately receive a color-coded response: green means eat it, yellow means there may be problems associated with the species, and red means steer clear.

Make the Call
Donating your old cell phone to a school, church or community group might seem like a winning deal all around: you unload a piece of junk, the charity raises funds and a landfill is spared. Right? Maybe not. Many charities get paid to collect phones for middlemen who refurbish them for developing countries that lack modern landfills or recycling facilities, so the refried phones will end up trashing the earth anyway. To make sure your old phone doesn’t end up as e-waste, return it to a retailer or manufacturer or donate it to a program with a no-landfill policy. And the next time you’re in the market for a phone, consider buying a “just like new” model. For recycling information, go to www.epa.gov/epawaste/partnerships/plugin/cellphone/index.htm

Think Inside the Box
Annual carbon dioxide emissions that could be avoided if 97 percent of U.S. wine made to be consumed within a year was sold in boxes instead of bottles: about two million tons.

Annual carbon dioxide emissions of 400,000 cars: about two million tons. (That’s right: the average passenger car emits about five tons of CO2 annually.)

Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "Being Green".

This article was originally published with the title Being Green.

1 Comments

1. 1. eco-steve 06:22 PM 12/16/08

   Wear long-johns indoors under your trousers and put a thick shirt over your woolen jumper. The added insulation will enable you to turn down your heating by three degrees or more, and still be comfortable, even if you are just sat down motionless infront of your computer screen for hours on end.
   

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