While most of Styrofoam—95%— is actually air, the solid part is the epitome of environmentally unfriendly: not only does it not biodegrade, but when it is burned, it creates a toxic ash. And remember, in Fairfax County, our municipal waste is virtually all burned at the Covanta trash-to-energy plant in Lorton (more on that in …

You can recycle more than you think! According to the EPA, the average person produces 4.40 pounds of trash per day or about 1.5 tons of solid waste per year However, we recycle and compost only 1.51 pounds of our individual trash generations. While the EPA estimates that 75% of the American waste stream is …

America Recycles Day is coming on November 15! We all know that single-use water bottles are terrible for the environment. The statistics are staggering:  According to National Geographic, Americans buy more bottled water than any other nation in the world, adding 29 billion water bottles to waste disposal. Additionally, in order to make all these …

When was the last time you used a marker? Was it a washable marker to create a sign? A highlighter to help you remember some information on the page? A permanent marker to label your moving boxes? Or was it a dry erase marker to use on a whiteboard? And how quickly does that marker …

Wow! Even human cells recycle! Our own bodies turn out to be excellent models of the reduce, reuse, and recycle process. Check it out here: Nobel Prize in medicine awarded to Japan’s Yoshinori Ohsumi for work on ‘cell recycling’ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/10/03/nobel-prize-in-medicine-awarded-to-japans-yoshinori-ohsumi/    

America Recycles Day, Keep America Beautiful’s nationally recognized day dedicated to promoting and celebrating recycling, is November 15 this year. Living in Fairfax County, where we have curbside recycling, it is easy to assume that the U.S. is a leader in recycling. In fact, the U.S. falls behind many other nations, with Americans recycling only 34 percent …

Dry cleaning is amazing: you bring in your wrinkled, stained clothing and several days later pick up crisply pressed clean clothes. There is, however, that faint chemical odor. Therein lies the problem! In 1996, the National Institute for Occupational Health (NIOSH) found that the leading dry cleaning chemical, perchloroethylene, commonly known as PERC, was indicated …

Spurred on by pictures of marine animals tragically trapped in the holes of plastic six-pack rings, many of us have dutifully cut up these plastic rings around our soda and beer six-packs confident that no bird, fish, or sea turtle will ever get ensnared in our plastic. The problem, however, goes deeper. Since 1994 the …

  Approximately 15%-17% of the U.S. population smokes cigarettes, down from 21% in 2005 according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. While this is a good trend from a health perspective, the rise in “smoke free” establishments for our majority non-smoking population has had an unintended consequence: fewer accommodations for those who do smoke …

They’re green in principle, but not in the way people use them.  While many people have made the move to reusable bags, there is still some debate about whether these are, in fact, better than paper or plastic. Some studies suggest that it takes more energy to produce reusable bags, and that a large portion of those …