Packaging Waste

You know it costs us when the manufacturers put their medicine bottles in a small box. We must throw away that box when we get home. We then will pay for the disposal of that box. The container mostly functions to make it easy to ship those products and nothing more. It may add security for the product but their are other ways to do that. How much money could we all save if we stop this? Not only the product would be cheaper but we would reduce the waste stream and the cost of disposal.

Okay envirojunkies, if you really want to make a difference start living like you are in a depression economy. Stop throwing away so many things. Stop buying new things because you want them when you do not really need them. Let's stop talking about making biofuels and get down and do it. How much vegetation is thrown away or burned or sent to landfills everyday. How much grass is grown just for your visual enjoyment. How about using the cuttings for fuels. More later. Just think.

Let's Look at Rainfall Data for the Last 94 Years

The local water management District, Southwest, has the rainfall data for 16 counties in this area for the previous 94 year. I graphed three counties, two adjacent and the northern county in the district: Hillsborough, Polk and Levy. While there has been major fluctuation in all the counties, the oscillation has been between 40 inches and 80 inches in all three counties. I recently read a paper by Naziha Azli and Norhafizah Ramli (University of Malaysia) regarding trends from climate data that oscillates. There are those who want to perform a regression analysis of the data to plot a straight line. In every case the straight line will be ascending which people translate to mean that the average temperature/rainfall, etc. is steadily rising. However, Azli and Ramli found that if you plot a random series of numbers that oscillate up and down as rainfall and temperature do, the regression analyses will always yield a ascending line. It is not appropriate to do this analysis on this type of data. When reviewing the rainfall data for this region there is clear oscillation but no apparent change in the range. We cannot say from this data that rainfall is dropping or dramatically rising. It also depends on how you pull the data. If you look at the first 30 years of data for Hillsborough County the average rainfall is 52 inches which is considered the average for the area. If you pull 32 years different but consecutive years the average is 62 inches. So what cycle are we in at any given time; only God knows.

Stormwater Issues 101

The greatest source of pollution to our waters is from stormwater runoff. You are going to hear a lot about that in the weeks to come. We will have to do a better job maintaining the stormwater treatment systems like we do for our other utilities. It is time to re-think how we landscape e.g. reduce the amount of sod, choose sods that require little fertilization, do not require sprinkler systems, capture stormwater for your future irrigation. If we do not start building with this in mind when we will get started. So much water is wasted and sent to the waste water treatment plants. Not all this water needs to leave the house or business. We need dual plumbing in the buildings; we need to be prepared to accept gray water even if it is not available now. What are you prepared to do for your part?