What To Do With Boxes

In this age of the internet it seems that most of us order a lot of our needs online and have them shipped. This means we have more boxes than we know what to do with. The first and easiest thing to do with boxes is to put them out for recycling if your city has a recycling program.

What if your city doesn’t have such a program? You’ll need other ways to recycle your boxes (dropping them over the wall into the neighbor’s yard doesn’t count). If you have things that you don’t want anymore, try listing them on Ebay, when someone buys the item, use one of your boxes to pack and send it in. It’s almost like re-gifting a present you don’t want. You get rid of the unwanted item and the box too!

If you don’t have things to sell, advertise your boxes for free on a local online classified ad service. For as many people as there are trying to get rid of boxes, often there are just as many looking for them. Do you give a lot of gifts at Christmas time? Break your extra boxes down and store them flat until you can use them for Christmas presents. Boxes make great forts and kitties love to play in them. Why go out and by a hundred dollar cat tree when with a little craftiness you can turn your unwanted boxes into a cat tree your cats will love?

Peanuts Peanuts and more Peanuts!

Do you order things online and have them shipped to you? If you do, you’re probably constantly throwing away all of those clingy packaging peanuts. If the peanuts you are throwing away are white or pink, they are made from seventy percent raw material, whereas green ones are seventy percent recycled material.

All of these can be used in an abundance of ways rather than throwing them away.

*There are many recycling centers that are now accepting them.

*You can also drop them off at pretty much any mail center as they reuse them.

*If you have a green thumb, you can use packing peanuts instead of rocks at the bottom of your pots for drainage.

*Using an ice chest and need to keep it cool as long as possible? Put some bags with packing peanuts inside into the ice chest. Make sure the bags are well sealed otherwise you will be picking packing peanuts out of your ice and food.

*Making your own Halloween costume? Need padding? Packing peanuts make great padding for costumes because they are light weight. Just make sure they are completely contained or you will be playing Johnny Appleseed with packing peanuts.

If you just plain detest packing peanuts, when you order things, request that the sender use some other material that is more environmentally friendly, this will solve all your problems before they even occur.

Green Water Purification

When it comes to being green, water is one of the most important issues. Everyone has to have clean water, because they’ll die if they don’t. The problem with that, recently, is that there is less and less clean water. There are shortages in a lot of states, and many other states are expecting those shortages within the next five to ten years. That’s unfortunate, but it could also be deadly. States that don’t anticipate water shortages are still seeing problems like aging infrastructure and more contamination. They aren’t sure what to do about these kinds of things, and they don’t know if they’ll have the money to fix them – which could be a serious problem for millions of people over the coming decades.

Water purification is the key, because there’s plenty of water overall – it’s just not clean. Finding inexpensive, adequate, and responsible ways to make dirty water clean is what states have to focus on. There’s only going to be so much water available, and if an area can take that water and make it safe to drink again, water can be recycled just like plastic, cardboard, and glass. Setting up everything that’s needed to purify water will cost a lot of money, though, so it’s important that states start planning now, so that they can build things over time and have them ready when they need them. 

Algae Biofuels

New alternatives to old fuels are important, and there are always people trying to come up with new ways to power their vehicles. One of the newest ways is with algae. Because algae are very prolific and easy to grow in many kinds of conditions, it’s a gold mine for people who want to find a way to turn it into fuel. There’s so much of it, and huge algae blooms can sometimes cause a problem for wildlife, so if they can be turned into something profitable that’s even better. With algae biofuels, jets and trucks can be operated without the kinds of fuels that are used now and that are so dangerous to the environment as a whole. Still, though, it will be five to ten years before anything like this is produced on a large scale.

Soybeans and other common feedstocks for biodiesel are popular, but algae offers up to 100 times more oil for each acre that’s harvested. That could be very significant when people are trying to use this on a large scale, since it can take a lot of feedstock to produce biofuels that work well. There are many different kinds of algae, too, and finding the ones that work the best can mean some trial and error for a lot of scientists. If one kind of algae works better than other kinds, it’s possible that there will be ‘farmers’ who will grow certain types of algae simply to be used for fuel production.