In a grocery store, they call it "rotating your stock". This means that when items are placed on a grocery store shelf, the newer items are placed behind the older items. Older (but still good) fruits and vegetables are placed on top of the pile in the produce section. That way, the older items are purchased first, before they spoil. In a home pantry or refrigerator, the same principle can help prevent food waste. Most of us have had the experience of finding an expired or spoiled food item at the back of the pantry, refrigerator, or freezer and wishing we had found that food while we could still eat it. It takes a few more minutes to put the new items in the back or to check the back of the refrigerator or freezer, but it can prevent a lot of food waste. Putting a date on the container can also help you keep track of when an item is approaching its "eat me now" date.
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Electric utilities report that an increasingly significant amount of electricity is used by electronic devices and chargers that are not actively in use. Not every electric appliance, light, or device uses energy even when turned off, but an increasing number of these items do use energy even when turned off. If you want to know if an item is using electricity when it’s turned off, see if your local electric utility or library has a consumer power meter that you can borrow. When you plug the power meter into an outlet and then plug a device into the power meter, it will tell you how much power the device is using. Many devices and chargers are warm when they are using power, so feeling the device is an easy low-tech way to identify some of these items. Another thing to consider is that these unused items that are warm are adding heat to your home, which adds to the air conditioning load in the summer.
We all wish that “everything” would be recyclable, so that we could easily reduce waste going to the landfill. Wishcycling means adding things to the recycling bin that may not be recyclable, hoping that perhaps the recycling facility will find a way to recycle them. Unfortunately, wishcycling does more harm than good. I found a great article that explains why. An inappropriate article can cause jams in the recycling facility machinery or contaminate a batch of recyclable material so that it must be thrown away instead of processed for recycling. Check the rules for your recycling facility and follow them so that the recyclable items can be effectively processed.
https://earth911.com/living-well-being/wish-cycling |
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