by Sidney Sweeting, DDS

My wife found some information in Better Homes and Gardens which I found both enlightening and frightening.

It is titled “Ways to go green.”

1.      A dripping faucet can waste up to 74 gallons of water a day and a leaking toilet up to 200 gallons a day. If every subscriber fixed one dripping faucet, the savings would be more than 20 billion gallons of water a year – enough to provide 548,000 homes with water annually.

2.      If each of their 7.6 million subscribers would replace a single light bulb in their home with the new CFL (compact fluorescent) bulb they would reduce emissions from power plants by 1.5 million tons over the lifetime of the bulb – the equivalent of taking 5.9 million cars off the road for a year.

3.      If every subscriber unplugged one TV when not in use the energy savings would be $25 million annually.

4.      If 1 million subscribers recycled one cathode-ray tube TV this year it would keep 4 million pounds of lead out of the ground.

5.      Most of the energy consumed by washers goes toward heating the water – 90% in the clothes washer and 80% in the dishwasher. The answer is to combine half-loads. Washing two fewer loads of clothes and one fewer load of dishes a week can save up to 4,500 gallons of water a year.

How about recycling in the Bahamas – newspapers, cans, bottles. It is long overdue.