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I like how neat things are when people think them all the way through. There’s a thing called basal metabolic rate, which is the rate at which we burn calories when we’re just lying around all day. A 35-year-old, 200-pound man who jogs for a half hour can look forward to burning through a cool 381 calories. But wait, to think the whole thing through, that same man has a basal metabolic rate of 1985.3. If that guy’s BMR holds steady all day, then each hour he burns about 83 calories an hour just being alive. So then he actually netted 298 calories burned from that jog.
The idea behind recycling is to take trash, break it back down into raw materials and then reuse those raw materials to make new things.
The idea behind upcycling is to take trash itself as a raw material and use it to make new things. The trash directly becomes part of the new object. If you think about it, quilting is a very old example of upcycling.
Here is an example of modern upcycling. In the following video, plastic shopping bags are fused together to make a fabric that is then used to make a messenger bag…
This video contains several amazing, startling facts about the use of disposable coffee cups (like the kind you get at Starbucks) in the United States…
In yesterday’s blog, I looked into allegations that efforts to toilet train cats were decimating the California sea otter population. A parasite called Toxoplasma gondii frequently shows up in cat feces (this is also the reason you shouldn’t mess with litter boxes if you’re pregnant) and, if flushed, can infect sea snails that the otters depend on — with fatal results.
Yet, according to a 2007 post on The Daily Green, flushing your cat’s litter down the toilet can also save the planet. They argue that more than 4 billion pounds (almost 2 billion kilograms) of litter winds up in landfills every year and that the clay that it’s made from originates in environmentally destructive strip mines — all this on top of the potential stink.
Most cities won’t accept trashed monitors, because a monitor can contain up to 5 pounds of lead. Learn more about lead in this HowStuffWorks podcast.
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