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Earth Hour

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Vigo:
Pretty much all the buildings in my area turn of their lights, at least by midnight. They need to keep dim lighting on for safety/emergency purposes. Most buildings have light on later because of employees working working late, then the cleaning crew must be in there afterwards, plus security needs to sweep the entire building after that. It's probably a major effort to get the lights out by 8:30.

I don't think many buildings will unnecessarily light their building through the night unless they see an advertisement advantage in doing so. It's all about the money.

eds1275:
I'm a little late for this discussion, but I think I'll contribute anyway.  Earth hour is an hour long guilt trip. An hour isn't going to make much of a difference, but it'll give you time to think about how evil you are for living in a world where people pollute and you have no control over.

What I have done is take my house from an energy rating of 56 to 91. Insulation, new tighter fitting doors, better windows, energy star appliances, a new furnace with heat pump. I am a recycling fiend, though where I live you have to be - we get garbage day 2x a month, and recycling 2x a month... with food waste pick up every week [they recycle our food waste - including paper coffee cups, meat, bones, pizza boxes etc].

I think this recycling nonsense has totally overshadowed the other two r's - reducing and reusing. I reuse old computers to make video game machines :)

The things that should be done are reducing - and not so much on a consumer level. Mainly packaging. For example those plastics that aren't recyclable... why not make them illegal to use for packaging? I imagine there are more serious uses for them so I don't think they should be outlawed entirely but when they're used for packaging it's ridiculous. Everything is over packaged, manufacturers should cut that back. It would probably cut back on their shipping costs and save them $$$ in the long run anyway. Here's another example - my fiance bought a new cell phone the other day, and the box it came in was big enough for my cat to sit in. The phone was really really small.

Sure there are people who don't take this seriously, and although I do I can imagine and understand why some don't. We all have enough crap going on in our lives to worry about without having an hour guilted into us - and we [as consumers/materialistic people in a consumer world] would be doing more overall if we had less stuff to deal with physically - the overwhelming amount of packaging materials.

Vigo:
I hate all that packaging too, my basement is filled with boxes and packing materials from my purchases, but I have a buddy that is a packaging engineer and I know that packaging methods are very calculated, and making the packaging heavy is actually less wasteful because there is a much smaller chance of the product getting damaged or lost in shipment. The energy, chemicals, and cost that goes into building one cell phone is probably more than what goes into 100 packages.

Also, in reality, the amount of plastic used to make enough Styrofoam to ship a large TV could easily fit in the palm of your hand. Styrofoam is mostly air. Compare that to the amount of plastic in a TV set itself, and the companies are happy make packaging extra secure to ensure that less TVs get trashed. If you want a fun way to get rid of your styrofoam, try dumping styrofoam into a pot of acetone. it melts it right down, you end up with a plastic goo that will harden, and even put in a mold. I used this method to mold replicas of a finishing piece on my motorcycle that kept breaking off.

BadMouth:

RayB:

--- Quote from: eds1275 on April 19, 2011, 12:16:31 pm --- Here's another example - my fiance bought a new cell phone the other day, and the box it came in was big enough for my cat to sit in. The phone was really really small.
--- End quote ---

http://unrealitymag.com/index.php/2011/03/11/how-dell-ships-65-screws/

There are other egregious examples like that related to lots of other companies.

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