Live Earth

I am sure you would have caught your fav artist at/on the Live Earth concerts on 07/07/07. If u have 3 minutes, go and take this survey which will tell you what’s your live impact. With a carbon output of 9.9 tons per year I must def be amongst the above average of us who continue to harm the earth in more ways than one. And I am not alone.. each one of us is responsible. Here are a whole lot of things we can do to help our environments and ourselves.

OK the serious part done, let's get down to Shek's Tag:-

What am I doing to make the earth a greener place?

1) Transport
I use public transport. Car in Europe??? Hahahahah... Dude, am still employed in an Indian company. I also own a bike, which I ride on non rainy, non snowing days. Well not all the 35 days.

2) Paper
I don’t use printouts until it is absolutely necessary to carry some in a meeting. And also I have this habit of having all the data in one sheet of paper. So I print with Font Size = 2 or something. And just so I utilize each n every part of it and nothing is wasted, I draw doodles on the remaining blank surface of the paper in the meeting.

3) Washing
I wash my clothes together at the end of the week. No whites-and-non-whites-separate for me you racial bastards. Also I make sure I stuff all my clothes to be washed in one go. I use cold water to wash as hot water makes more creases in the clothes which take more time to iron out. My towel was last washed on ....errr March?, which is about the time when I also washed my bed sheet n pillow cover.

4) Electricity
Last time I had to buy bulbs I got the long lasting compact fluorescent light bulbs. 2 of them. It will take time before I switch to them completely. My PC/laptop goes on standby/sleep with 10 minutes of inactivity. I have consciously tuned the settings this way.

5) Shopping bags
I carry shopping bags for my weekend grocery shopping and use them repeatedly until they threaten to burst and spill all the stuff on the road.

6) Recycle
I don’t use recycled paper but I do recycle plastic/glass bottles and cans. In fact we get 1/1.5/3 Kroners back for every bottle/can submitted. Nothing like buying beer from the money u just made from empty beer cans.

Some other tips that will help u save the environment:-
* Wear jackets with deep pockets. This way whenever u buy something, u can carry it in those deep pockets. You will not need to buy the shopping bags.
* Eat pizza at the pizza shop, no matter how shady it is. Agreed that u like to have your pizza sprawled on your living room floor in a lungi scratching you hair, but if u eat it there u wont need the pizza box and help in generating less trash. You will also conserve water as you will have no dishes to clean.
* Wear jeans to work. Apart from the fact that they are better any day than formals, you can actually save a lot of water in washing before anyone notices that u r wearing the same pair for the last 2 weeks.
* If u happen to stay in colder regions where the sun is rather reluctant then do wear cardigans all the time at work. They allow you to wear a shirt with just the collars ironed. Save electricity in ironing.
* Shower sensibly. No, I am not asking you to do French showers, but who needs hour long showers and bath tubs filled with gallons of water. If you shower daily then you should be practiced enough to bathe in less than 10 minutes. You may indulge in such extravagances from time to time, but plz keep them to the minimum.

On a more serious note let me end this post with an old native American saying - "We do not inherit the Earth from our parents, we borrow it from our children".

Let's return it to them as a better place.