I received this today and I thought I would pass the information along.

Did you know more than 41.5 billion pieces of mail advertisements were produced and distributed in the U.S in 2005, and it took more than 100 million trees to create all this bulk mail?  That’s the equivalent of deforesting the entire Rocky Mountain National Park every four months, according to www.ecocycle.org.

It is critical that we do our part by stopping junk mail at work. Reducing junk mail eliminates the problem at hand. It also has an additional benefit of reducing our waste disposal expenses, which helps lower our operating costs. Also, of course, helps preserve the world’s natural resources.

Want to participant in “Junk Mail Elimination?” Go to http://www.ecocycle.org/junkmail/index.cfm to learn how you can take an active role.  You can also stop catalogs at home via http://www.catalogchoice.org/.

RECYCLEMANIA started this Sunday (Jan 17th). This is a national recycling competition among colleges and universities. According to Burton, our EcoRep organizer at the College of Charleston, over 500 schools have signed on so far.  He also notes “that there are lots of finer points to this competition but in essence, the more we recycle (and the less we throw in the trash) the better we do in the competition — it is weighted by school population.”

I ran across this on instructables.com this morning and I thought it was a project well within the spirit of Recyclemania.  The covers could be replaced with a number of items, including recycled cardboard and would make a nice palette for stenciling recycling messages on the covers.  If we used recycled paper for the inside of the notebook it would be even better. I wonder if we could use recycled spirals? The instructions were inspired by Ivy Lane Designs, “home of the ORIGINAL recycled/upcycled eco journals/notebooks, handmade from discarded boxes headed for the landfill. Helping the environment, one recycled notebook at a time.”

VHS Spiral Bound Notebook – More DIY How To Projects

Here is a link to the recyclemania site: http://www.recyclemania.org/

Chris Vinson, our Systems Librarian at Addlestone, has written a detailed tutorial on how to install and use Aardvark, an add-on for Firefox that lets you remove pieces of web pages before you print them out so you have a cleaner, earth-friendlier print job.

Feel free to pass it along!