Environment | YPGG - Why Green?

Earth Day 2019 Has Come and Gone, but Here’s some Green Living Tips to Help Celebrate Year-Round

April 24, 2019 / Chris Boyle / 0 Comments

NEW YORK - Monday, April 22 was Earth Day, a holiday that was created 49 years ago in order to remind the world how their actions affect the environment, and how we all should be collectively taking steps to reduce our carbon footprint upon the planet in order to ensure the health and well-being of future generations.

In this day and age of differing political and social opinions on just about everything, helping to save our environment is certainly a cause everyone can get behind, and to make that easier for the average man, woman, and child to do, we’ve compiled a list of the top things your can do to help protect our planet.

Recycle…and not just the easy stuff. “Micro-trash” needs attention as well

Sure, some household items are easy to recycle, including large plastic, aluminum, cardboard, and glass, and it helps that many local municipalities offer weekly recycling pickups. However, a lot of people tend to overlook smaller items such as plastic straws, paper wrapping, and plastic grocery store bags. Most people tend to throw this “micro-trash” out, and as a result they end up clogging landfills across the country. Your average person typically isn't going to make the extra effort to try to separate these things from their regular trash, so a healthy alternative would be using metal or biodegradable straws and reusable grocery store bags instead of their single-use equivalents. The switch may be easier than you think.

Using reusable utensils

Another item that people tend to overlook, and something commonly found in office and workplace kitchens, are plastic utensils and paper or styrofoam plates. These can also be considered “micro-trash,” as they are typically small items that people don't think to recycle; as a result, they also tend to end up in landfills. While it may take a tiny bit of extra work, bringing reusable utensils and plates to your workplace is an excellent way to help reduce your personal carbon footprint. If you want to go even further, you could actually use utensils made from eco-friendly materials such as bamboo or recycled aluminum.

Commuting to work at new and different ways

If your ask your average worker what the dreariest part of their day usually is, most will probably tell you that it’s the commute to and from work. But there are ways to change things up that are not only more fun and interesting, but could actually help the environment as well! For example, if you live local to your work place, you could always ride your bike; this will not only save you money on gas and help the environment, but also you'll be getting some much-needed exercise in as well. In addition, hybrid and electric cars are more affordable now, so utilizing one instead of an old fashioned gas-guzzler is another viable option. And lastly, the old standby...carpooling! If you have several co-workers who are all looking for some variety in their commute, get together with them and make a point of traveling to work together, with a different co-worker driving each day.

See some trash? Pick it up!

While in a perfect world everyone would clean up after themselves when they're out enjoying nature, unfortunately some people can't be bothered doing so. That said, if you're out and about and you notice some inconsiderate person has left their garbage in a park or wooded area, give some serious thought to maybe picking it up yourself. Carrying a bag with you for such purposes is a good idea, and if you really want to go crazy, you could even consider separating any recyclables you may find as well.

Invest in solar energy

Renewable energy sources such as solar and wind are the wave of the future, so why not get in on the ground floor and help save the environment sooner rather than later? If you've ever wondered if the price of installing solar panels on your home would be worth it, you only have to look as far as the EPA's greenhouse gas equivalency tool, currently available on their website. According to their calculations, the energy output of even one solar panel per year equals the equivalent of hundreds of pounds of coal. In addition, solar power also helps to save the substances that are typically used up in the creation of other forms of non-sustainable energy, including water and air.

Earth Day may have come and gone, but there's no reason why you can’t adopt the spirit of this important holiday each and every day of your life. Going Green shouldn’t be an annual occurrence...if everyone pitched in each and every day, even in small and insignificant ways, it would all add up to a bright and sustainable future.

Scientists Conducting Research into Fluorinated Pollutants Known As PFAs

April 23, 2019 / Chris Boyle / 0 Comments

NEW YORK - Scientists have been placing a growing emphasis on a series of commonly-found – but until recently misunderstood – chemicals typically utilized in the creation of consumer products such as water-resistant clothing, stain-resistant furniture, nonstick cookware, and more, focusing mainly on their intrusion into the environment and the subsequent potential health risks to human beings.

Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl are perfluorinated chemicals – or PFAs for short – were created in the mid-20th century and have found widespread use in creating non-stick items serving a variety of uses, including in plastic and rubber used to make food wrappers, umbrellas, tents, carpets and firefighting foam. PFAs are resistant to water, oil, and heat, and their omnipresence in today’s society has resulted in these chemicals making their way into the environment...including our drinking water.

Testing has revealed PFAs in rivers, lakes, and drinking water supplies, according to reports; subsequently, PFAs are now being actually being found in people, particularly in their bloodstreams. And the reason that this is occurring is due to the resiliency of these chemicals, as they often take an extremely long amount of time to break down in the environment...or the human body. As a result, a person could have PFAs in their blood for years, or even decades, experts say, and if these pollutants are saturated in a person’s local environment, they could have a continual source of contamination ensuring non-stop exposure.

However, is exposure to PFAs harmful, and if so, what are the risks? These are questions that scientists are currently not able to provide answers to, as their research into PFAs is essentially in its earliest stages. In fact, a current legal safety limit of exposure to PFAs hasn’t even been established yet by any group that governs public environmental or health issues. Science needs to provide answers before PFAs can be properly regulated, experts say. Regardless, the Environmental Protection Agency has made note of the fact that it intends to eventually establish legal safety limit for certain PFAs in drinking water, although what types – there are currently over 5,000 and growing – and the amounts have not been revealed as of yet.

The amount of money going into public research of PFAs has been steadily increasing by groups such as the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and multiple state university systems. One issue that makes research into PFAs difficult, however, is the fact that current regulations that govern chemicals in the United States do not require that a chemical has to be proven to be hazardous before it can be sold; instead, the EPA must make a determination following testing that a given chemical poses a risk under specific circumstances in order for action to be taken, and normally this only happens after health concerns are expressed by the public.

Early testing of PFAs has established some of the potential risks the chemical can pose to the health and well-being of both environments and people; research has determined that a "probable link" exists between long-term exposure to a PFAs chemical called PFOA and kidney cancer and thyroid disease developed by people in West Virginia and Ohio who were allegedly exposed to the substance by chemical company DuPont; a class-action lawsuit is currently in the works.

A 2016 study found unsafe levels of PFAs in 194 out of 4,864 water supplies in 33 U.S. states. Covering two-thirds of drinking water supplies in the United States, the study found thirteen states accounted for 75% of the detections, and firefighting foam was singled out as a major contributor. In addition, a 2018 report to Congress indicated that "at least 126 drinking water systems on or near military bases" were contaminated with PFAS compounds.

Scientific studies of both humans and rodents have resulted in similar findings, lending credence to the worries that PFAs pose serious health risks. However, scientists working on research and testing into PFAs still say that they are approximately two years away from concrete answers. However, it certainly can’t be expected that the answers – when they eventually come – will be anything positive. But in the meantime, supporting programs that look at risks to the environment can help, as can reaching out to your local legislators and lawmakers to tighten chemical production oversight and regulation.

After all, if perfluorinated chemicals were supposed to be in the environment – and our bodies – wouldn’t Mother Nature have put them there already?

The Threat of Plastic on the Environment Evolves into “Microplastics”

April 18, 2019 / Chris Boyle / 0 Comments

NEW YORK - As if the danger that discarded, non-biodegradable plastics pose to the environment aren’t enough, a new breed is making its presence felt; a dangerous evolution known as “Microplastics.”

Microplastics are not a specific kind of plastic, but rather any type of plastic fragment that is less than five millimeters in length; they enter natural ecosystems from a variety of sources, including, but not limited to, cosmetics, clothing, and industrial processes.

Some Microplastics enter the environment directly as a result of various sources, such as microfibers from clothing, microbeads, and plastic pellets; however, they are also the result of the degradation of larger plastic products once they enter the environment through natural weathering processes. Such sources of secondary microplastics include water and soda bottles, fishing nets, and plastic bags, and much more.

Both types of microplastics are recognized to persist in the environment at high levels, particularly in aquatic and marine ecosystems. And as plastic typically degrades very, very slowly, often over the course of hundreds or even thousands of years, the chances of microplastics being inadvertently ingested or incorporated into the bodies and tissues of a variety of different animals and organisms – including human beings – are on the rise with each and every passing year.

According to a 2014 report, there are approximately 51 trillion pieces of microplastic in the Earth’s oceans, with an estimated weight of 236,000 metric tons. By 2019, that amount has almost certainly increased exponentially. In addition, microplastics on land are often small and light enough that they are able to easily able to migrate around the globe, carried by the wind; microplastics have even been discovered on remote mountaintops, according to a new study. Microplastics are being found in rivers, oceans, soils, and even tap water around the world.

As a result of the spread of microplastics throughout a variety of environments, experts theorize that numerous humans and animals are likely to have consumed the particles at points via food and water; however, currently it is not known if this has any potentially adverse effects upon the health upon living creatures or the ecosystems they inhabit, but scientists are currently conducting research into the issue. But if it turns out that the prevalence of microplastics is indeed a serious health problem, experts say it will be a major one, given how this is turning into a problem through sheer volume alone that will likely touch each and every living thing on the planet.

But the problem is that this is also an issue that is still in its infantsy; given the relatively recent introduction of plastic into our society compared to the age of humanity itself, scientists are still attempting to gauge the scope of microplastics, its possible health effects, and – most importantly – to come up with possible solutions.

Bioplastics – plant-based plastics, as opposed to fossil fuel-based – are a development that many are touting as an effective solution to plastic pollution, as their biodegradable nature is possible solution to the large amounts of microplastic waste in the Earth’s ecosystems. But recent studies have indicated that bioplastics come with their own built-in environmental and health issues that may prevent them from being the answer we’re seeking, and may ultimately be just as harmful to the planet as conventional plastics.

Some researchers have proposed incinerating plastics to use as energy, which is known as energy recovery. As opposed to losing the energy from plastics into the atmosphere in landfills, this process turns some of the plastics back into energy that can be used.

However, as opposed to recycling, this method does not diminish the amount of plastic material that is produced. Therefore, recycling plastics is considered a more efficient solution, especially by increasing education via recycling campaigns. While this would be a smaller scale solution, education has been shown to reduce littering, especially in urban environments where there are often large concentrations of plastic waste. If recycling efforts are increased, a cycle of plastic use and reuse would be created to decrease our waste output and production of new raw materials.
But in order to achieve this, states would need to employ stronger infrastructure and investment around recycling. Some advocate for improving recycling technology to be able to recycle smaller plastics to reduce the need for production of new plastics.

Is Climate Change Contributing to The Current Deep Freeze Gripping the US?

February 5, 2019 / Chris Boyle / 0 Comments

NEW YORK, NY - Last week, a significant portion of the population of the United States had to deal with sub-zero temperatures - the likes of which have not been seen in this country before, leading to renewed debates in regards to the effects that Climate Change are having upon the planet. It turns out that a gradual warming of the planet’s atmosphere over the long haul can actually make things colder in the here-and-now.

Areas in the Midwest last week reported temperatures as low as 50 and even 60 degrees below zero – colder than the North Pole – which is an astonishing low for a region of the country already known for harsh winter weather. Meanwhile, if we go south of the equator, Australia has been experiencing a heat wave of mammoth proportions, with average daily temperatures well into the 100’s. It’s gotten so bad in Australia, as a matter of fact, that hundreds of thousands of fish have literally choked to death in the water. And while we’re discussing the southern hemisphere, we would be remiss to mention that Antarctic’s largest glaciers have been reported to be showing signs of ruptures, an indication that the region is warming at a record pace.

Clearly, the climate – the statistics of weather over long periods of time – of this planet, as opposed to the weather – which is merely the current state of the atmosphere – is in a period of rapid flux never before seen in human history, and as 2019 begins, it appears that the new year is picking up right where 2018 left off, unfortunately, with Climate Change accelerating at a destructive rate. However, it’s easy to see why people might be confused as to how Climate Change can be responsible for both exceedingly hot and exceedingly cold weather patterns at the same time, but these extremes fit with research into how humanity’s carbon footprint upon our planet are having such an impact.

Simply put, carbon emissions as a result of human activity are cumulatively increasing up in the planet’s atmosphere; as a result of this build-up of carbon, the warming of the planet overall begins to increase, causing the polar ice caps to melt and disrupt the temperature gradient between the Earth’s North and South Poles and the equator. This has the effect of flattening out the temperature gradient, which according to theory causes the jet streams – wind patterns that drive the planet’s weather systems – to weaken.

The weakening of the jet streams results in heavier, high-pressure weather fronts to be more difficult to propel on their natural path, causing them to remain in regions longer than they ordinarily would, resulting in potential heat waves. Likewise, during winter in the Arctic, warmer air drawn from the south as a result of a looser polar vortex not only makes for higher temperatures in the region, but also allows frigid air to escape to neighboring parts of the planet that it wouldn’t ordinarily reach; this explains the freakishly cold spell that the American Midwest is currently enduring.

The global trend is that temperatures overall are on the rise, and according to reports, the last four years has been the warmest on record. If mankind wishes to avert the eventual environmental disaster that the planet is facing in the future, countries need to come to an understanding and work together in order to save the Earth. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are the highest they have ever been, according to reports; Earth is millions of years old, while mankind has only inhabited the planet for a mere 200,000 years, so the human race has no real experience with the new climate that is being created by its actions.

Recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – a climate science division of the United Nations – noted that North America and Australia are expected to bear the brunt of rising temperatures, which will result in unexpected, unprecedented, and at-times unpredictable changes to weather patterns as time goes by. More areas are reporting droughts, heat waves, rising sea levels, and acidifying oceans, and only by working together and making a uniform plan to reduce carbon emissions will curb the scourge of Climate Change.

Yellow Pages Goes Green® Announces Yearly Environmental Scholarships

November 6, 2018 / Chris Boyle / 0 Comments

Environmental telephone publisher announces $1,500 annual scholarships to graduating high school seniors whose career path is related to environmental science.

EAST NORTHPORT, NEW YORK, USA -- Yellow Pages Goes Green®, an environmentally friendly telephone directory is offering $1,500 College scholarships, one per year, to distinguished graduating high school seniors whose career path is slated to take them into any field related to environmental preservation and environmental sciences. The goal of this scholarship is to encourage youth to pursue careers which impact Earth.

Those applying for the scholarships must adhere to criteria listed on the official scholarship page at https://www.yellowpagesgoesgreen.org/scholarship.php

“The environment has sustained countless years of abuse at the hands of corporations and the only way to combat the damage is through supporting the next wave of environmental engineers, scientists, and preservationists, and that’s why we have instituted this scholarship contest which will offer yearly scholarships. We ask that those who have resources to spread our scholarship information to schools and financial aid departments help by doing just that” said Yellow Pages Goes Green® Founder and CEO Michael Keegan.

Yellow Pages Goes Green®
Yellow Pages Goes Green ® (Yellow Pages Directory Inc.) provides an environmentally friendly search engine and directory vigorously supporting the green movement, promotes awareness and helps consumers easily opt-out of printed yellow pages delivery while providing a simple, effective, online alternative to print. For more information please visit https://www.yellowpagesgoesgreen.org/

Tag: Environment (page 1 of 6)

Earth Day 2019 Has Come and Gone, but Here’s some Green Living Tips to Help Celebrate Year-Round

Scientists Conducting Research into Fluorinated Pollutants Known As PFAs

The Threat of Plastic on the Environment Evolves into “Microplastics”

Is Climate Change Contributing to The Current Deep Freeze Gripping the US?

Yellow Pages Goes Green® Announces Yearly Environmental Scholarships

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