Earth Day

I ran across some of these statistics online today while checking some of my favorite blogs. Here are a few that jumped out at me...

1. the air inside the typical home is on average 2-5 times more polluted than the air just outside - largely because of household cleaners and pesticides
2. app. 300 million people will be suffering from diabetes in 2020 (mostly type 2)
3. most people spend 90 percent of their time indoors
4. the average father spends the same amount of time shopping for groceries as for looking after his children, 24 minutes a day
5. the western population compromises only 20% of the worlds total population but consumes approx. 80% of the worlds resources
6. only 9 cents of each dollar spent at conventional food markets goes to the farmer
7. the total weight of fossil fuels and chemicals used to produce a 2-gram memory chip is 630 times the weight of the chip itself
8. by 2005, consumers worldwide will have stockpiled approx. 500 million cell phones that are likely to end up in landfills, where they could leach as many as 142 tons of lead
9. we lose about one plant species every day
10. only 0.6% of the approx. 5000 billion plastic bags, that factories around the world produced in 2002, were recycled

Some of these statistics were scary. Now, I'm no environmentalist. I use said plastic bags to carry my grocery buys in, but I find way to reuse them or recycle them. I used to bring a bottled water to the gym each day, but decided to start using one of the dozen Nalgene bottles I have instead. Then, my FIL emailed me an article/study about how bottles made with polycarbonate plastic (look at the bottom of you bottle - if they have a triangle with the number 7 inside of it this is polycarbonate) such as Nalgene bottles, are linked to causing chromosomal aberrations. Great! Scratch that idea. We use those "green" light bulbs, but we drive a Land Rover. Yikes. One step forward, one step back.