From The CUB Voice newsletter of the Citizens Utility Board

You might want to ignore the fact that winter is fast approaching, but now is the perfect time to prepare your home for the chilly months ahead.

Here’s a Checklist:

• Set your water heater to 120 degrees (warm setting). Cover it with an insulated blanket you can purchase at a hardware store.
• Get your furnace inspected. Have a certified heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) contractor inspect your furnace. If your furnace is 15 years or older, you may want to consider upgrading to a newer system.
• Replace filters. A clean filter helps your HVAC system operate at its best and last longer. You may have to change your filter every month, but at least do so every three months. If you have pets or allergies you may need to clean and replace your filters more often.
• Keep warm air in, winter cold out. Weather-strip doors, caulk windows and install storm windows if you have them. A door guard or sweep can help fill the gap at the bottom of your front and back doors. You can find most of these items at local hardware stores.
• Clean gutters. If your gutters are filled with build-up like leaves, they can damage your home’s siding and roofing, causing cracks and letting cold air in.
• Reverse ceiling fans. In the winter, run the fan clockwise (from your position, looking up at it) to pull warm air down from the ceiling and keep it circulating in your house.
• Tree branch trimming. Cut down any extended branches that can get tangled with power lines, causing outages.
• Turn off outdoor faucets. Flushing outside faucets before winter is a great way to remove any excess water that could freeze up later and cause damage to your pipes.
  This only takes a few steps and you can find instructions on CUB’s blog. (Shut off the inside valve that leads to the outdoor faucet and turn on the outdoor faucet until the water stops.) Consider buying an insulated cover for each outdoor faucet.
• Bonus tip: If you have WiFi, a smart thermostat can help control your home’s temperature and cut heating and cooling costs by up to 20 percent.

I have always known that plastic was a polluting problem that needs to be dealt with. I just didn’t know how bad the problem was until recently. Plastic can be a useful, convenient, substance, but it pollutes much of the earth and the oceans to a degree I didn’t realize before. Here are some horrible plastic statistics.Americans use 2 ½ million plastic bottles every HOUR. Only about 1/4th of all these bottles are recycled. Making all of these water bottles required the energy equivalent of 50 million barrels of oil. Think of all the pollution, in the form of Green House Gas, Sulfur, particulate matter, mercury and others, that is put into the atmosphere from the generation of all that energy. When thrown away as garbage and put into a landfill that plastic does not degrade for thousands of years if it is not exposed to the sun. If it is in sunlight it doesn’t decompose, it just breaks into very small pieces. The same thing is true if the plastic is dumped into a lake or an ocean. Small pieces of plastic are a problem because animals wrongly see them as food, and eat them. The PCBs and other pollutants become a part of the animal. This is an even greater problem in the oceans. There are huge whirlpool like areas in the Pacific Ocean, twice the size of Texas, that are floating trash heaps. A large portion of this plastic trash is made up of the ¾ of a trillion plastic bags used worldwide. It is estimated that only 1 in 200 of these plastic bags are recycled. Plastic bags and other plastics are eaten by birds that think it’s food. So the bird can starve to death while having a full stomach, of plastic. The plastic particles from plastic bags, bottles, toys and other things are mistaken by fish as food, and eaten. When we eat those fish we are eating the plastic that they have eaten. The plastic even gets into tiny filter feeding marine creatures. Small fish eat these living things. Bigger fish eat the smaller fish, etc. Again we eat the fish and get the bio-toxins that is passed up through the food chain. Another plastic that is hidden from us are the micro-beads put into soaps to exfoliate our skin and into toothpaste to scrub our teeth. These tiny particles of plastic are so small that when they are washed down the drain to water treatment plants they are too small to be filtered out. So they end up in lakes, rivers and oceans and are consumed by tiny marine organisms. So eventually they pass up the food chain to humans.

These horrible facts about plastics reinforce the great importance of recycling plastics, as well as other things. Take your own reusable bags to the store so you don’t need plastic bags. Don’t drink water from one use water bottles, bring your own drink or a container for the drink you need. Encourage your coffee shops to start using corn based cups or paper cups which can then be turned into compost. Finally, reduce the amount of plastic you buy and recycle what you buy.