Keeping our Earth clean is obviously very important, so what can you do to help keep the Earth clean? As an individual, you may not feel like you can do any damage or help in any significant way, but you can! Let's take a look at some statistics.

36 percent of the commercial workforce in America goes to work in an office each day. Of that 36 percent, each employee will produce 1.5 pounds of paper waste each day and each employee uses about 10,000 sheets of paper a year! Wow! That's just paper; what about the energy it takes to print that paper? Well, 21 percent of all energy used in the USA is consumed by offices, big and small.

So let's do the math for an office with 42 employees.

If you have 42 employees' times 1.5 pounds= 63 pounds of paper waste each day. So, 63 pounds/day times 22 days a month (Monday- Friday) = 1,386 pounds of paper waste per month, which comes out to 16,632 pounds of paper waste per year! That's 8.32 TONS of paper waste per year for just 42 employees.

Crazy right? As an individual you can take steps towards saving the amount of paper waste and energy your office uses by encouraging your employees to recycle, send emails instead of mailing hard copies, review rough drafts before printing and even encourage walking to talk to an employee about an assignment or project. All of these simple tasks will save your company money by reducing the amount of paper used and will help reduce air and water pollution. Our company practices these simple Earth saving tips and together we are able to make the Earth a little bit cleaner.

Tossing trash on the ground doesn't seem like a very harmful thing to do, just a dirty thing to do, but in reality tossing a piece of metal, a water bottle, a broken toy or even your coffee cup on the ground causes serious damage to the Earth's foundation.



Metals will rust from the water and dirt, causing harmful chemicals to sink into the ground, killing the grass and other life around the area. Broken toys water bottles and coffee cups do not decompose and release harmful chemicals into the ground over time.

Trash can also travel around the world in a matter of weeks by being blown into a stream and carried out to the ocean then being trapped in the ocean currents. This causes chemicals to release into the water harming ocean life. Ocean life can also be entangled in the trash hindering its ability to survive.

If a simple piece of trash can do all of this, imagine if everybody in a small town threw trash on the ground. There would be a catastrophe! A simple solution to saving the world is to throw your trash in a trash receptacle. This way your trash will be properly disposed of and you'll have saved the Earth once again!

One more way you can save the world as an individual is to help reduce the amount of smoke that is released into the air. Along with second hand smoke for people is second hand smoke for the Earth. Think it's ludicrous? Think again; When unnatural smoke is inhaled by people or absorbed by Earth, damage occurs. For people, second hand smoke damages lungs, hearts, brains and even kidneys. For the Earth, second hand smoke damages plants, animals, the o-zone and even the soil.

So how do you help? Quit smoking? You can, but if you don't want to you can help save the Earth and the people around you by putting your smokes in a smoke receptacle. These help put the cigarette out and contain the smoke, so people don't inhale the harsh chemicals and the Earth doesn't have to absorb them.

So you see, even though it's just you, you can save the world we live in and encourage others to help keep Earth clean too! If you'd like more information on how you can keep earth clean, or would like to purchase trash receptacles, recycling containers or smoking receptacles, please visit BYO Recreation. You can also give us a call at 1-800-853-5316 and one of our consultants will answer all of your questions.