The Mobile Public Library Energy Conservation Initiative
Reduce, Recycle, Reuse!

The Library is committed to promoting an awareness of environmental and sustainability issues. The Library encourages economical and ecological responsibilty through strategies such as recycling, energy and product conservation and efficiency, and the purchase of environmentally friendly products. The library affirms that everyone must do their part to reduce and eliminate waste, recycle paper and other products and reuse supplies.


Some of the Green Team initiatives already underway include:

- Selling a reusable book bag for $1.00 as a low cost alternative to plastic bags
- Recycling Paper
- Installing programmable thermostats and lowering temperatures when buildings are unoccupied
- Installing window film at West Regional to lower energy costs
- Setting computers to go to sleep mode more quickly
- Lowering the temperatures on our hot water heaters so they meet but do not exceed the required temperatures for hand-washing
- Regularly maintaining our Heat and Air Conditioning systems in order to ensure maximum efficiency
- Promoting Reuse by hosting an annual book sale so old books can find a new home
- Encouraging patrons to sign up for Email delivery of the Newsletter
- Setting Reduce, Recycle, Reuse guidelines for staff especially in the areas of waste elimination, recycling, reusing supplies and purchasing environmentally friendly products


We are also looking forward and planning on some new things such as timers, motion detectors and light sensors for outdoor and parking lot lights and assessing the necessary balance between safety and energy conservation

DID YOU KNOW THAT ….?

- The average American uses 650 pounds of paper each year - 100 million tons of wood could be saved each year if all that paper was recycled.
- Americans use 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour.
- A typical family consumes 182 gallons of soda, 29 gallons of juice, 104 gallons of milk, and 26 gallons of bottled water a year. That's a lot of containers that can all be recycled!
- About 80% of what Americans throw away is recyclable, yet our recycling rate is only 28%.
- Every month Americans throw out enough glass bottles and jars to fill up a giant skyscraper!
- Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures a year! Ever heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? It's twice the size of Texas and is floating somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii. It's also 80 percent plastic, and weighs in at 3.5 million tons.
- Recycling one ton (about 2,000 pounds) of paper saves 17 trees, two barrels of oil (enough to run the average car for 1,260 miles), 4,100 kilowatts of energy (enough power for the average home for six months), 3.2 cubic yards of landfill space, and 60 pounds of pollution. The 17 trees saved by recycling one ton of paper can absorb a total of 250 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the air each year.
- If all of our newspapers were recycled, we could save about 250 million trees each year! If every American recycled just one-tenth of their newspapers, we could save about 25 million trees each year.
- More than 20 million Hershey's Kisses are wrapped each day, using 133 square miles of aluminum foil. Believe it not, ALL that foil is recyclable, but not many people realize it so most it goes in the trash! Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours. In spite of this, Americans throw away enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial fleet of airplanes every three months!


LINKS TO MORE GREEN INFO

Keep Mobile Beautiful Recycling - includes a map of paper drop-off locations all over the city
Reduce, Recycle, Reuse from the EPA
Recycling for Kids - Includes trivia, games, puzzles, a coloring book, composting instructions, and informaton about recycling aluminum, tin, glass, paper, and plastics.
How To Recycle Anything
Freecycle.org - The Freecycle Network is made up of many individual groups across the globe. It's a grassroots movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns.
My Green Electronics - zipcode lookup for recycling electronics
Bottled Water vs Tap Water - straight info on where bottled water comes from and its safety, the health and environmental impacts of plastic bottles and what you can do