Final reflection on zazengo.com class project. :)

1. As a part of the Zazengo CyberARTS team I worked as key contact person between Mr. Ford and myself, communicating daily all that the class accomplished, along with our next steps in the projects and problems/concerns we encountered. As contact person it was often quite difficult trying got keep both sides up to date and informed of the entire "goings on". Further, I also acted as Team Leader for the Recycling Project in the class. I worked with Aftab, Gal, Maxim and Kiril in creating an awareness campaign on recycling in the school and community. To accomplish this, we created a group itself on zazengo.com where we created awareness through posting videos, stories and starting discussions. As well, we advertised the recycling concept to the Northview community through posters that we put up, and slogans we created.

Throughout the course of this project I did a plethora of jobs including:

 - maintaining regular contact with Mr. Ford

 - keeping the class up to date with the goings on, and information I received from Mr. Ford

 - gave 2 presentations to teachers at Northview to advertise zazengo.com and get the rest of Northview involved

 - acted as host and helped to organized our "Inconvenient Truth" presentation

 - helped to create and follow through with the competition we posted onto zazengo.com for students to submit their work

 - worked with my team members for the recycling project

 

2. When we started this project in the beginning and actually checked out the site for ourselves, I remember being very confused and finding it hard to navigate around the site. I think if we were to start from scratch I would perhaps like to see a bit of a different layout for the site. Something a little bit more simplistic. For example, instead of having so many categories of groups: event, campaign, etc...I would just create one, as "Organization" and under organization would be all the pertaining information rather than jumping from group to group.

Example:

Organization:  CyberARTS

And under the Cyber ARTS page there would be links leading to all events run through Cyberarts ("Real Solutions for an Inconvenient Truth", "Re(Use-Duce-Cycle)", "Project Z") all campaigns etc... rather than having discussions and stories for each category.

I think a Facebook application for zazengo.com would be an excellent idea, and I think it should be a box like tool on profile pages, where there could be a mini profile of the person, with their picture, metrics, and organizations they're involved with, as well as their total number of volunteer hours. I think it would be interesting to see, and with the volunteer hours given, I think people that wouldn't normally go to a site like zazengo.com would be convinced otherwise.

3. A sample of my work is posted above, and my updated profile can be viewed at:

http://www.zazengo.com/users/Ramona

 

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Can boycotting cars really change the environment?

View this link: http://www.gurl.com/showoff/comix/pages/0,,605672_711072-3,00.html

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Fats facts on global warming.

View this link: http://www.gurl.com/findout/fastfacts/articles/0,,706553,00.html?nlcid=gu|11-08-2007|

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25 hot tips on doing your bit, and being green!

View this link: http://www.gurl.com/findout/guides/articles/0,,605406_712526-1,00.html?nlcid=gu|11-08-2007|

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Courtesy of Maxim! :)

PAPER *1 ton of 100% virgin (non-recycled) newsprint uses 12 trees *A "pallet" of copier paper (20-lb. sheet weight, or 20#) contains 40 cartons and weighs 1 ton.Therefore, *1 carton (10 reams) of 100% virgin copier paper uses .6 trees *1 tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333.3 sheets *1 ream (500 sheets) uses 6% of a tree (and those add up quickly!) *1 ton of coated, higher-end virgin magazine paper (used for magazines like National Geographic and many others) uses a little more than 15 trees (15.36) *1 ton of coated, lower-end virgin magazine paper (used for newsmagazines and most catalogs) uses nearly 8 trees (7.68) *At least 38.9% of the U.S. waste stream is paper. *Americans throw away 44 million newspapers everyday. That’s the same as dumping 500,000 trees into landfills each week. *If every household reused a paper grocery bag for one shopping trip, about 60,000 trees would be saved. *We save 17 trees for each ton of recycled newspaper. *Recycling a 36-newspaper stack saves the equivalent of about 14% of the average household electric bill. *Making one ton of recycled paper uses only about 60% of the energy needed to make a tone of virgin paper. *One person uses two pine trees worth of paper products every year. *Americans discard 4 million tons of office paper every year--enough to build a 12 foot-high wall of paper from New York to California. *American’s throw out about 85% of the office paper we use. *Americans use 50 million tons of paper annually--which means we consume more than 850 million trees. That means the average American uses about 580 pounds of paper each year. *Every ton of recycled office paper saves 380 gallons of oil. *Each year, 27 million acres of tropical rainforests are destroyed. That’s an area the size of Ohio, and translates to 74,000 acres per day...3,000 acres per hour...50 acres per minute. METAL *Every year we save enough energy recycling steel to supply L.A. with nearly a decade’s worth of electricity. *We save enough energy by recycling one aluminum can to run a TV set for three hours. *Recycling aluminum saves 95% of the energy used to make the material from scratch. That means you can make 20 cans out of recycled material with the same amount of energy it takes to make one can out of new material. Energy savings in 1993 alone were enough to light a city the size of Pittsburgh for six years. . *Americans throw away enough aluminum every month to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet. *Recycling steel and tin cans saves 74% of the energy used to produce them. * Americans use 100 million tin and steel cans every day. *Americans throw out enough iron and steel to supply all the nation’s automakers on a continuous basis. *A steel mill using recycled scrap reduces related water pollution, air pollution and mining wastes by about 70%. * When you toss out one aluminum can you waste as much energy as if you’d filled the same can half-full of gasoline and poured it into the ground. ALUMINUM CANS *More than 50% of a new aluminum can is made from recycled aluminum. *The 36 billion aluminum cans landfilled last year had a scrap value of more than $600 million. (Some day we'll be mining our landfills for the resources we've buried.) GLASS *Americans throw away enough glass bottles and jars every two weeks to fill the 1.350-foot towers of the former World Trade Center. *Most bottles and jars contain at least 25% recycled glass. *Glass never wears out -- it can be recycled forever. We save over a ton of resources for every ton of glass recycled -- 1,330 pounds of sand, 433 pounds of soda ash, 433 pounds of limestone, and 151 pounds of feldspar. *States with bottle deposit laws have 35-40% less litter by volume. *If all the glass bottles and jars collected through recycling in the U.S. in 94 were laid end to end, they'd reach the moon and half way back to earth. PLASTIC *Every year we make enough plastic film to shrink-wrap Texas. *Americans go through 2.5 million plastic bottles every year. *26 recycled PET bottles equals a polyester suit. 5 recycled PET bottles make enough fiberfill to stuff a ski jacket. *In 1988 we used 2 billion pounds of HDPE just to make bottles for household products. That’s about the weight of 90,000 Honda Civics. *If every American household recycled just one out of every ten HDPE bottles they used, we’d keep 200 million pounds of the plastic out of landfills every year. STYROFOAM/POLYSTYRENE (# 6) *It is un-recyclable- you can't make it into new Styrofoam. The industry wants you to assume it is- don't BUY it! *Each year American throw away 25,000,000,000 Styrofoam cups, enough every year to circle the earth 436 times. STEEL *The steel industry's annual recycling saves the equivalent energy to electrically power about 18 million households for a year. Every time a ton of steel is recycled, 2500 pounds of iron ore, 1000 pounds of coal and 40 pounds of limestone is preserved. *Every day Americans use enough steel and tin cans to make a steel pipe running from Los Angeles to New York... and back. If we only recycle one-tenth of the cans we now throw away, we'd save about 3.2 billion of them every year. *The average American throws out about 61 lbs. of tin cans every month. *About 70% of all metal used just once and is discarded. The remaining 30% is recycled. After 5 cycles, one-fourth of 1% of the metal remains in circulation. JUNK MAIL *If only 100,000 people stopped their junk, mail, we could save up to 150,000 trees annually. If a million people did this, we could save up to a million and a half trees. *The junk mail Americans receive in one day could produce enough energy to heat 250,000 homes. *The average American still spends 8 full months of his/her life opening junk mail. GENERAL GARBAGE *In 1865, an estimated 10,000 hogs roamed New York City, eating garbage. Now, one of every six U.S. trucks is a garbage truck. * In a lifetime, the average American will throw away 600 times his/her adult weight in garbage. If you add it up, this means that a 150-lb. adult will leave a legacy of 90,000 lbs of trash for his/her children. *The average baby generates a ton of garbage every year. *The landfill gas produced daily at Fresh Kills Landfill is enough fuel to heat 50,000 homes. TIRES/RUBBER *It takes half a barrel of crude oil to produce the rubber for just one truck tire. *Every two weeks, Americans wear almost 50 million pounds of rubber off their tires. That’s enough to make 3 1/4 million new tires from scratch. *Producting one pound of recycled rubber versus one pound of new rubber requires only 29% of the energy. FOOD AND PACKAGING *$1 out of every $11 Americans spend for food goes for packaging. *Americans dump the equivalent of more than 21 million shopping bags full of food into landfills every year. NEWSPAPERS *Every day America cuts down two million trees-but throws away about 42 million newspapers. That means the equivalent of about 500,000 trees is dumped into landfills every week. *If everyone who subscribes to the New York Times recycled, we’d keep over 6,000 tons of pollution out of the air. *It takes an entire forest--over 500,000 trees to supply Americans with their Sunday newspapers every week. LIGHTBULBS *Every year Americans buy over a billion incandescent lightbulbs. That’s three acres of bulbs every day. *A 60-watt incandescent bulb lasts about 750 hours; a fluorescent bulb with 1/3 the wattage will generate the same light and burn for 7,500 to 10,000 hours in five to ten years of normal use. *Substituting a compact fluorescent light for a traditional bulb will keep a half-ton of CO2 out of the atmosphere over the life of the bulb. OTHER *One gallon of used motor oil can contaminate 1 million gallons of water. * Most cars on U.S. roads carry only one person. We have so much extra room in our 140 million cars that everyone in Western Europe could ride with us. *If today is a typical day on planet earth, humans will add fifteen million tons of carbon to the atmosphere, destroy 115 square mils of tropical rainforest, create seventy-two square miles of desert, eliminate between forty to one hundred species, erode seventy-one million tons of topsoil, add twenty-seven hundred tons of CFCs to the stratosphere, and increase their population by 263,000. *Almost four million computer diskettes are thrown away every day, which equals over on and a half billion disks per year or a stack of disks as tall as the Sears Tower in Chicago every 21 seconds. It will take nearly 500 years for the disks to degrade. BE ECO-CONSCIOUS. REEE-CYCLE!

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An excerpt from: http://www.recycling101.ca/facts.html

Since 1950, Canadians have consumed as much as all the generations before us combined. In North America, we produce enough garbage each day, to fill 70,000 garbage trucks. Lined up bumper to bumper, over a year, they would stretch halfway to the moon. To create just one kilogram of consumer goods, manufacturers create five kilograms of waste. When our trash disappears off the curb it is buried in the ground where it can remain, unchanged for centuries. More than 20% of the garbage thrown out by the average BC household is packaging. Canadians take home more than 55 million plastic bags each week. If everyone on the earth lived like the average Canadian, we would need at least four planets to sustain our lifestyles and provide all the materials and energy we currently use. We create a lot of waste - over 1,000 kilograms per person each year. Did you know the majority of stuff we throw out isn't "waste" at all, it can be reused or recycled! What Exactly is Recycling? Recycling is a term that describes the process of converting "waste" into resources that can be made into new products. It sounds simple, but there are several critical steps involved: First, it is up to us to separate recyclable material from regular garbage. Then, Urban Impact will collect the materials, sort them, and send them for recycling; the materials go to companies all over the world - and several right here in BC! These companies use the recycled materials as feedstock to produce new products, conserving natural resources. The process isn't over yet! Then we need to buy items made from recycled materials to ensure that companies continue to use recycled material in their products. Buy Recycled! What Happens to the Stuff I Recycle? - Office Paper Did you know... The average office worker generates about 73kg of waste each year. 80% of that waste is recyclable paper products. Recycled office paper can become new office paper. -Cardboard Did you know... Cardboard boxes can contain up to 100% recycled fibres. On average, the recycled content of a cardboard box is about 59%. The cardboard box is one of the most widely recycled items, the national recovery rate is about 80%. -Newspaper Did you know... About 40, 000 trees are cut down each day just to produce the newsprint for Canada's daily papers. Recycling newspapers and magazines reduces the need for mining clay soils, which is used to make newsprint pulp. Old newsprint is made into new newsprint (so the Sunday comics you're reading now may be the Sports pages you read two months ago!). -Plastics Did you know... Plastics take about 400 years to break down in a landfill. PET plastic bottles collected for recycling in BC are usually made into carpeting and fibrefill for pillows, sleeping bags and ski jackets, but can also be made into t-shirts and fleeces, automotive parts, and floor tiles! Most plastic containers have a code on the bottom that tells you what type of plastic it is. -Glass Did you know... It takes one million years for a glass bottle to break down in a landfill. In BC, recycled container glass is used to create new bottles and jars, fiberglass, and is used as aggregate material in roads and sidewalks. If laid end to end, all the glass bottles collected in recycling programs in Canada would circle the equator four times. -Aluminum Did you know... Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a television for 3 hours. Aluminum takes 500 years to break down in a landfill. Aluminum is the most valuable recyclable material, when they have been re-melted, aluminum cans can be used in any product made from aluminum. -Steel (Tin) Cans Did you know... When recovered steel is used instead of iron ore to make new steel, water consumption is reduced by about 50%. It would take about 100 years for a steel can to break down through natural processes. Most of the steel cans collected in BC are recycled in the Pacific Northwest region. Want more info? Visit Urban Impact on the web at www.urbanimpact.com or call 604-273-0089 Or visit the Recycling Council of B.C. www.rcbc.ca or call 604-732-9352 (REC-YCLE)

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