Trash, trash, trash. You see it pile up day after day in your garbage cans at home, at work, at the quick service restaurant where you grab lunch once in a while. It seems like your wastebasket is always overflowing. Does all that really have to go into a landfill?

That "trash" could be full of things you can easily recycle instead! As a matter of fact, if your garbage is collected at the curb, chances are that the same collection service will also pick up your recyclables. It could be as easy as having 2 "garbage" cans, one for trash and one for recyclables.

Recyclable materials include aluminum and steel cans, glass bottles and jars, plastic bottles and containers, newspapers, office (copy) paper, magazines and catalogs, phone books, and cardboard. It only takes a few extra seconds to rinse that can or jar before you toss it into your recyclables bin, and it makes a world - the only world we have - of difference.

Even old appliances can be recycled. Your garbage collection service may offer this curbside as well for a minimal extra cost.

Recycling Benefits You

Recycling most items will not cost you any extra, in fact, it could save you money. If your garbage collection service charges extra for extra bags of trash, you may find that separating your recyclables will eliminate that problem. You may find that you need that plastic jug for some purpose after you have thrown it out - if you rinsed it and put it in your uncollected recyclables, it is clean and handy instead of covered in garbage. And best of all, you will gain personal satisfaction knowing that you and your family have reduced your negative impact on your community and on the environment.

Recycling Benefits Your Community and Country

When you choose to recycle, you conserve natural resources and energy, you help the environment, and you support the businesses that provide recycling services and the jobs they create. Just think:

One family can easily recycle a ton of paper and cardboard or more in a year - think of all those newspapers and magazines - saving 12 to 24 trees. If you recycle just 1 glass bottle, you have saved enough energy to power a light bulb for 4 hours.

Thanks to past and present recycling efforts, about 84,000 tons of trash are kept out of landfills each year. Greenhouse gases are reduced by the equivalent of taking millions of cars off the road. There is a reduction in air and water pollutants released into the environment.

The recycling business has created over one million jobs in the United States. It creates 4 jobs for every 1 job created by the waste disposal industry.

Recycling Benefits Your World

These benefits of recycling have a far larger impact than many people realize. By reducing the demand for natural resources, recycling efforts reduce the need for mining, an occupation with a reputation for being the world's deadliest. The motivation for wars fought over natural resources such as timber and minerals, which affect the lives of over 20 million people and raise billions of dollars for warlords and brutal dictatorships, can be reduced by recycling.

Check with your garbage collection service to learn what recyclable materials they accept, and make a world - the only world we have! - of difference.. Read more on this article...

Here’s a geoengineering approach you may not have heard of: Stuart Strand of the University of Washington proposes making bales of crop residue (stalks and other agricultural waste) and sinking them into the deep ocean to sequester carbon. Strand says they could reduce the build up of atmospheric carbon dioxide by up to 15% per year. Here’s how:

Worldwide, farming is mankind's largest-scale activity. Thirty percent of the world's crop residue represents 600 megatons of carbon that, if sequestered in the deep ocean with 92 percent efficiency, would mean the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be reduced from 4,000 megatons of carbon to 3,400 megatons annually, Strand says. That's about a 15 percent decrease.

The proposed process would remove only above-ground residue. Strand bases his calculations on using 30 percent of crop residue because that's what agricultural scientists say could sustainably be removed, the rest being needed to maintain carbon in the soil. Crop residue would be baled with existing equipment and transported by trucks, barges or trains to ports, just as crops are. The bales would be barged to where the ocean is 1,500 meters, or nearly a mile, deep and then the bales would be weighted with rock and sunk.

"The ocean waters below 1,500 meters do not mix significantly with the upper waters," Strand says. "In the deep ocean it is cold, oxygen is limited and there are few marine organisms that can break down crop residue. That means what is put there will stay there for thousands of years." (Science Codex)

But, but, but.... In the original piece Strand addresses potential environmental consequences and how to mitigate them. So, check it out—Some of Earth’s climate troubles should face burial at sea—and come on back and weigh in.. Read more on this article...

WASHINGTON – The "War on Terror" is losing the war of words. The catchphrase burned into the American lexicon hours after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, is fading away, slowly if not deliberately being replaced by a new administration bent on repairing the U.S. image among Muslim nations.

Since taking office less than two weeks ago, President Barack Obama has talked broadly of the "enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism." Another time it was an "ongoing struggle."

He has pledged to "go after" extremists and "win this fight." There even was an oblique reference to a "twilight struggle" as the U.S. relentlessly pursues those who threaten the country.

But only once since his Jan. 20 inauguration has Obama publicly strung those three words together into the explosive phrase that coalesced the country during its most terrifying time and eventually came to define the Bush administration.

Speaking at the State Department on Jan. 22, Obama told his diplomatic corps, "We are confronted by extraordinary, complex and interconnected global challenges: war on terror, sectarian division and the spread of deadly technology. We did not ask for the burden that history has asked us to bear, but Americans will bear it. We must bear it."

During the past seven years, the "War Against Terror" or "War on Terror" came to represent everything the U.S. military was doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the broader effort against extremists elsewhere or those seen as aiding militants aimed at destroying the West.

Ultimately and perhaps inadvertently, however, the phrase "became associated in the minds of many people outside the Unites States and particularly in places where the countries are largely Islamic and Arab, as being anti-Islam and anti-Arab," said Anthony Cordesman, a national security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

Now, he said, there is a sense that the U.S. should be talking more about specific extremist groups — ones that are recognized as militants in the Arab world and that are viewed as threats not just to America or the West, but also within the countries they operate.

The thinking has evolved, he said, to focus on avoiding the kind of rhetoric "which could imply that this was a struggle against a religion or a culture."

Obama has made it clear in his first days in office that he is courting the Muslim community and making what is at least a symbolic shift away from the previous administration's often more combative tone.

He chose an Arab network for his first televised interview, declaring that "Americans are not your enemy." Before his first full week in office ended, he named former Sen. George J. Mitchell as his special envoy for the Middle East and sent him to the region for talks with leaders.

According to the White House, Obama is intent on repairing America's image in the eyes of the Islamic world and addressing issues such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, unrest in Pakistan and India, Arab-Israeli peace talks and tensions with Iran.

Using language is one way to help effect that change, said Wayne Fields, professor of English and American culture studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

"One of the contrasts between the two administrations is the care with which Obama uses language. He thinks about the subtle implications," said Fields, an expert on presidential rhetoric. The Bush administration "didn't set out deliberately to do things that were offensive but they liked to do things that showed how strong they were, and to use language almost in an aggressive sense."

Obama, he said, understands that language and conversation must be worked at and that it's "not just a series of sound bites."

White House officials say there has been no deliberate ban on the war-on-terror phrase. And it hasn't completely disappeared. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs has used the wording in briefings, and it's still in vogue among some in the Pentagon and State Department.

Asked about Obama's avoidance of the phrase, Gibbs said the president's language is "consistent with what he said in his inaugural address on the 20th. I'm not aware of any larger charges than that."

Juan Zarate, who served as the deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism during the Bush administration, said he has seen signs that the new White House is trying to subtly retool the words, if not the war.

"There's no question that they're looking very carefully at all issues related to how the war on terror is packaged, to include lexicon," said Zarate. "All of this is part of an attempt to see how they could at least frame a change in policy even if, at the end of the day, the actual war on terrorism doesn't change all that much."