Pollution Prevention Week: EPA Offers Tips to Living Greener

As part of this week’s Pollution Prevention (P2) Week activities, EPA is encouraging Americans to prevent or reduce pollution at the source.

The EPA offers the following tips for preventing pollution:

• Ride a bike, carpool, walk or take mass transportation to work or school.
• Buy school supplies wrapped with minimal packaging, or buy products that come in bulk sizes. Packaging accounts for more than 30 percent of all the waste generated each year.
• Use re-useable lunch containers bags rather than paper or plastic.
• Practice Safe Take-out - Say no to extra napkins, plastic-ware and condiments.
• Help start a recycling program at school or at work.
• Use only recycled paper and other recycled products.
• Maintain heaters, air conditioners, refrigerators and other energy using equipment, to reduce the amount of energy used.
• Switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs.
• When you purchase electronics and appliances look for the ENERGYSTAR label and buy the most energy efficient items possible to meet your needs.
• Purchase products in bulk with minimal packaging.
• Save water and protect the environment by choosing WaterSense labeled products in your home, yard and business and taking simple steps to save water each day.

Jim Jones wrote the following on the EPA blog:

As the old saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It’s easier to prevent something bad from happening than to fix it after it’s already happened. For me this means stopping pollution before it starts, which is the core concept behind pollution prevention (P2) or sustainability. Here’s a couple of real world examples of how costly it can be to clean up pollution after it’s already happened:

• Effective P2 practices could have avoided hundreds of millions of dollars of PCB cleanup costs. PCBs are a hazardous chemical that can cause cancer and were banned in 1979. Cleanup of Hudson River PCB contamination alone has cost more than $500 million.
• If we can take effective action to slow down the rate of climate change, we can save not billions but trillions of dollars over the coming decades.

From these examples I know that an ounce of prevention is worth millions of dollars in clean-up activities and countless environmental hazards. What many people may not know is that sustainable practices started out as P2. In 1990, the Pollution Prevention Act tasked EPA with establishing a grant program to teach state and local governments and businesses about the benefits of P2. Over time, businesses, colleges, and even sports teams have realized that with P2 they can achieve their corporate objectives and help save the environment, all while improving their bottom lines. From clean energy initiatives, like the Clean Power Plan, to programs that promote the user of safer chemicals, like Safer Choice, sustainability is now part of the fabric of institutions around the world.This week is P2 Week, and this year marks the 25th anniversary of the Pollution Prevention Act. During this week, and every week, I encourage you to find things you can do in your daily life to stop pollution before it starts. Whether it’s riding your bike instead of driving or reducing the amount of garbage you generate, you’ll be making choices that are better for you, your family and the environment. What’s an ounce of prevention worth to you?

Learn more about P2 Week and how you can prevent pollution.

Sources:

http://ehstoday.com/environment/epa-marks-pollution-prevention-week...
http://www2.epa.gov/p2week
http://blog.epa.gov/blog/2015/09/whats-an-ounce-of prevention worth...