Interesting Environmental Facts

I ran across some interesting environmental snippets and thought I would pass them along. I hope you enjoy them.

While we are busy working above ground to reduce, reuse and recycle; we seem to have been missing the boat below ground. Each year, the United States of America buries enough embalmed corpses to deposit 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid – formaldehyde, methanol and ethanol- into the soil. Imagine what this is doing to our ground water!!! If you think cremation is any friendlier to the environment look at what cremations pump into the air - dioxins, hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide. Can anyone say “acid rain?”

The honey bee deserves more respect than it gets. Not only does the honey bee produce honey; but, honey is the ONLY natural food that does not spoil. Pretty good for something so small and unassuming.

A Swedish company, Promessa, has come up with they claim is an “ecological burial”. They will freeze-dry your body in liquid nitrogen, pulverize it with high-frequency vibrations, and seal the resulting powder in a cornstarch coffin. They claim this totally environmentally-friendly coffin will decompose in 6-12 months.

Groundwater is our greatest source of freshwater on the planet. It comprises a 30 times greater volume than all freshwater lakes, and more than 3,000 times what's in the world’s streams and rivers at any given time. Groundwater is housed in natural underground aquifers, in which the water typically runs around and through the stone and other material.

This just boggles my mind. The solid inner core of planet Earth -- a mass of iron comparable to the size of the Moon -- spins faster than the outer portion of the iron core, which is liquid. A study in 1996 showed that over the previous century, the extra speed caused the inner core to gain a quarter-turn on the planet as a whole. So the inner core makes a complete revolution with respect to the rest of Earth once about every 400 years. Immense pressure keeps it solid.

Nature is absolutely amazing. Reindeer eat moss because it contains a chemical that stops their body from freezing. Who would have thought?

By recycling just one aluminum can, you can save enough energy to operate a TV set for 3 hours and is the equivalent to half a can of gasoline. It really pays to recycle.

Enough glass was thrown away in the United States in 1990 to fill the Twin Towers (1,350 feet high [if they were still standing]) of New York’s World Trade Center every two weeks. That’s a lot of glass!

By recycling all of your newspapers for one year, you and you alone can save four trees, 2200 gallons of water and fifteen pounds of air pollutants. Makes you wonder what would happen if we could attain 100% participation.

A single porcupine is known to kill 100 trees in one winter. It uses its sharp claws to climb a tree, sits on a limb to gnaw away at the bark and twigs and then stuffs them all into its mouth at once. Due to its liking for bark, the porcupine causes much damage to forests.

Nature never ceases to amaze me with her great ingenuity. The tip of an elephant's trunk is so sensitive and flexible that it can pick up a pin.

I knew that as a nation Canadians were gluttons; but, I didn’t expect this. By the age of only six months, each Canadian has consumed as many resources as the average person in the developing world consumes in his or her lifetime.