From Guest Blogger Hannah Whittenly: Four Ways That You Can Support Green Living in Your Community
Living green is a lifestyle that can be done in one household or a whole country, like Costa Rica. This country has gone more than 150 days and counting relying purely on renewable energy for their electricity. You may not be able to change the country’s heart just yet, but you might be able to move your community toward more sustainable living with the following tips.
1. Get Local
One thing you can do is introduce the idea of buying local because traveling costs money, energy, and fuel at times. You want to spread the word around your community regarding local farmers or local gardens. If you do not find a local garden in your community, consider starting one. This should help you get to know your neighbors and keep resources in the neighborhood.
2. Community Car Pool
Traveling can get a little expensive and force you or those in your community to drive their cars more than they need to. The CO2 emissions can cause harm to the planet. Perhaps, you should try to initiate a carpooling club. People can purchase some community vans to help transport kids to school instead of everyone driving their kids to school. You can try to do your grocery shopping in this manner, too.
3. The Right Trash Service
Finding the right trash service is very important. The right service will help provide your community with containers that will help separate recyclables, trash, and compostables to make it easier to recycle in your community. You want to make sure that the trash service, like Cheaper Bin Hire, diverts the majority of their rubbish away from landfills.
4. Free Trade
There are a number of sites online that are helping people connect with others who want to give away their unwanted possessions. This is something that you can start in your own community. Sure, you can sell stuff at a garage sale, but you may have a few items left over, and you should not throw these items away. The best thing to do is to encourage a free trade agreement so that all items are re-used as often as possible. This will prevent wastefulness.
There is always more to do, and the ideas are bound to overflow as your green-conscious community continues to grow. Be open to suggestions, because going green is a community effort—you are just there to provide the spark!
According to the following link, Costa Rica gets 80% of its power from hydro systems:
http://www.sciencealert.com/costa-rica-has-been-running-on-100-renewable-energy-for-2-months-straight
Here is a quotation from the above article:
“Since then, the country has been powered on a mix of hydro, geothermal, wind, and solar energy, with hydro power providing about 80.27 percent of the total electricity in the month of August.
“Geothermal plants contributed roughly 12.62 percent of electricity generation in August, while wind turbines provided 7.1 percent, and solar 0.01 percent.”
For a long time it has been known that a country fortunate enough to have sufficient hydro power can get most or all of its power from renewable sources. For countries without that much hydro power, it is a very different matter.
If hydro is not easily available the other sources are – geothermal, wind, solar,biomass, biogas etc.even if such a high percent is not presently attainable then let’s go for 50%! as far as community efforts why not contact a solar roof company and invite a sales person to the neighborhood!(for example) Craig you’re doing a great job. Thank you
Of course, but there is an exceedingly important difference: Hydro can provide continuous and reliable power whereas wind and solar cannot. Eventually we must practically totally phase out fossil fuels and with present technology, that cannot be done with intermittent sources of power alone. However, if a country has almost adequate hydro power available, then wind and solar may be able to reduce the water usage of the hydro system by enough to phase out fossil fuels completely.
Solar sales personnel, at least in my experience, do not do a good job. Most have never even heard of internal rate of return. Before making ANY investment, whether it is in the stock market, rental housing, or whatever, one should have a reasonable idea of what the rate of return will be. Without knowing that, one cannot know where to invest one’s money, such as by paying of a mortgage faster, buying bonds, or whatever. And, I would want to know what the internal rate of return is without subsidies.