Fats, Oils, and Greese!

We are entering the holiday season, hooray! With that comes tasty home-cooked meals prepared with lots of love (i.e. fats and oils from dairy and meat products). Fats, Oils, and Grease (FOG) may add great flavor to our holiday foods, but they are a problem for our sanitary sewer systems. When flushed down the sink, FOG's congeal and build up inside pipes, constricting flow of wastewater. This then leads to unwanted back-ups and overflows of untreated sewage.

Grease is a frequent cause of blocked pipes. Mixing hot water and soap may cause FOG's to "melt" in you sink, it quickly reforms into a solid blockage in pipes.

Prevent FOG Problems by:
x Don't pour oil or grease down the drain
x Don't run water over dishes, pots and pans to wast grease down the drain
x Don't was food scraps down the drain
* Do place cooled fats, oils, and grease into sealed container and discard in the garbage
* Do dry wipe grease from dishes before washing
* Do scrap food scraps from dishes into the garbage can. 

Grease-clogged pipe!

Other plumbing tips for the Holidays: 

• Avoid putting stringy, fibrous or starchy waste in the garbage disposal. They cannot be sufficiently broken down. 
• Make sure the disposal is running when you put food into it. Don't wait until it's full to turn it on. 
• It's a good idea to wait 15 minutes between showers so waste moving through your plumbing has an adequate amount of time to disperse. 
• Avoid toilet clogs by only flushing human waste and toilet paper . . . nothing else!
• Know your limits. Often, minor plumbing problems turn into plumbing catastrophes if not handled properly. 

Did you know:  One turkey can produce one pound of waste fats, oils, and grease! 

Celebrate World Water Day!

March 22nd is World Water Day!  World Water Day has been celebrated on March 22nd since 1993.  It was established by the UN Conference on Environment and Development.  World Water Day's purpose is to "focus attention on the importance of freshwater and advocate for the sustainable management of freshwater resources" (UN, 2013).  The theme of this year's World Water Day is cooperation, since 2013 has been designated as the International Year of Water Cooperation.

Here are a few water facts from the UN:

• 783 million people do not have access to clean water and almost 2.5 billion do not have access to adequate sanitation.
• 6 to 8 million people die annually from the consequences of disasters and water-related diseases.
• Water availability is expected to decrease in many regions. Yet future global agricultural water consumption alone is estimated to increase by ~19% by 2050, and will be even greater in the absence of any technological progress or policy intervention.

 

So what can you do? Don't pollute water and encourage others to keep water clean too.  You can also conserve water by checking your home plumbing for leaks, using a rain barrel, taking shorter showers, etc.  Check out a post we did here for more water conservation ideas.  If we all work together to conserve water now, we could have fewer water cooperation issues down the road.

-Written by Jillian Schubert Edwards

Hazardous Holiday Lights

As the holidays approach, many of us are pulling out last year’s lights to decorate.  Each year you find a few more lights on the strand that don’t work; eventually, the whole string of lights is out.  These little lights can cause you more harm than just the frustration you feel while trying to get them to work.  The Ecology Center, a non-profit organization based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, found that 79% of lights tested contained lead (HealthyStuff.org, 2010).  While your main concern about lead in holiday lights is probably your family’s health, please also consider the environment.  When bulbs break or the strand mysteriously stops working  and the lights are discarded in the trash, they end up in a landfill.  Lead can leach out of landfills and into our water.  Animals that rummage through landfills can also be harmed by ingesting or becoming entangled in the lights.

Please consider the environment by recycling holiday lights rather than discarding them in the trash.  Recyclers chop the lights into pieces and sort by material.  Each material component is then separately recycled. 

Local holiday light recycler:

WLSSD Materials Recovery Center

4587 Ridgeview Road

Duluth, MN 55803

Mail-in holiday light recyclers:

Environmental LED

The LED Warehouse

Attn: Christmas Light Recycling

109 E. Prairie Street

Vicksburg, MI 49097

HolidayLEDs.com

Attn: Recycling Program

3849 Guest Road

Jackson, MI 49203

Useful Links:

HealthyStuff.Org Report

http://www.healthystuff.org/get-stuff.php?report=New+Research+Finds+4+out+of+5+Sets+of+Christmas+and+Holiday+String+Lights+Contain+Lead

-Written by Jillian Schubert Edwards