The Tactics are nicely illustrated and user friendly; in fact, they are ideal for sticking on your fridge to remind you not to throw recyclable things in the rubbish and to fix that dripping tap! Although, I shouldn’t be suggesting this because the magazine asks you to download them and send them to a friend, and NOT to kill any more trees printing them out. Oops.

Download the Men’s Health Eco Tactics

If you use 60-Watt incandescent bulbs and burn them for 3 hours a day using electricity that costs an average of 35c/kWh, then each bulb will cost you R1.89 a month. If you use 11-Watt CFLs, each bulb will cost 35 cents a month in electricity. By changing to CFLs, over the course of a month you’ll save 49 Watts of electricity and R1.54 in costs. In a year the savings will total R18.48.

From April the price of electricity will increase by 14.2 percent, this means your annual savings per CFL could increase to about R21. Say you have an average of 10 lightbulbs switched on every night, your savings could amount to around R200 a year.

So, even though CFLs are more expensive than conventional light bulbs, chances are you’ll recoup the extra cost in less than a year. In addition, the life expectancy of a CFL is six times that of an incandescent bulb – 6,000 hours versus 1,000 hours.

Source: Eskom, “Saving electricity means saving money”

Source: ClimateCrisis.net

It’s called the Smart Living Handbook and it explains the hows and whys of things like recycling, energy efficiency, water use and the importance of conserving biodiversity. It’s very user-friendly and full of fascinating (and disturbing) facts, as well as practical advice on how to do things like make compost, conduct an energy audit in your home or estimate your household’s carbon emissions.

It’s focus is sustainable living in Cape Town, but the general information has broad appeal.

It would be brilliant if we could have one of these handbooks for Joburg.

To download a pdf version of the book, click here and look for the City of Cape Town Smart Living Handbook link.

The energy saving from recycling one bottle will power a 100 watt light bulb for almost an hour, a washing machine for 10 minutes, a TV for 20 minutes or a computer for 25 minutes.

The raw materials for glass – sand, soda and lime – all have to be dug from the earth. They are then melted together at 1,500ºC. This takes a lot of energy. Every ton of glass that is recycled saves 1.2 tons of raw materials and the equivalent of 136 litres of oil energy.

Only 140,000 tons, or 20 percent, of all glass containers produced annually in South Africa are retrieved for recycling. About 550,000 tons of waste glass still finds its way into our landfills.

Sources: The Glass Recycling Company and Britain’s Environment Agency

Source: Friends of the Earth