The Internet is a wonderful place and a powerful tool for today’s society to teach children about the environment. There is no doubt that early influences can spark a lifetime of concern and participation throughout that person’s life. In today’s schools and youth organizations, there are programs dealing with recycling, environmental health, litter and other ecological programs. Younger children and arts classes make use of free materials that were formally considered waste. Schools, day care centers, kindergarten, preschool classes and other children related facilities often accept items that they can turn into craft projects for the kids.

For instance, old rolls of gift wrapping paper or wallpaper can be donated for children to use as drawing or craft paper. Boxes, paper bags, buttons, greeting cards, wrapping and ribbons, tiles and many other items can be used for art and craft supplies.To find out what they might be looking for, simply give the overseer, teacher or caregiver a call.

Egg cartons make for excellent craft supplies and can be turned into all kinds of things crafts for youth including creating a wide array of bugs that are native to your area and at the same time turning the afternoon into an educational lesson in ecology and the environment. Craft paper, or scrap paper from your office recycling bin can also be of use to youth groups as they can use the paper’s clean side for drawing. Speaking of paper, newspapers cannot consume the newsprint rolls on their machines right to the end of the roll – as such they always have partial rolls of newsprint. These long strips of paper are a fantastic resource. Magazines, even torn ones, can be used in crafts as well.

The best thing to do is call up your local school, daycare center, recreation center or youth groups to find out what they might be interested in receiving. Once you are armed with that information, it is easier to sort out and store your “donations” in boxes or bags until you can make the trip to drop them off.

Recently, there have been a lot of environmental buzzwords floating around. It can be difficult to find a clear definition. I’ll explain what the term “carbon neutral” means, and why it’s important.

You might think that carbon neutral simply means that something does not release any carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This is true to an extent, however it is too simple a definition. It is possible to release CO2 into the atmosphere and still be carbon neutral, so long it is balanced by a CO2 reduction elsewhere.

Biofuels are carbon neutral, even though burning them releases CO2. How can this be? Well, the carbon in the biofuel comes from photosynthesis, where CO2 is captured from the atmosphere by a plant and turned into glucose. The glucose can then be turned into more complicated molecules such as sugars, starches, oils and proteins. Sugars and starches can easily be converted into bioethanol, while oils can be converted into biodiesel. Carbon is removed from the atmosphere, stored in plants for a few months, then released when the biofuel is burned. For every gram of CO2 released by burning a biofuel, there was a gram removed from the atmosphere by photosynthesis just a few months ago. This perfect balance is why biofuels are carbon neutral.

Alternatively, the term carbon neutral can be used to describe energy that does not cause the release of any CO2 at all. For instance, solar cells, wind turbines and hydroelectric turbines generate electricity without releasing CO2. Nuclear power does not release CO2 during the generation process either.

There is a problem with this, however. Currently, virtually all forms of carbon neutral energy actually involve the burning of fossil fuels. The crops for biofuels are harvested using machinery that burns fossil diesel. This is because fossil fuels are a great deal cheaper than biofuels. Some ways of producing biofuels are controversial because so much fossil fuel has to be used in the production process. Some sources of bioethanol are in this grey area. Solar cells, wind and hydroelectric turbines are all produced and transported using fossil fuels to some extent. The technology exists to make these things truly carbon neutral, but it is hopelessly uneconomic at this time. Nuclear power involves the burning of fossil fuels in the mining and transport of uranium, the building of power stations, and the disposal of waste. When uranium becomes scarce, mining it will consume even more fossil fuels.

Sometimes companies plant trees to offset the CO2 released by burning fossil fuels. This is not truly carbon neutral. Fossil carbon is being released into the atmosphere, and locking it up in trees is a very short term measure. To be truly carbon neutral, the carbon would have to be locked up for millions of years. Trees only live for tens or hundreds of years, after which they decay or are burned, releasing the carbon back to the atmosphere. We have no way of knowing whether people in the future will be able to keep replanting trees to keep the carbon locked up.

Scientists are trying ways to lock up carbon on a long term basis. This is called sequestration, and most experiments involve pumping carbon compounds such as CO2 into old oil wells or coal mines. This would genuinely make fossil fuels carbon neutral, but it is questionable whether enough carbon could ever be stored to offset fossil fuel use.

In summary, moving to a genuinely carbon neutral society will take time. It may take government tax breaks to make biofuels and alternative energy economically viable. People can take steps towards being carbon neutral by using biofuels and alternative energy. Where it is impossible to avoid fossil fuels, people can focus on efficiency to reduce their fossil fuel use to a bare minimum, and switch to biofuels when they become available. This will move them closer to the ideal of having no net effect on the amount of carbon in the biosphere, in other words, to be carbon neutral.

There is little doubt that we as a society have become more conscious of the impact we make on the world around us and the need to protect it. This brings us to the subject of biodegradable products.

When you are shopping for products, you tend to see a lot of different claims on products. If you are environmentally conscious, you probably keep an eye out for environmentally friendly products. Once such claim that is commonly made on products is that they are biodegradable. Well, what does biodegradable mean?

Biodegradable material is that which can be naturally broken down into organic components. The process can work in two ways. With aerobic degrading, the materials are broken down by bacteria in an oxygen environment. As you might guess, anaerobic degradation is the second method and does not require an oxygen rich environment. To satisfy this component, the materials comprising the product usually need to be organic to begin with, but not always.

Society is a beautiful thing. When a society shows an interest in some subject, businesses hustle to provide products in that gap. If you doubt this, look no further than hybrid cars. When a swath of society started showing interest in cars that were more fuel efficient and less harmful for the environment, every car manufacturer started producing hybrid cars. In perhaps the ultimate irony, there are now hybrid SUVs! Well, society has shown the same interest in biodegradable products, and the business industry has reacted.

Plastic products are all around us. Classic plastic products, however, are hardly biodegradable. The hall of shame in this regard is the plastic used to hold six packs of beer and soft drinks together. It takes 450 years on average for this convenience packaging to break down. 450 years! This is hardly good news for the plastic industry, so it has come up with something new that it likes to claim is biodegradable.

Bioplastics are the new craze in the plastic industry. Bioplastic is produced from the components of organic materials such as soy oil and corn starch. The goal with bioplastics is to produce a plastic that is… Well, biodegradable. The technology is fairly new, so nobody is really sure how well it degrades. It is generally considered to be superior to traditional plastic, but that isn’t really saying much given the 450 year life span of plastic six pack holders. The real question is how long will it take for the bioplastics to degrade? While there are certainly a lot of claims, independent studies have not yet produced definitive results.

From a practical perspective, you need to be careful about buying products that claim to be biodegradable. Technically, everything will eventually break down. Much like many over inflated supplement claims, may supposed biodegradable products may not deliver what they infer.