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The POST Green Initiative is POST's internal effort to:
Reduce consumption of renewable and nonrenewable resources
POST is committed to decreased energy use. We have implemented energy-saving policies at our headquarters, which include powering down all computer and office equipment during non-business hours.
Reduce environmental damage caused by travel
POST uses dedicated and Internet-based communication methods to reduce travel. We regularly use teleconferencing to connect commissioners, committe members, POST management, and staff throughout California. Presentations are regularly delivered using Internet meeting technologies. Annually, approximately 20,000 courses are completed via POST’s Learning Portal, eliminating travel for participants.
Decrease costs associated with information distribution
POST is reducing paper mailings, allowing recipients to opt-in to electronic delivery. POST now delivers nearly all field communication electronically:
- Administrative Progress Reports (APRs)
- Law Enforcement Employment Opportunities
- POST Bulletins Regulatory Actions
- What's New
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Streaming Audio: POST discusses the POST Green Initiative with EnviroBro on KDEE 97.7 FM
- POST has a system in place for recycling your used batteries. Alkaline batteries and other non-rechargeable batteries are considered hazardous waste and must be kept out of landfills to protect the environment.
- POST has recycle bins though out building to recycle beverage containers such as aluminum cans, glass bottles, plastic bottles and glass jars.
- POST is leasing a Prius for routine business travel to reduce the cost of emissions, save of gas, and in addition we do not pay for taxis; saving POST money.
- POST buys and recycles inkjet & toner cartridges, it cuts waste, decreases energy consumption, reuses resources and saves money.
- POST reuses the packing peanuts from incoming mail, and the container they came in, where they will be reused by the Business Services Office.
- POST has containers through out the building to recycle paper & cardboard.
- POST maximizes our use of online phone books, while decreasing the number of paper phone books.
- POST participates in the State Employee Transit Vouchers, State of California's Commute Program that offers you big discounts for using alternative transit such as light rail, catch a bus, ride the train, carpool, vanpool, bike, or walk to work. We help save money while helping reduce our impact on climate change.
- POST purchases Environmentally Preferable Products which are long lasting, high-quality, less toxic, reusable, and easy to recycle. Environmentally Preferable products use less materials, water and energy, minimizing the impact on California's natural environment.
- POST purchases from the Prison Industry Authority who produce over 1,400 goods and services including: office furniture, clothing, food products, shoes, printing services, signs, binders, eye wear, gloves, license plates, cell equipment, and much more specifically for federal, state, and local government agencies.
- You can use green cleaning products which are certified to contain lower or insignificant amounts of toxic or hazardous chemicals and reduce adverse impacts on our environment. These green cleaning practices will minimize the release of polluting chemicals into the environment.
- You can recycle paper products in your home such as newspapers, magazines, junk mail, brochures, telephone books, envelopes, file folders, cardboard, and paper.
- You can recycle beverage containers in your home such as aluminum cans, glass bottles, plastic bottles, and glass jars.
- You can use alternate transit such as the light rail, bus, train, carpool, vanpool, bike or walk. You'll save money, reduce your impact on climate change and feel more relaxed at the end of your commute.
- You can use LED or CFL light bulbs which only use 1/3 of electricity compared to traditional light bulbs. Replacing just a single incandescent light bulb with a LED or CFL light bulb will keep a half-ton of CO2 out of the atmosphere over the lifetime of the light bulb.
- You can use rechargeable batteries, these are considered a potentially valuable source of recyclable metal and are recycled by the battery manufacturing industry.
- You can purchase energy star appliances for your home.
- You can recycle yard waste! If you don't have curbside yard waste recycling, contact your local landfill and see if they have an yard waste or organics recycling program. Home composting is another option for composting your yard waste to harness those valuable organic nutrients and replace them into your soil for a healthy garden
- Flex Your Power offers Energy-saving tips for work and home.
- Take the Ecological Footprint Quiz to find out what kind of personal impact you're having on the environment.
- Recycling 101: Where and how to recycle just about everything at home.
- Universal Waste: How to properly dispose of batteries, electronic devices, fluorescent light fixtures, and other types of universal waste.
- Zero Waste California: Everything you've always wanted to know about how you can reduce, reuse and recycle.
- Best Practices in Waste Reduction Video (October 2009). Reducing waste can save you money, conserve energy and resources, and reduce air, soil, and water pollution.
- Food Waste: Food scraps can be turned into valuable soil amendments through the simple techniques of composting or feeding a worm box.
- Recycling Tools: Helpful tools listed on this page include lists of manufacturers of containers for home and office and of recycling processing equipment.
- Tire Recycling: Californians use a lot of tires, which can be recycled in California to produce crumb rubber for new products, recycled in rubberized asphalt concrete (RAC), used in civil engineering applications, or combusted as fuel.
- Used Oil Recycling: Oil doesn't wear out, it just gets dirty! Find out more...
- Recycling Coordinator Information and Resources. Materials and assistance to help you set up and operate a successful waste reduction program in your business, office, or locality.
- You can make a difference by recycling both on the job and at home.
- Recycling in the Sacramento-area has never been easier! Sacramento County's Green Team provides an all-inclusive listing of recycling solutions.
- Find your nearest recycling center.
- Find a location to e-cycle electronic waste!
According to The Green Book:
- 400 million ink cartridges end up in our nation's landfills annually, with a typical cartridge taking 1,000 years to decompose.
- One year's worth of discarded ink cartridges, placed end-to-end, would stretch from California to New York.
- Remanufacturing recycled cartridges uses 80 percent less energy than making new ones.
According to the EPA:
- Recycle 1 ton of paper and save 7,000 gallons of water, 3 cubic yards of landfill space, 2 barrels of oil, 4,100 kilowatt-hours of electricity and 17 full-grown trees. Overall, recycling paper instead of using new materials produces 74 percent less air pollution and uses 50 percent less water.
According to Conservatree:
- One ton of non-recycled, printing and office paper uses 24 trees.
- One tree makes approximately 8,333 pieces of non-recycled paper.
According to Pay it Green
In one year, by switching from paper to electronic billing, statements, and payments, the average American household would...
Save 6.6 pounds of paper
- Avoid producing 171 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions—the equivalent of:
- The emissions avoided by not driving 169 miles
- The emissions avoided by not consuming 8.8 gallons of gasoline
- Planting 2 tree seedlings and allowing them to grow for 10 years
- Preserving 24 square feet of forestland
- Avoid releasing 63 gallons of wastewater into the environment
- Avoid using 4.5 gallons of gasoline to mail paper items
If only 20% of American households switched from paper to electronic bills, statements and payments each year, the collective impact would...
- Save 150,939,615 pounds of paper
- Save 1,811,275 trees
- Avoid producing almost 2 million tons of greenhouse gases
- Avoid creating over a billion gallons of wastewater during paper production
- Avoid using over 100 million gallons of gas to mail payments
According to A Recycling Revolution:
Aluminum Recycling
- A used aluminum can is recycled and back on the grocery shelf as a new can, in as little as 60 days. That's closed loop recycling at its finest!
- Used aluminum beverage cans are the most recycled item in the U.S., but other types of aluminum, such as siding, gutters, car components, storm window frames, and lawn furniture can also be recycled.
- Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours -- or the equivalent of a half a gallon of gasoline.
- More aluminum goes into beverage cans than any other product.
- Because so many of them are recycled, aluminum cans account for less than 1% of the total U.S. waste stream, according to EPA estimates.
- An aluminum can that is thrown away will still be a can 500 years from now!
- There is no limit to the amount of times an aluminum can be recycled.
- We use over 80,000,000,000 aluminum soda cans every year.
- At one time, aluminum was more valuable than gold!
- A 60-watt light bulb can be run for over a day on the amount of energy saved by recycling 1 pound of steel. In one year in the United States, the recycling of steel saves enough energy to heat and light 18,000,000 homes!
Paper Recycling
- To produce each week's Sunday newspapers, 500,000 trees must be cut down.
- Recycling a single run of the Sunday New York Times would save 75,000 trees.
- If all our newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year!
- If every American recycled just one-tenth of their newspapers, we would save about 25,000,000 trees a year.
- If you had a 15-year-old tree and made it into paper grocery bags, you'd get about 700 of them. A busy supermarket could use all of them in under an hour! This means in one year, one supermarket can go through over 6 million paper bags! Imagine how many supermarkets there are just in the United States!!!
- The average American uses seven trees a year in paper, wood, and other products made from trees. This amounts to about 2,000,000,000 trees per year!
- The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years.
- Approximately 1 billion trees worth of paper are thrown away every year in the U.S.
- Americans use 85,000,000 tons of paper a year; about 680 pounds per person.
- The average household throws away 13,000 separate pieces of paper each year. Most is packaging and junk mail.
- In 1993, U.S. paper recovery saved more than 90,000,000 cubic yards of landfill space.
- Each ton (2000 pounds) of recycled paper can save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, three cubic yards of landfill space, 4000 kilowatts of energy, and 7000 gallons of water. This represents a 64% energy savings, a 58% water savings, and 60 pounds less of air pollution!
- The 17 trees saved (above) can absorb a total of 250 pounds of carbon dioxide from the air each year. Burning that same ton of paper would create 1500 pounds of carbon dioxide.
- The construction costs of a paper mill designed to use waste paper is 50 to 80% less than the cost of a mill using new pulp.
Plastic Recycling
- Americans use 2,500,000 plastic bottles every hour! Most of them are thrown away!
- Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year!
- Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as burning it in an incinerator.
- Americans throw away 25,000,000,000 Styrofoam coffee cups every year.
- Recycle Bottles
- Glass Recycling Facts
- Every month, we throw out enough glass bottles and jars to fill up a giant skyscraper. All of these jars are recyclable!
- The energy saved from recycling one glass bottle can run a 100-watt light bulb for four hours or a compact fluorescent bulb for 20 hours. It also causes 20% less air pollution and 50% less water pollution than when a new bottle is made from raw materials.
- A modern glass bottle would take 4000 years or more to decompose -- and even longer if it's in the landfill.
- Mining and transporting raw materials for glass produces about 385 pounds of waste for every ton of glass that is made. If recycled glass is substituted for half of the raw materials, the waste is cut by more than 80%.
Solid Waste and Landfills
- About one-third of an average dump is made up of packaging material!
- Every year, each American throws out about 1,200 pounds of organic garbage that can be composted.
- The U.S. is the #1 trash-producing country in the world at 1,609 pounds per person per year. This means that 5% of the world's people generate 40% of the world's waste.
- The highest point in Hamilton County, Ohio (near Cincinnati) is "Mount Rumpke." It is actually a mountain of trash at the Rumpke sanitary landfill towering 1045 ft. above sea level.
- The US population discards each year 16,000,000,000 diapers, 1,600,000,000 pens, 2,000,000,000 razor blades, 220,000,000 car tires, and enough aluminum to rebuild the US commercial air fleet four times over.
- Out of every $10 spent buying things, $1 (10%) goes for packaging that is thrown away. Packaging represents about 65% of household trash.
- On average, it costs $30 per ton to recycle trash, $50 to send it to the landfill, and $65 to $75 to incinerate it.
Miscellaneous Recycling
- An estimated 80,000,000 Hershey's Kisses are wrapped each day, using enough aluminum foil to cover over 50 acres of space -- that's almost 40 football fields. All that foil is recyclable, but not many people realize it.
- Rainforests are being cut down at the rate of 100 acres per minute!
- A single quart of motor oil, if disposed of improperly, can contaminate up to 2,000,000 gallons of fresh water.
- Motor oil never wears out, it just gets dirty. Oil can be recycled, re-refined and used again, reducing our reliance on imported oil.
- On average, each one of us produces 4.4 pounds of solid waste each day. This adds up to almost a ton of trash per person, per year.
- A typical family consumes 182 gallons of soda, 29 gallons of juice, 104 gallons of milk, and 26 gallons of bottled water a year. That's a lot of containers -- make sure they're recycled!
Additional Resources