As stated in my previous article, I sold my Jeep last week and the guy who purchased it paid me in cash. Most of the bills were $20 bills. Although there were a few $50’s in the pile, it was still more than 3 inches thick. I brought the wad of cash to the bank this morning to deposit it and the bank teller had a stunned look of disbelief on his face at the site of the monotonous and impending task at hand. He concurred that it doesn’t happen often in our age of technology and plastic, but despite that it only took him about 3 minutes to count the money. This transcended my 15-minute marathon of counting and sorting the cash the previous week.
On a separate note of irony, I was in the bathroom at work today drying my hands with paper towels when I read a memo (directly above the paper towels) that said congratulations to the tenants of the building for saving 8,478 trees last year and diverting 1,924.87 megatons of waste. I threw my paper towel in the garbage, walked away and realized that the world still has a long way to go and wondered if it will get there before it’s too late.
Did you know that paper towel can be recycled?
Also, I recently learned that applicances/electronic things that are plugged into a wall and not on (e.g. a hairdryer, toaster etc.) still use energy? The stat is something like in one year, in the U.S., these items that are not turned on but are still plugged in use enough energy to power the U.S. for 3 to 4 years…
Crazy huh?
I know paper towels can be recycled, but in most situations that I’ve seen, they aren’t recycled. They are typically collected in a regular trash bin, and I’m positive that nobody is going through that trash to separate it.
I have heard that it’s a good idea to unplug an appliance when not using it, which kinda makes sense that a small amount of energy can pass through to the appliance when plugged in. But I’m not sure about that statistic though. It must mean that it uses enough energy to power the US for 3 or 4 years with no appliances plugged in. It would be impossible otherwise.