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Tuesday, April 19, 2011

A Billion Acts of Green - Earth Day 2011

For over 40 years, April 22 has marked the celebration of Earth Day.

This year, Earth Day's theme is "A Billion Acts of Green" - A people powered campaign to generate a billion acts of environmental service and advocacy.

There are several ways for you to become involved this year:

In the early 1960's, most Americans were oblivious to the concept of "concern for the environment". One of the early watershed moments for the modern environmental movement came with the release of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring. Public awareness was raised after this New York Times bestseller sold over half a million copies. The 'official' Earth Day movement started, however, in 1969, after Gaylord Nelson (Earth Day founder and then US Senator from Wisconsin) witnessed the horrible repercussions of the massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California. Rallying together 85 people from across the country, they organized the first series of coast-to-coast demonstrations on April 22, 1970. On that day, an estimated 20 million people joined together to protest the degradation of the environment.

Much has changed in the past forty years; substances we once thought benign are now considered toxic and climate change has come to the forefront of all environmental concerns. There have also been advances in curtailing pollution such as increased rates of recycling and the trading of pollution credits to control acid rain. But we still have a long way to go.

Currently, the average person produces around 1,460 pounds of garbage each year. Additionally, the World Health Organization reported that developed nations generate, on average, over twenty-five pounds of medical waste per person each year. That is a lot of waste, considering the US has a population of over three million people!

Now on to the hard part: how do we reduce this huge amount of waste?

Reducing waste in general seems far easier than reducing medical waste. Hospitals dispose of miles of IV tubing and nasal cannulas, tons of contaminated sharps, and all kinds of toxic and radioactive material. With all of the public health concerns, is there any good way to reduce or recycle these materials without increasing exposure to infectious disease?

Sassy Scrubs would love to hear your ideas for reducing medical waste. Do you work in a medical setting and already practice ways to reduce waste, or have ideas on how waste can be reduced? Share your ideas, and maybe in another forty years we can boast reduced amounts of medical waste and a healthier environment.

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