Set sprinklers to water the lawn or garden only - not the street or sidewalk.
Use the microwave to cook small meals. (It uses less power than an oven.)
Purchase "Green Power" for your home's electricity. (Contact your power supplier to see where and if it is available.)
Scrape, rather than rinse, dishes before loading into the dishwasher; wash only full loads.
Cut back on air conditioning and heating use if you can.
Turn off appliances and lights when you leave the room.
We all do it – toss the trash.
On average, we each create about six pounds of solid waste every day. It really adds up, but where does all that garbage go after the SPSA trucks take it from the curb? A little less than half passes under the supervision of Danny Armstrong, the Operations Manager at SPSA's RDF plant in Portsmouth. It’s the first step in a process that turns waste into energy.
"We try to take your trash off the street and chew it up to a four-by-four particle size before we send it to the power plant," Armstrong says.
From there, it’s converted to steam and electricity at the power plant across on the Navy lot for use at Norfolk Naval Shipyard at the RDF plant.
For every truckload that arrives there, another goes to the landfill. The regional landfills receive 2,000 to 3,000 tons of trash daily.
Besides trash, yard waste, like downed trees, branches and bushes, end up in landfills, too.
SPSA is trying to change that. It created a yard waste facility to convert “green” items into mulch. The mulch is then sold to offset the costs of the program.
'Tis the season to keep the facility in mind.
"We get about 5,000 Christmas trees during the holiday season. Starting after Christmas Day, people can bring their Christmas tree to our yard waste facility. And the reason we want people to do that is because it takes up valuable space in our landfill," explains Brenna Gintyrapp with SPSA.
Not every tree collection site takes the trees to be converted to mulch. If you want to make sure yours is recycled, SPSA says it needs to be taken to the Va. Beach facility.
SPSA gives the pine mulch from Christmas trees away, free of charge, in the spring.
