First of all ridding it`s a good way to keep in shape and also protect the enviroment.
I’m very dissapointed because in my town this activity is not so frequently.

“A recent poll from Ipsos/Reuters shows the extent of workplace evolution as well as the fallout of globalization. Nearly 1 in 5 (17%) of the over 11,000 users from 24 countries polled online indicated that they work exclusively and/or consistently from home. Telecommuting is most popular in regions with emerging markets, such as Asia-Pacific (24%), the Middle East and Africa (27%), and Latin America (25%), while North America and Europe (both at 9%) lag significantly behind.

But the winner is India with 82% telecommuting at least once a week and 57% working remotely on a routine basis. Compare this to the U.S. where 26% are working remotely at least once a week with only 10% respondents doing so consistently.”

Why buy local? - Justified!

Slightly off beat but here is a fun way to make people deposit garbage where it is intended to be!

Think about the city you live in. Everyone uses a lot of electricity to power their lights and electronic devices. The WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) started a global event called Earth Hour. They designate an hour every year and ask households and businesses to turn off the non-essential lights and electronics for an hour. In 2011 all seven continents participated and electricity use was greatly reduced. What if there was a city that rarely ever used electricity if at all? It’s carbon footprint would be a lot less.

Think about the city that you currently live in. Think about your main uses of transportation. There may be a few people who think of a bicycle when they think of main uses of transporation. However, I know personally the only time I use a bicycle is for recreational purposes. I don’t ever ride my bike to school or use it to run errands. Unfortunatley, because of the size of the city I live in it would be very tiring to do so. I am all for low carbon transportation though! If I was a mayor of a medium sized city, I would love to help develop a town that is eco friendly and contribute new ideas. Riding your bike is not the only option to decrease your carbon footprint, though. I think everyone wants to live in a community that is very eco friendly. Living in an eco friendly ciommunity does not have to be something you can only imagine about… changes can be made to your town that will greatly reduce its carbon footprint! What if every single person recycled at least once a week? Obviously recycling is beneficial because you are re-using products, but did you know that it takes 95% less energy to recycle aluminum than it does to make it? Recycling not only saves energy, but it benefits the enviornment in which you live in. Lets say you live in a community that is close to the ocean. If everyone in your community recycled, there would be less waste floating around in the ocean. Not only would the ocean be more cleaner for humans to enjoy, but animals too would benefit. Lots of times, animals mistake trash for food or get caught between plastic. You could also plant a tree in your community… the possibilities are endless! If you are ready and willing to make a change in your community go for it! A big difference can be made by you.

For a sustainable city, some key features need to be more eco-friendly waste management and public transportation. Recycling and reusing is key. My neighborhood recycles, but there are many homes and even schools that don’t. Throughout my childhood I’ve been hearing the problems surrounding landfills and too much trash. From the day my family started recycling, our amount trash thrown away has pretty much been cut in half. According to http://recyclingfacts.org/, ‘disposal of waste to landfills has decreased from 89% in 1980 to 54% in 2007’. So, for a city to be greener, I believe recycling should be mandatory of all households. Along with mandatory recycling, bike lanes and safer bike travel would be necessary. Imagine how many cars off the street if everyone biked when they were going to that nearby store or market! Not having a car, I would definitely bike everywhere if it was safer, and there were more designated bike lanes. Not to mention the money saved from not paying for gas.

One contributor to personal carbon footprint that we all city dwellers leave is the use of plastic bags while shopping.

Says a post in Time for Change…
“The carbon footprint of plastic (LDPE or PET, poyethylene) is about 6 kg CO2 per kg of plastic. If you know the weight of your plastic bags, you can multiply it with the number of plastic bag you are using per year. Then you can easily calculate the carbon dioxide emitted by your own usage of plastic bags. See below for some background information.

The production of 1 kg of polyethylene (PET or LDPE), requires the equivalent of 2 kg of oil for energy and raw material (see here). Polyethylene PE ist the most commonly used plastic for plastic bags.
Burning 1 kg of oil creates about 3 kg of carbon dioxide (see e.g. our offline carbon footprint calculator). In other words: Per kg of plastic, about 6 kg carbon dioxide is created during production and incineration.
A plastic bag has a weight in the range of about 8 g to 60 g depending on size and thickness. For the further calculation, it now depends on which weight for a plastic bag you actually use. A common plastic carrying bag in our household had a weight between 25 g and 40 g. So I took the average of 32.5 g.
Take the above relation between kg plastics and kg of carbon dioxide, and you get about 200 g carbon dioxide for 32.5 g of plastic, which is the equivalent of the average plastic carrying bag in our household. Or in other words: For 5 plastic bags you get 1 kg of CO2.
Of course you’ll find different figures on the Internet. The main factors are the weight of the plastic bag and whether the grey energy (energy used for production and disposal) is taken into account.”

http://timeforchange.org/plastic-bags-and-plastic-bottles-CO2-emissions

and another post talks about how this is being tackled in India.

http://blog.mywonderfulworld.org/2011/11/blog-a-thon-hey-plastic-youre-not-welcome-here.html

A sustainable city seems far off. We try and be as eco friendly as we can biking and carpooling but in the end were still emitting Co2 and increasing our carbon foot print. Yet people have already started the idea of a sustainable city and in fact they are in the process of creating the first eco friendly city. The city of Masdar in the deserts of Abu dhabi and will hopefully be the first green city in the world. They already have created sun powered buses called SuperBuses and so many others ideas. Heres a YouTube video showing the plans for Masdar. If they could succeed than it would hopefully be the start of creating more and more green cites.

When I traveled to Amsterdam, Holland about six years ago, I noticed that the main mode of transportation was biking. Everywhere you looked, people of all ages were biking to reach their destination. My mom and I saw an elderly woman who must have been about 75 years old riding her bike with her groceries. Lots of the roads in the city even had lanes designated for bikes, and there were stoplights for the bicyclists, too. I bring this up because I think that we should put bicycle lanes on our roads in America along with stoplights specifically for bicyclists. Not only is biking healthier and more economical than driving a car, but it’s also much better for the environment and the world’s carbon footprint. Peopleforbikes.org says that “traffic congestion wastes nearly 3 billion gallons of gas per year in the U.S.” and “for every one mile pedaled rather than driven, about one pound of [carbon dioxide] is saved.” Imagine if each day every person in America or even just your local community biked one of the miles that they normally would’ve driven. You would stop pounds of unnecessary carbon dioxide from being emitted into the atnosphere.
Visit the link down below if you want to see the other numerous benefits of bicycling.