I hope you will all continue to enjoy the last week of April. I have gotten down to crunch time and have to decide where I'm going to college before the first of May! It's stressful and exciting all mixed together! With all this hustle and bustle of the winding-down school year, we need to try even harder not to let our environmental awareness slip to the back burner. As I always say, don't forget to always reduce, reuse and recycle. I haven't found an example when it doesn't work yet.

This week I want to talk about another way that we can reduce paper and other resources. Do you get any catalogues or magazines that move straight from your mailbox to your trashcan? Think about how much waste that junk mail creates. In America there are 4.5 million tons of junk mail each year. Twenty-eight billion tons of water is used every year in the production of this mail. Tons and tons of wasted water and paper are filling up the landfills. Three percent of the total United States trash is composed of junk mail. Not only is it annoying, it's also not very green. There are steps that you can take to improve this problem. First of all, you can contact the people that send you the mail and have your name taken off the distribution list. For all the catalogs that you enjoy seeing, try to find out if you could get notifications about the store sent to your email. If all else fails, just make sure you recycle it. It's better to have that junk mail recycled than to send it to the landfills.

See what you can do about any regular junk mail that you receive in the mail, and remember to recycle any that you still end up getting. Go Green!