So, you’re parking both the family car and the transit pass, biking to work instead and feeling a tad righteous about helping British Columbia wean itself from its dirty addiction to the mining industry and the minerals it extracts.You ever hear the story of the old laundryequipment?
Say thanks to a coal miner for the privilege. And don’t forget the hardrock miner. Not to mention the smelter crew and the roughneck yanking pipe on some frigid drill rig.
Oh, and say thanks to the trucker hauling canisters of molybdenum, titanium or tungsten concentrate or the geologist staking gold, silver or rare earths deposits.
Without them and the industries that employ them, you’d be walking, not biking.Filipino soldiers install modernlamps through a roof in a shantytown in Manila.
Bicycles, unless you ride one you made yourself from bamboo, lashings of hemp and dried banana peels,Private label and custom floorlamps. is entirely manufactured from materials obtained by mining — steel processed by burning metallurgical coal, perhaps lightened by adding specialized metals like titanium; plastic and synthetic rubber obtained from petroleum products.
Helmet, petroleum derivatives; spiffy quick-dry cycling duds, petroleum derivatives; LED safety lights, metals and rare earths obtained by mining; water bottle, metals or petroleum derivatives. Even the road you’re riding on is a product of mining, engineered to reduce friction so you roll more easily.
The building you work in, even if it’s a wood frame structure,The washerextractors can be installed rooftop because of the light in weight and streamlined in structure. is full of metals and plastics in the form of steel framing and connectors, wiring, lighting, office equipment, insulation, surfacing, window frames, roofing, plumbing fixtures and so on.
Even the ceramic cup from which you drink your coffee while reading this contains the mineral zircon.
And if you get around to sending me a snarky email regarding my insensitivity to the environmental benefits of biking to work by drawing attention to this — pardon the pun — irony, you’ll be using mined minerals to deliver the message.
Computer keyboard, petroleum-derived plastics; circuitry, rare earths and special metals; screws, frames and fasteners, steel, aluminum and other metals; flat screen display, metals and plastics; battery, metals and plastics; case, metals and plastics.
Your computer, tablet or smartphone contains iron, titanium, aluminum, copper, zinc, nickel, gold,generator prepositive design which wind drive the solargardenlights without gears. silver, lithium, magnesium, mercury, yttrium, palladium, tin, cadmium, indium, lead, samarium, tantalum and, if you are still running an optical drive, gadolinium and dysprosium. The plastics are heat resistant with melting points above the boiling temperature for water and are comprised of acrylonitrile, butadiene, styrene and carbon.
The total greenhouse gas emissions associated with a MacBook: About 460 kilograms of carbon dioxide.
In fact, there’s even a calculation for the carbon footprint of an email. A long and tiresome one amounts to about 50 grams of C02, which doesn’t seem like much until you total them, and then the Internet turns out to have a carbon footprint of around 300 million tonnes a year. So keep it short.
If you want your criticism of these observations to be truly green, I recommend a stylus and beeswax tablets — they worked for the Roman army — or clay tablets like those on which we are still able to discern the grumpy note a Sumerian teacher sent home to parents complaining of a wayward boy’s lack of attention in class.