Want to go green? Try these simple steps – Home & Garden – MSNBC.com

“There are about 1.6 billion homes in the world, about 100 million in the United States alone. Yours is where you spend most of your time. It’s where you use the most energy and water and create the most waste. You create 4.5 pounds of trash every day. Over the course of your life, that will total 600 times your average adult weight… in garbage. Broken down, your torso would be paper. One leg would be yard trimmings, the other food scraps. One arm would be plastic with a rubber hand. The other would be metal with a wood hand. Your head would be glass, and your neck would be all the other stuff. In the end, we will each leave a 90,000-pound legacy of trash for our grandchildren.

But waste isn’t our biggest impact on the planet: Americans use at least twice as much water and energy per person as anyone else in the world. Those are big problems considering there’s a scarcity of both to go around. By 2025, the world must increase its water supply by 22 percent in order to meet its needs. Meanwhile, 40 percent of the drinking water supplied to homes is flushed down the toilet. As far as energy goes, it’s used mostly for heating and cooling.”

New York publisher turns a green page – Nightly News with Brian Williams – MSNBC.com

NEW YORK – In the concrete jungle of Manhattan stands a paragon of green: the new Hearst Tower, rising from the original Hearst building’s historic facade.

Ninety percent of its steel is recycled. It uses 26 percent less energy and 10 percent less water than a conventional office building. Sensors detect when a room is empty and automatically turn off the lights and computers.

“From the very start, we looked at this as a home renovation,” said Brian Schwagerl, who oversees sustainability initiatives as the publishing giant’s director of real estate and facilities planning.”