Welcome to the Changing Habits for Habitats Challenge! This week's topic is Transportation. We will be sharing ways you can use transportation more efficiently to help the environment.
Todays challenge is:
Don't Allow Your Car to Idle
Why?
Letting your car idle might not seem like a big deal, however it's bad for the environment and it also wastes money. You can't easily avoid letting your car idle when its stuck in traffic or at a light, but idling your car while it's in park is completely unnecessary.
One pound of carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere for every 10 minutes your car idles. Every day, americans waste approximately 3.8 million gallons of gas and add 40,000 tons of CO2 to the atmosphere because of voluntary idling.
Contrary to popular belief, letting your car idle does not save fuel when compared to restarting your engine. Letting your car idle for longer than 10 seconds actually wastes more fuel that restarting your car. Turning you car off while it's in park also prevents damage to your engine caused by idling.
If you reduce your voluntary idling by just five minutes, every year you will save approximately 15 gallons of gas, $40 that you would have spent on gas, and you will prevent 330lbs. of CO2 from entering the environment.
Here are some websites with more information about the effects of car idling on the environment:
The Hinkle Charitable Foundation http://www.thehcf.org/antiidlingprimer.html
The Environmental Defense Fund: http://www.edf.org/transportation/reports/idling
Keep on changing the world!
~The Coyotes
Todays challenge is:
Don't Allow Your Car to Idle
Why?
Letting your car idle might not seem like a big deal, however it's bad for the environment and it also wastes money. You can't easily avoid letting your car idle when its stuck in traffic or at a light, but idling your car while it's in park is completely unnecessary.
One pound of carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere for every 10 minutes your car idles. Every day, americans waste approximately 3.8 million gallons of gas and add 40,000 tons of CO2 to the atmosphere because of voluntary idling.
Contrary to popular belief, letting your car idle does not save fuel when compared to restarting your engine. Letting your car idle for longer than 10 seconds actually wastes more fuel that restarting your car. Turning you car off while it's in park also prevents damage to your engine caused by idling.
If you reduce your voluntary idling by just five minutes, every year you will save approximately 15 gallons of gas, $40 that you would have spent on gas, and you will prevent 330lbs. of CO2 from entering the environment.
Here are some websites with more information about the effects of car idling on the environment:
The Hinkle Charitable Foundation http://www.thehcf.org/antiidlingprimer.html
The Environmental Defense Fund: http://www.edf.org/transportation/reports/idling
Keep on changing the world!
~The Coyotes