Buy A Bicycle And Help Save The Planet
December 8th, 2009 Posted in Green Living & News
Everyone has to commute to either work, school, the grocery store, or wherever else they need to go. Driving yourself or taking public transportation can end up costing you more than it is worth, not to mention that harm these forms of transportation can be to the environment.
Thus, biking is the free and eco-friendly way to get wherever you need to go.
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Benefits Of Riding A Bicycle
After you buy a bicycle, it basically pays for itself. With all the health benefits of bicycling, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t want to bike. Some of the many benefits include:
Health Benefits
- Makes your heart healthy
- Improves the chemistry of your blood, helping to produce good cholesterol
- Decreases the risk of cancer
- Lowers blood pressure drastically
- Helps to build strong bones
- Reduces chance of diabetes
- Increases muscle strength
- Decreases chronic pain like arthritis, joint pain, etc
- Helps reduce stress
- Increases effective digestion
Environmental Benefits
- Takes up little space, reducing the need for parking lots
- Biking produces no waste or gasoline, eliminating your contribution to increasing air pollution
- 70 to 100 bicycles can be built with the resources required to build one car
- In a typical American urban environment a person who work 7.2 miles from their home can make it there in less than an hour
- Roads and highways can carry 3 times as many cyclists as cars
Measuring Your Carbon Footprint
With all those benefits, how could anyone turn down biking? With the benefits in mind, it is important to know what your personal contribution to the environment really is. Seeing how you contribute to the reduction or increase of global pollution is really important because it will help show you what behaviors to continue or alter to help stop pollution.
Your carbon footprint is the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions an individual person directly causes. By using a carbon footprint calculator, you can help determine your own personal contribution quite easily. This takes less than 5 minutes to fill out, so whether you bicycle, use natural pesticides, or recycle you’ll find it helpful to see how these behaviors help to reduce your carbon footprint.
Commuter Tax Benefit
If the benefits weren’t already good enough, the United States government have made biking even more worthwhile. Initiated this past January, the program known as the Federal Bike Commuter Benefit has been created to encourage people to commute to work by bicycle. If your employer elects to offer this benefit, you can receive a bonus of up to $20 a month, as long as you only bike to work.
The only downside to this plan is that your employer has to choose to become a part of this federal program. Thus, if your employer is participating in the commuter tax benefit program, why wouldn’t you want to help the environment and get paid to do so?
1 Comment | The First 1,000 to Comment (Starting 12/21/2009) Will Become EcoSMART Product Testers!
By Quickly Go Green on Dec 31, 2009
Riding a bike is a great way to get healthy and reduce your carbon footprint. Unfortunately many people are just not able to do that for their everyday transportation. Sure folks in the cities can no problem but when your commute to work is several miles one way it just don’t make sense. Ofcourse I don’t think you should let that keep you from owning a bike and getting the exercise benefits from it. Just be sure you are doing all the other carbon reducing measures in your life. Which are easier than you may think.