Environmentally friendly

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The phrase environmentally friendly is used to refer to goods, services and/or practices considered to inflict little harm on the environment. The phrase has been in common usage for at least 20 years and is often added to product advertising or packaging to promote a sale.

It also means "being friendly to the environment". For example, you can be environmentally friendly by recycling, or by being "green", as people call it. There are also many organisations that associate themselves with the term, such as Greenpeace.

In pest control, integrated pest management is regarded as more environmentally friendly than traditional pesticide use, as its goal is to reduce pesticide use to a minimum by using a variety of less impactive means, with pesticides only as the last resort. More recently, the development of biological pest control methods are an effort to go a further step to being environmentally friendly.

In waste management, recycling and composting are viewed as more environmentally friendly than traditional bury or burn practices. Some cities are at the forefront of such environmentally friendly practices. For example, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada has adopted large-scale composting to deal with its urban waste. Its composting facility is the largest of its type in the world, representing 35 per cent of Canada's centralized composting capacity. The $100-million co-composter allows Edmonton to recycle 65 per cent of its residential waste. The co-composter itself is 38,690 square metres in size, equivalent to 8 football fields. It's designed to process 200,000 tonnes of residential solid waste per year and 22,500 dry tonnes of biosolids, turning them into 80,000 tonnes of compost annually.