In celebration of Earth Day, here a few things you can do:
- Make Homemade Cleaning Supplies (from the David Suzuki Foundation) – This is definitely something I will try next month. Not only are they eco-friendly, they’re cheap to make, too.
- Say No To Junk Mail. Sign up for the Junk Mail registries in your country like Red Dot Campaign (Canada) and Forest Ethics (USA), or put a sign by your mailbox that you don’t accept junk mail.
- Re-use packaging. Those boxes and mailers that go with things you ordered? Find ways to reuse them. The paperbags from stores? Re-use them. I use those envelopes and bags for bookkeeping purposes.
- Bring your own bag for your groceries. Whole Foods is officially eliminating plastic bags today. Here in Canada, the big supermarket, The Real Canadian Superstore, has been doing this for a long time. They charge you for the plastic bag if you opt to get one from them — it disciplines shoppers to either reuse their plastics or pay up.
- Use old magazines to wrap gifts. I’ll start doing this. Now there’s some use for those old New Yorker magazines! Hah.
- If you mail a lot of stuff, why don’t you shred your junk mail or the pages from your unwanted phone books and use that as padding instead of plastic bubble wrap? [Well, as long as it doesn't have your info.]
- I’m sure you can think of other things to do. Please share them in the comments section!
Did you know that we, our food sources, and our Mother Earth, are all related and we’re all affected by what happens to each other? We literally swallow the bad things we do the Earth. The environment provides food for our food, and we eat that food, and well — we do things to the environment — a lot of harmful things, unfortunately. It’s this inescapable cycle. If you care about your food (and I know you do!), you should care about the environment.
Please, please, please…find it in your heart to be good to the environment — Reuse, Reduce, Recycle. Make earth-conscious choices and good changes in your life, even little by little. That’s how it starts. :-)
There are a lot of things we can do, little things. We stopped eating beef for environmental reasons. I stopped driving. It is a pain in the butt in this country, but I am surviving. I walk as much as I can and I got a smaller computer that I turn off when it’s not in use. Little things make a big difference.
Ben’s last blog post..Taco salad, my Tex-Mex lunch
My wife and I try to save as much energy in the home as we can and re-use our old carrier bags. We use bags for life for our shopping and re-cycle everything we can. I even use old toilet roll tubes as plant pots as they are biodegradable and can be planted straight out. In this day and age we all need to do our bit for the planet!
Mark’s last blog post..A New Generation of Cruise Liner
excellent ideas! also: 1) walk to and from work once a week, 2) change your lightbulbs to energy-efficient ones, 3) eat one extra vegetarian meal (it takes 400 calories of grain to produce 100 calories of animal protein), 4) locate a farmer’s market near you and shop there, and 5) rather than exercising on a machine at the gym, go for a run outside!
katy’s last blog post..Mushroom-Stuffed Mushrooms
Great ideas! My contribution is to bring your own water to the gym and such :) I hate having to buy bottled water. Imagine my horror when I visited my relatives in the States and they even had bottled water at home! Just a waste.
Manggy’s last blog post..Magic Spice Cake with Maple Penuche Frosting
Compost food scraps. We have a Green Cone in our yard — it’s kind of a round plastic laundry basket that you bury in the ground and then it has a tall plastic cone that attaches to the basket above ground so all the food scraps are buried underground and no people or animals can get to them (except bugs and worms). The sunshine on the cone heats it up to help the waste break down quickly and the moisture and nutrients just seep into the ground. Because it’s underground you can put any kind of food waste into it, even fat and bones.
feefifoto’s last blog post..Gifts For Customers
Thanks y’all for all these wonderful ideas!
Ben — Good for you! I love my beef. Haha. How long have you stopped driving?
Mark — Great idea for the plants! I saw someone before who used it for orchids. Neat.
Katy — Yay, go local!
Manggy — Yep, that’s a lot of plastic bottles.
Feefifoto — I haven’t heard of the Green Cone. It sounds really good.