Today is
Earth Day! A great way to celebrate is to make (big or small) changes in your
daily life that you can sustain in the long run that will help protect and
preserve our planet. You may feel as though your daily habits won’t make a dent
in the enormous ecosystem, but small changes add up and lead to a big effect. Today, we’re taking it back to
the basics of the three Rs – recycle, reuse, reduce.
Recycle According to
the EPA, the United States generated 262.4 million tons of trash in 2015. 137.7
million tons of that ended up in landfills. So much of that trash could have
been recycled; so much of the materials that end up in our landfills can be
recycled. Plastics, aluminums, paper – all things we use on an almost daily
basis. If we make it a habit to recycle those, we can help eliminate the amount
of recyclable trash that ends up in landfills, and contribute to the sustainability
of recycled items that come back to market.
Reuse Recycling doesn’t
just apply to trash. Reusing items again and again, for the same or for other
purposes, is a form of recycling as well. A great place to start is to buy
items that can be used more than once, such as using nylon or cloth bags every
time you shop for groceries, instead of plastic bags. Newspapers or magazines
can be repurposed as wrapping paper. Glass jars can be reused in a multitude of
ways around the house. Old shirts can be used as dusters. Think about items in
your home and how you can find different uses for them.
Reduce Here are a
few tips you could incorporate into your daily routine that can make a real
difference. Replace paper towels with reusable bamboo paper towels. Use glass
tumblers for your water instead of plastic bottles. Stainlees
steel straws can replace single-use plastic ones. By reducing the amount of
trash you generate, you are reducing the number of items that would potentially
end up in landfills. Now think about what would happen if we all made these
small changes – it would definitely make Earth a better place!
Share any
tips you’ve got below!
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