7 Ways To Save The Planet

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

1. Reducing

We  need to find ways that aim at reducing our wasteful habits and by reusing items we use everyday rather than throwing them away, for the times ahead are troubling for our economy and have a huge impact on the environment in which we live on our planet. Greenhouse gases are being released into the atmosphere that are destroying our planet and heating it up.. Here are a few green solutions:

2. Reuse

Before you throw them away try to find uses for your items that may be misplaced. Plastic utensils that you may not use in the kitchen anymore that are not broken and safe to use may be just what your kids are looking for to put in their play kitchen or to use with their play-dough set.

 

3. Recycling

Try to recycle your oldtennis shoes. Large companies like Nike can recycle your old sneakers to use in various programs that use them to pave new playgrounds for children, making it a safe play area for your children. A quick search online will point you in the direction of ways to participate.

4. Composting

Composting bins are a great investment – Why throw out your vegetable scraps when you can make your own inexpensive, safe fertilizer? Homemade fertilizer will make your gardens grow abundantly, and your home grown fruit and vegetables will be much tastier and healthy as they have been fertilized with a natural substance, and are chemical free.

5. Old Clothing

A wonderful thing to do is to join in with your family and friends for a clothing exchange, or go on an excursion to your local goodwill store. By shopping at “thrift” stores you will be helping their organization and you never know what great buys you will find stashed. There seems to be no shortage of clothing items, in fact it would be a lifetime enough!  In addition, you could use old clothes that are unable to be donated as rags around the house for cleaning jobs, or donate them to an animal shelter, where the clothing will be used for a bed.

6. Trading Old Goods

There are a number of programs that are online now for the sole use of trading old and unwanted household items, sometimes these can be a real score if you know where to look. Look for ways to trade unwanted items. Post an ad in a trade classification paper or website, and trade your unwanted items that you may not want or need anymore with an item that you do require and save money at the same time.

 

7. Shopping Bags

Think about using reusable shopping bags with you when you go shopping, or even when you go shopping for clothes or household items. This will be a great way to conserve our resources and to save the planet. Plastic and paper bags are very environmentally unfriendly, and they contribute to the unnecessary filling of our shrinking landfills and can take a sometimes hundreds of years to breakdown. Although paper bags are mostly recycled themselves, a better solution would be to not have to use them at all.

If you find yourself still using these kinds of bags, make sure that you do your part and recycle BOTH you plastic and paper, as they are accepted in most recycling programs nowadays.

Save The Earth Today For The Future Tomorrow!

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Recycling Can Mean Anyone Can Do Their Bit For The Planet

You have a home and it is so much more than the roof over your head. This home provides you food, water, shelter and the very air you breathe. Your planet, my planet and our planet is home to billions of people spread out over hundreds of countries. But it will not be much of a home unless we start recycling our garbage, and take the “reduce reuse recycle” idiom to heart. No one wants to live in a dirty, filthy home overrun by garbage. The Earth is no different.

Global climate change is a very real threat to the preservation of this planet. You have probably seen television ads focusing on new hybrid vehicles that can help save the environment by producing less toxic byproducts from the burning of fossil fuels. Does the burning of trash cross your mind as ways you can help save the environment. Our landfills are becoming overflowing with hazardous waste and other products that are not biodegradable. Plastic water bottles, disposable diapers and styrofoam containers, to name a few, are all becoming huge problems in most areas of the world.

If you are going to be recycling, then you will need to make sure the recyclables go into the appropriate destination containers. Plastics, glass, aluminum cans and paper products will each have a separate container. You should also consider making a compost if you live in a house that has a yard, that will utilize any yard trimmings and left over food waste.

If every person did their part to help combat overflowing landfills, then we could reduce our waste by fifty percent. That is half the amount going into landfills today. Perhaps there will come a time when we no longer have to continuously find new places to bury our waste. Plastics would be reused. Organic materials would be turned back into the soil to enrich the ground for crops. It is a lovely sentiment and thought but not enough people are doing their part to help make this a cleaner world and prevent global warming causes.

Recycling is a huge responsibility that each and every person should take upon themselves to help keep our landfills free of recyclables that could be better used elsewhere. If you do not know how to recycle, then there are resources in many places to help you getting started. Your local sanitation program can give you information on learning how to recycle and you can find a plethora of information on the internet.

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Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: We need to each do more… our planet depends on it

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

We’re wasteful. Not just on an individual level, but on a much broader scale. Our lifestyle is simply unsustainable in terms of the world’s resources we consume. So get the habit: reduce, reuse, recycle …

The subject of unnecessary waste in our society came sharply into focus for my wife and me over the last couple of years due to numerous trips to take garbage to the county dump.

When renovating our cabin we regularly took construction scrap to the dump (along with our wet garbage). We began to notice a considerable number of perfectly good items that had been thrown out. After seeing this for some time (and rescuing numerous perfectly good items along the way), we started to ask, “What can we do about it?”

We started changing our habits to reduce, reuse, and recycle. Although we may think we can’t make a difference individually, small steps taken on an individual level can and do make a difference. We must each do our own small part to minimize the waste and excess consumption in our society. Change is possible… indeed, it’s absolutely necessary.

One of the greatest challenges in doing this is the constant bombardment from the media… the non-stop stream of powerful advertising attempting to convince us that we need the latest and greatest gadgets, toys, electronics, cars, and on and on. It’s a powerful and extremely effective influence.

And it seems that, unfortunately, a lot of people are too lazy and/or simply don’t think about the fact that something that they are throwing away could be used and appreciated by someone else. Nor do they think about the landfill being taken up by perfectly good and useful items.

Our dump experience spawned the idea of a series of short video vignettes that would highlight this sad situation. Yes, it’s a serious topic, but we wanted to have a little fun with it in order to highlight the number of perfectly good items that were being thrown into the dump every week. Thus was born “Adventures with Fitzgerald the Dump Truck”. The episodes can be seen on the Rustic Lodge Lifestyle home page.

What can you do?

Are you concerned about rampant consumerism and the corresponding waste? If so consider taking some of the following steps:

Turn off

Break free of commercials by limiting your exposure to them… and if you have children, this is even more important. Setting a good example is paramount in teaching the next generation that it is not necessary to have the newest, most recent model of everything!

Teach them that happiness does not come from a store! We limit our exposure to the constant barrage of commercial messages. We rarely watch TV, we listen to public radio, and have very few subscriptions to magazines that come to the house.

Consequently we are blissfully unaware of so much of the product marketing and thus are not even tempted to rush out to buy this or that “must have” gizmo. We’ve never had a TV at our country lodge, so when the grandchildren visit, there is no temptation to watch it… it just isn’t part of the “lodge experience”.

Critically assess your habits

What are you throwing away? Get in the habit of looking critically at all of your household waste. Is it really garbage? Can it be used by others? Can you compost your wet garbage? Are you recycling everything that is possible to recycle? We have two or three charities that call us regularly to ask if we have any donations they can pick up. Some of them let us know we can call them any time for an additional pickup of clothing and household items. Check for charities that offer this service in your area.

Taking this simple step would see items such as stuffed toys (we’ve seen full boxes of perfectly good ones at the dump – some brand new with the tags still on),  other toys, bikes, folding chairs, lamps, tables, furniture, and much more, put to good use.

Episode one of the “Fitzgerald” series highlights many of the items that we rescued from the dump. Other episodes show many perfectly good items that had been thrown away, but which we personally didn’t take.

Challenge each other

Families can get together and set up challenges to minimize waste. At the office, organize a waste awareness day. Get your boss involved… or if you are the boss, you set the tone. Even neighborhoods can activate to increase awareness.

These are just a few suggestions to start the creative juices flowing. Each one of us must start taking individual responsibility to reduce the resource footprint on our fragile planet. Reducing our personal waste by limiting unnecessary consumerism, and through reuse and recycling are important actions for all of us.

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