Drink responsibly EVERY DAY! You go to meetings, coffee breaks, PTA functions, and soccer matches, accompanied by the ever-present cup of coffee or bottle of water. You stop at Starbucks or 7-11 for coffee. You jog with a bottle of water. So, care for our planet by lessening the amount of Styrofoam and plastic on the roadsides and in the landfill. Keep a coffee cup at your desk at work and a commuter mug in your car for use at meetings or filling at Peet’s. Fill a water bottle on your way out to a game or run. Keep a couple filled, in the refrigerator or freezer (great for a hot day at an arts festival). Just be sure to rotate your cups and bottles often, bringing them home for a thorough cleaning to avoid bacteria growth. This keeps both you and the Earth healthier.
Tag Archive for plastic
Unmelted Bottle Caps
Remove caps from bottles before recycling. Because they melt at far different temperatures, a cap mixed in with bottles can leave unmelted plastic, making the whole batch unusable for other items.
[For more easy, money-saving, Earth-friendly tips, download a FREE copy of Green Riches: Help the Earth & Your Budget. Go to www.Smashwords.com/books/view/7000 or your favorite e-book seller and download to your computer or e-book device. Totally free, with no strings attached.]
Done Eating? Don’t Wash that Bowl–Eat it
(CNN Business)–Food packaging is filling up landfills and polluting our oceans, where materials like plastic and polystyrene can take centuries to decompose.But one company might have a tasty solution to cut down our use of plastic dishware.South African startup Munch Bowls has created a biodegradable bowl made from wheat, which you can eat as part of your meal. The bowls are vegan, can hold hot soup for up to five hours and have a shelf life of 15 months, according to the company.
Teen Deserves His $50,000 Prize
A teenager from Ireland may have found a way to rescue our oceans from the growing plastic pollution problem.
A walk on the beach led Fionn Ferreira to develop his project on microplastic extraction from water for the annual Google Science Fair. The project won the grand prize of $50,000 in educational funding at this year’s event.
The 18-year-old said that while he was out on that walk in his coastal hometown of Ballydehob, he ran across a stone with oil and plastic stuck to it — something he says he’s become more aware of in recent years.
Read the rest of this fascinating article at This Irish teenager may have a solution for a plastic-free ocean.
Idea for Mother’s Day
Happy Mother’s Day to your mom or someone who has been a mom to you. Give her a beautiful indoor or outdoor flowering plant she can enjoy for many more years than the bouquet enclosed in a plastic tube. Both she and the Earth will appreciate it.
[For more easy, money-saving, Earth-friendly tips, download a FREE copy of Green Riches: Help the Earth & Your Budget. Go to www.Smashwords.com/books/view/7000 or your favorite e-book seller and download to your computer or e-book device. Totally free, with no strings Write caption…
Drink Beer & Help the Environment
Even if you aren’t a Corona or other beer drinker, this is good news. Six-pack rings have always been a hazard to wildlife, killing and choking them, and drink industries–beer and soft drink–have been slow to adopt the technology that’s been around for years that can solve the problem. That is, biodegradable, non-plastic 6-pack rings.
Kudos to Corona for finally doing that. It’s only a pilot program, but it’s an important start. Read about it at Corona Beer to Ditch Plastic Packaging by Using Biodegradable 6-Pack Rings. Then, contact Corona and congratulate them on their enlightened action. (If you want, lift a beer in a toast to them.) And ask your favorite beer and soft-drink manufacturers why they aren’t doing the same thing.
Our Beautiful, Endangered Oceans
Yesterday was World Oceans Day, calling attention to our oceans and how to appreciate and take care of them and inviting us to do so all year long. This year the emphasis is on all the plastic accumulating in those magnificent bodies of water. So I offer you this small reflection:
40,000 garbage trucks filled with plastic = 270,000 tons of it floating around our oceans. That’s what the current estimate is. And that’s a conservative guess, since fish, birds, and other species eat a good amount of it. It’s unsightly and deadly for the critters who eat it or get hopelessly entangled in it. It’s not healthy for humans, either.
This is something to think about next time we’re about to toss a plastic bottle cap, bag, food wrapper, or other item onto the roadway or gutter, where it can wash into the waterways leading to the ocean. Or tossing those items off of a boat or bridge.
The item can’t be that heavy to hold onto until you see the next recycling container.
Those Painful Broken Plastic Toys
Well, they’re painful when stepped on or go into the landfill. Hasbro has a solution. They’re working with TerraCycle to recycle them into materials for playgrounds and benches. Find out how you can participate: https://www.terracycle.com/en-US/brigades/hasbro.
[For more easy, money-saving, Earth-friendly tips, download a FREE copy of Green Riches: Help the Earth & Your Budget. Go to www.Smashwords.com/books/view/7000 or your favorite e-book seller and download to your computer or e-book device. Totally free, with no strings attached.]
Plastic Down Your Drain
Stop washing plastic down the drain. That face or body wash that promises to clean, exfoliate, and scrub away oil often contains little beads—made of plastic! Read the label. Microbeads are being phased out, but you probably still have products in your home that contain them.
[For more easy, money-saving, earth-friendly tips, download a FREE copy of Green Riches: Help the Earth & Your Budget. Go to www.Smashwords.com/books/view/7000 or your favorite e-book seller and download to your computer or e-book device. Totally free, with no strings attached.]
Mound of Plastic in the Back Yard
You probably recycle those plastic bottles and anything else with the recycle symbol on it. I know I do. It’s a little thing we can do to help our environment. Except that there’s a problem. That is, many U.S. “recylers” haven’t been processing it (or electronic waste) here but shipping it to China, where it’s cheaper to deal with because they toss it into a landfill. China, drowning in our plastic, is wising up and saying NO MORE! They now have a Green Fence Policy, which says that they won’t be importing most of that plastic any longer.
What are our recyclers going to do? And those in Europe, Japan, and Hong Kong? They don’t know yet. And it’s a big problem–China imports 70% of the 500 million tons of electronic waste and 12 million tons of plastic waste each year that the world creates.
This will be costly (labor, technology, environmental safety standards), but it’s past time to actually recycle the waste rather than letting it pile up in landfills in China’s–or our–back yard.