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Earth Day is an international day devoted to our planet that aims at drawing attention to environmental issues and promoting conservation and sustainability. Each year on the 22nd of April, around 1 billion individuals across more than 190 countries take action to raise awareness of the climate crisis and bring about behavioural change to protect the environment. This week, I’m doing exactly the same with this blog post!
Participating in Earth Day can take place in many forms, from small home or classroom projects like planting a herb garden or picking up litter, volunteering to plant trees, joining ecological projects, and even participating in street protests. These campaigns and projects aim to bring together like-minded people or groups to address deforestation, biodiversity loss, waste management, climate change, species conservation, plastic pollution, etc.
THE EARTH DAY NETWORK
Thankfully, The Earth Day Network makes it so easy for us to have one place to refer back to when we’re not exactly sure how and where we can take action and be part of this positive movement. You can head to their website to get inspired, learn about environmental issues as well as take part in the green revolution. There are so many ways to get involved: from signing petitions to helping environmental literacy by spreading the word about climate change and even a map to find your nearest community clean-up campaign. With this many resources so handy, we can all take action and start making a positive impact.
Earth Day is not just a day to celebrate Mother Earth, but a movement that can be carried out all year around. In fact, there’s a lot we can do to start living more sustainably and little by little, help tackle climate change. Every Earth Day can drive a year of energy, enthusiasm and commitment to create a new plan of action for our planet!
Waste Management
Poor waste management is one of the main contributors to climate change and air pollution and directly affects many ecosystems and species. Landfills are considered the last resort in the waste hierarchy, but because of the amount of waste we are producing every day, they are very much in use and releasing methane, a very powerful greenhouse gas closely linked to climate change.
Waste dumping has become a way to “solve” the world’s enormous waste problem, but unfortunately, it comes with disastrous consequences such as:
- Pollution of soil: Waste can leak hazardous chemicals into the soil and from there into our food.
- Air pollution: The burning of waste at landfills releases toxic substances into the air, including extremely poisoning dioxin.
- Pollution of oceans: 13 million tonnes of plastic ends up in the world’s oceans each year. If we keep dumping plastic in the oceans, by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the sea.
- Pollution of groundwater: 280 billion tons of groundwater is being polluted every year, that’s 9000 tons every second!
You can check out how the data is changing by the second here. With 2.12 billion tons of waste dumped on the planet every year, it’s no surprise that the environment is taking a big hit. Although governments definitely need to put stricter regulations in place in order to control consumers’ buying habits, we can all do something to reduce the waste produced in our own households.
“STOP WASTE. STOP WASTE OF ANY KIND. STOP WASTING ENERGY, STOP WASTING FOOD, STOP WASTING PLASTIC AND STOP WASTING TIME. THIS IS A PRECIOUS WORLD AND EACH OF US CAN USE OUR ACTIONS AND OUR VOPICE TO SAVE OUR PLANET.”
DAVID ATTENBOROUGH
How You Can Reduce Waste
If you’re going to start reducing waste in your everyday life, you first need to understand how much waste you’re actually creating. An easy way to do this is to use the WWF environmental footprint calculator to find out which aspects of your daily life will need improving in order to help save our planet. Once you know the areas of your day-to-day that you need to improve, you can start looking at how to reduce your personal waste.
Stop Wasting Energy
Although today the UK has 42% lower emissions than it did back in 1990, mainly due to a rise in renewables, there’s still a long way to go to get to the government’s target of net zero by 2050.
Here’s what you can do:
- Switch to a green energy provider to make sure you’re supplied with energy from renewable sources.
- You can reduce your energy usage by using energy-saving lightbulbs, flying less and/or offsetting the carbon emissions caused by flights and turning off your home appliances when you’re not using them.
- Get a smart meter installed in your house, so you can check how much you’re consuming and try to correct yourself if you see you’re using way too much energy.
Stop Wasting Food
Food waste is a big issue: one-third to a half of all food produced globally for human consumption is actually wasted and not consumed. According to an article in The Independent 6.7 million tonnes of food wasted in the UK each year.
According to the United Nations, the world’s population is expected to grow from 7.6 billion to 9.8 billion by 2050 – and with it, our food waste is predicted to increase. But reducing waste in your household can be simple, if you take into account these recommendations:
- Freeze anything you can’t eat while it’s fresh, so it doesn’t go to waste. This way you won’t waste your food or your money.
- Try to buy loose produce as much as possible, so you can select the exact amount that you need. This might be easier when shopping at your local farmers market or refill shop, where not only you can support local businesses, but you’ll also get fresher ingredients than you might find in the big-box grocery store and you can avoid the need for excess food packaging.
- Give a second life to ingredients that most commonly go to waste: you can get creative with what you make from leftover food. For example, there’s nothing better than a chunky soup made out of leftovers from your Sunday lunch.
- Finally, remember to compost whatever food waste you have to get rid of. 25% of the items in your bin can potentially be removed from the waste stream if composted in your back garden. While composting requires more effort, it can also be used as fertiliser for your garden plants, so in the long run, it would save you time and money too.
Stop Food Waste Day
The 26th of April marks the official ‘Stop Food Waste Day’, another environmental movement that aims to ignite change regarding the global food waste issue by drawing attention to the problem, educating society at all levels and sharing practical, creative and impactful ways we can all change our behaviour to minimize food waste. Check out their resources here. They even have a digital food waste cookbook you can download, that features recipes which give a second life to ingredients that most commonly go to waste in home kitchens, including stale bread, bruised fruit & vegetables and fruit peels!
Food Rescue Apps:
There are also a number of food waste/rescue apps that make it easy to rescue perfectly good food from cafes, restaurants, bakeries and shops that might otherwise be destined for the landfill, as well as others that enable you to share surplus food among your neighbours and local communities all with just a few taps on your phone.
OLIO
Believing small actions can lead to big change, the founders of Olio wanted to create an app that connected not just consumers and businesses but neighbours, too. Whether it’s sell-by date food from local stores or rescued pastries, Olio is an app for sharing by giving away, borrowing or lending things among communities all across the UK, including non-food household items.
But back to food. Olio is free to download, and if you have surplus food that you can’t bear throwing away, simply list it on the app and someone in your area will pick it up.
Everything on the app is free, except listings in the “made” section where you can buy local homemade crafts or food goods.
A nice good-will scheme on the app involves signing up to be a local volunteer, collecting leftovers from supermarkets and distributing to the community via the app. While free to download and use, you can become an “Olio supporter” for £4.99 a month which allows you to see a map view of listings. Download on iOS or Download on Android
TOO GOOD TO GO
Founded in 2016 in Copenhagen, Too Good To Go is free to download and boasts 28 million users worldwide, saving more than 100,000 meals every day. It’s B-Corp certified, and allows users to browse local food sources nearby, including restaurants, cafes, shops and bakeries with surplus food that hasn’t been sold in time and would otherwise be thrown away; you can also buy a surprise “magic bag”, all via the app, all for a fraction of the retail cost.
You can read more about the impact they are making here. Download on iOS or Download on Android.
NO WASTE
No Waste is free to download, and rather than rescuing food from restaurants and shops, NoWaste tackles the excess that starts in our own homes by helping you to keep track of your purchases, expiry dates and fridge contents, and by letting you see what needs to be used first in order to reduce unnecessary purchases. It helps you track your food waste by using the receipt and barcode scanner, where you can log your weekly shop, enable automatic reminders for when food will expire and by deleting your food when eaten. The handy meal-planning feature helps you save money and avoid leftovers at the end of the week.
With lists for your freezer, fridge and cupboard, you can sort and search for food in seconds while synchronising and sharing lists with others in the household. Being able to follow your monthly food waste and money savings as well as learning about the high waste risk of certain foods are very useful too. Download on iOS or Download on Android.
Stop Wasting Plastic
By 2050, there could be more plastic in the ocean than fish. We can’t let our throwaway culture continue, so here are a few tips on how to put a stop to your plastic consumption at home:
- Try to swap single-use items for sustainable alternatives. For example, you can start by using reusable bags, coffee cups, water bottles and metal straws. A lot of these items made from plastic would end up in a landfill once we have used them only once, so having something that you can use more than once will save space in landfills and save you money too – many high street coffee shops will give you a discount if you bring your own cup, and you’ll only have to buy it once!
- Everyday items such as clingfilm, teabags, food containers and toothbrushes all have zero-waste options too. There are so many ways you can cut down on plastic: from switching to a bamboo toothbrush to only having glass containers in the house and switching to our beeswax wraps.
Stop Wasting Money
One of the ways we have the most power is with our money; we can decide where we spend it and where we don’t. There are lots of choices we can make on a day-to-day basis about buying sustainable and ethical products:
- Try to support sustainable, ethical businesses where you can and put pressure on the companies who are contributing negatively to the environment. You can always ask brands and companies for more transparency and their process information.
- Ask your bank or pension provider how they’re using your money. Is it invested in sustainable projects, or contributing to nature’s decline?
- Before you go and buy something new, consider buying it used, which can also save you lots of money. Buying from used furniture stores and using repurposed construction materials, to a second-hand bicycle or wool coat, you can use your money to support local charities in addition to saving items from ending up in the dump or landfill.
- You can reduce the amount of waste you produce by purchasing products that come with less packaging and/or come in packaging that can be recycled or is biodegradable.
Of course, a very important aspect of waste management is recycling as much as possible, which is also where second-hand buying comes into play. What if we could use waste as a resource and thereby scale down the demand for the extraction of new resources? Extracting fewer materials and using existing resources would help avert some of the impacts created along the chain. Of course, in order to be able to do this, we’d need to ensure high-quality recycling, eliminate landfilling, limit energy recovery for non-recyclable materials, and stop illegal shipments of waste.
The potential gains are immense, and they can facilitate the global move towards a circular economy, where nothing is wasted. Moving up the waste hierarchy requires a joint effort by all the parties involved: consumers, producers, policymakers, local authorities, waste treatment facilities, etc. Ultimately, whether waste will constitute a problem, or a resource all depends on how we manage it.
