Halloween should be a fright fest for the kids, not the environment. Unfortunately, all the waste produced from single-use costumes, candy wrappers, and face paint takes its toll on our earth. Try greening your Halloween with some of these eco-friendly tips.
Getting your period can be a pretty wasteful event: A woman can easily go through a whole pack of pads once a month. Unfortunately, these go straight to the landfill. While a woman should never feel ashamed of her period, there are ways to curb waste during the menstrual cycle. Here's how to create a low waste menstrual cycle that will also help you save money while bettering your health.
Imagine a world where weekly garbage pickup didn't happen. Would you still make as much trash every day, knowing it would eventually consume your entire sidewalk, possibly even your home? We often forget how privileged we are to have garbage pickup services—not everyone is so lucky. We give very little thought to what happens to our garbage when it's sent away. The truth is, it doesn't go away. It goes to landfills, likely located in poor communities, where it emits toxic gasses bad for people's health and the earth.
I recently returned from a writing residency in Slovenia, the small country that sits east of Italy and lays wedged between Austria to the north and Croatia in the south. Few people are aware of its existence, and prior to spending several weeks there, I considered myself to be fairly unaware of it, too. Unfortunately, Slovenia deserves a lot more credit than it gets, specifically for its greenness—think low pollution levels, preservation of natural resources, encouragement of biodiversity, and more.
We live in a plastic world, and I don’t mean superficially.
Every year more than 15 million tons of cloth, fabric, and textiles are wasted, which is a big burden on the Earth’s resources as well as the grounds on which they are dumped. That said, most of us have plenty of clothes in the closest, some that we use to their full extent and others that we don’t. Inevitably some of these clothes will end up being discarded, but the way in which they’re discarded can have an impact.
The reduce-reuse-recycle philosophy of my youth evoked images of bottles, cans, and paper. My friends and I lamented the poor animals with necks caught in plastic rings from six-packs of cans. To this day, I diligently seek out recycling bins everywhere I go, from restaurants to house parties.
But what to do with my old clothes?
Celebrating Earth Day shouldn't just be about mouthing platitudes—how about we get up and make a concentrated effort to de-stress our planet by reducing our carbon footprint and being eco-friendly?
Your garden doesn’t have to be perfectly manicured to look nice—the one thing that makes a garden really stand out is using little quirks of your own to give it personality. Likewise, your garden should not look like your neighbor's garden—so it needs to carry forward your personality and its own quirk within the green.
In this season of celebrating the blessings of life and love, it can be easy to get caught up in the rush of indulgence and consumerism. Perhaps you feel the pressure of offering something both thoughtful and useful to those you hold dear?