Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - Ways to Reduce Your Environmental Impact From Home
We all know that we should recycle. After all, recycling helps cut the amount of waste that goes into a landfill.
However, we don’t often consider recycling together with the other two “Rs”: reduce and reuse. It’s important for us to reduce our impact on the planet and to also reuse things when we can.
Incorporating these practices into our daily lives also helps us do something for the benefit of all. That’s really useful when it feels like there is nothing positive in the world. Not only can that encourage others, but it also helps you feel more positive.
Here’s how you can practice “reduce, reuse, and recycle” from home.
Reducing Your Personal Carbon Footprint
One thing that you can do to lessen your impact on the environment from home is to reduce the amount of time you spend driving. When you don’t drive, you are preventing exhaust fumes from your vehicle being turned into greenhouse gases. That, in turn, helps with mitigating the effects of climate change.
Of course, you need to get out of the house eventually. What can you do to control your carbon footprint then?
When possible, choose these options:
Walk
Ride your bike
Use public transportation
When you do go out, combine errands and get them all done in one day, rather than stretch them out over the course of the week. Also, stay as local as possible. The less time you are on the roads, the fewer emissions you produce.
Reusing Food Scraps
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 28% of landfill waste is food-related. That includes your table scraps and that poor tomato that has languished in the back of your fridge for a month!
But there’s something that you can do about this problem: start a home composting project.
Composting allows you to redirect food waste away from the landfill and into nutrient-rich soil that you can use for gardening. The EPA recommends having a combination of brown and green waste, as well as water.
Items that you can compost include:
food items (fruits, vegetables, eggshells, coffee grounds, etc.)
wood chips
paper
grass
clippings
clean yard waste that’s pesticide-free
Don’t have enough backyard space? No problem. There’s a solution for that as well. Why not consider an indoor compost bin?
Recycling Your E-Waste
Our never-ending desire for the latest gadget comes with a cost: e-waste. E-waste refers to electronic waste.
Whether you like it or not, your cellphone, laptop, and other devices all have a certain lifespan. Once that ends, it’s time to get rid of them and move on. However, millions of tons of e-waste are just thrown away, ending up in a landfill, or worse—incinerated.
That’s a problem for two reasons:
E-waste contains harmful chemicals that, if they come in contact with groundwater, can pollute local water sources.
Incinerated waste releases those chemicals into the atmosphere.
There’s another problem with just throwing away e-waste: a lot of valuable and useful materials in e-waste that can be retrieved and recycled into new products. These materials are referred to as rare earth elements. They make up the circuitry and innards that make your devices work. Yet, they are not the easiest to find or extract from the earth. That’s why recycling your old flip phone can be so helpful.
To remedy the problem, contact your local recycling center to learn if they take e-waste. Plus, some private companies also take e-waste.
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It’s amazing how simple it is to make choices that benefit the planet. Feeling like you are making a difference is important, especially if you are struggling with depression, anxiety, or other mental health issues. Reducing, reusing, and recycling can allow you to feel like you have some power and control again. If you’d like to learn more, feel free to contact me.