Make Earth Day One to Remember

Happy Earth Day!

Today marks the 40th Annual Earth Day celebration. It is a day reserved to “inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth’s environment,” so why not do just that?

• Make some time to get outside and appreciate the beauty that nature provides. Go for a walk around a park, or open your car windows and enjoy some fresh air.
• Follow the 3 Rs closely: reduce the impact you have on the environment by reusing everyday items around your apartment and recycling the things you don’t need any longer.
• Donate money or time to an environmental cause. There are several charities out there benefitting worthy causes such as the earthquake relief efforts in Haiti and Chile that could use donations of any kind. If you have gently worn clothing you no longer wish to wear, give them to Goodwill. In addition to the help you’d be providing others, you’ll qualify for tax write-offs.

How will you change the world today?

You Can Change the World in 5 Minutes

There’s something floating out there in the World Wide Web that caught my attention. It’s something called the Five Minute Experiment.

What is the experiment exactly? Well, it’s really simple. All you do is set a timer for 5 minutes, and see how much good you can do for the world around you. That’s it.

Now what all could you accomplish in 5 minutes?

• You could donate cans of food: walk in your grocery store – they usually have a drive going.
• You can tutor kids: By the end of 5 minutes, you may have solved a few math problems (and realized you don’t remember much from algebra class).
• You can recycle! I’m sure you’ve got plenty you could donate or recycle. So get to it!

Once you’ve done your part to change the world around you, post your brief experience on the website. Yours just may be one of the lucky submissions to be published in a book set to come out later this year!

Clean Water for a Healthy World

Today is World Water Day. It was first reserved at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, and is now celebrated worldwide. In a time when natural disasters, especially earthquakes, seem more common than ever, this holiday serves an important purpose in reminding the global population to learn more about water conservation.

One of the biggest problems the world has is that wastewater is not being reused productively as much as it could be. Developing countries have up to 80% of all waste is being discharged without treatment due to lack of regulations and resources. Water is one of our most precious resources, yet we’ve yet to really make water pollution a pressing issue.

Today is hopefully the day that the world really takes a stand for water conservation. World Water Day hopes that now is the time raise the profile of water quality at the political level so reform can start today.

What are you doing to make a difference?

(photo courtesy of woodleywonderworks on flickr)

It’s National Nutrition Month

For this week’s green tip I want to inform everyone that March is National Nutrition Month. In honor of this, I would like to give you a way to start getting greener with your diet. Literally.

Getting more greens in your diet is essential to eating healthier. They provide tons of health benefits, one of them being that they strengthen the blood and respiratory systems.

And the darker the greens, the better. More deeply colored and brighter fruits & veggies are packed with antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals.

So get on the path to better health today & get greener in your diet!

(photo courtesy of flickr)

Arbor Glen’s Green Tip of the Week!

This might’ve been one you’ve heard before.

Switching out your old incandescent bulbs for compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL) can do a great deal of good for the environment. If every house in America used just one CFL bulb in place of an incandescent, we’d save enough energy to light about 2.5 million homes – incredible!

If the energy-savings aren’t enough to convince you to make the switch, consider the money you can save. CFL bulbs cost more at the point of purchase, but they can save you a great deal of money with the energy saved, and they can last longer than an incandescent!

Hope you enjoyed this week’s green tip. Look out for at least one of these every week!

Do yourself (& the environment) a favor

Go green & save money in the process? I call this a win-win situation.

I’ve recently seen a statistic stating that Americans waste about 25% of their food. That number is outrageous! I am a huge fan of tupperware and I a l w a y s save leftovers. We need to stop being so wasteful & start being smarter eaters! Here are a few tips to help you both save money & help the environment:

• Don’t throw it away: a lot of times when fruit and veggies lose their toughness & go soft, we just throw them out. Don’t do it anymore! Softer fruit is great for smoothies and shakes.
• Write a list & stick to it: I am absolutely an impulse buyer, and this is the worst at the grocery store. I’ll grab anything on sale or  clearance, and it eventually gets thrown in the trash. Whether it’s that I didn’t get to eat it before the expiration date or I never really wanted it in the first place, I have wasted a great deal of food. Writing a grocery list will guarantee you buy only enough of what you need. The grocery store will still be there for your next shopping trip.
• Rotate your pantry: after you’ve completed your shopping, make sure to move the older food to the front to be eaten first. This will reduce your waste because you won’t let anything go uneaten before it spoils!

These are just a few ideas to help reduce our impact on the earth. More importantly, these will increase the size of your wallet!

Do you have any additional tips? Leave them in the comments section!

(photo courtesy of Masahiro Ihara on flickr)