Month: September 2018

Thank you all again for visiting my blog! This week we are taking step 4 of our Green Shift to become more environmentally conscious in our everyday lives. Step 4 is another fairly easy one to work into daily routines if you set your mind to it. Turn off electricity when you don’t need it!

It’s simple, it’s easy, so why doesn’t everyone do it? People don’t realize the impact of wasting electricity. According to The New York Times, a quarter of a typical home’s energy consumption is due to electronics draining power when they are plugged in but not on. That is a significant amount of energy (and money!) that is being wasted every month. Multiply that by every house in the city, the state, and America as a whole. Our American culture is so wasteful, in fact, the average American household has 50 electronic devices that are always draining power (The New York Times).

Don’t worry, there are ways we can reduce our energy waste! One very easy way to reduce waste is to switch to LED bulbs. Put them in once and forget it! They can even save you up to $135 before they burn out (Save with SRP). There are simple things you can add to your everyday lives to conserve like deciding what you want to eat before opening the fridge (to reduce the time staring at an open fridge, I know I’m guilty of it), turn out lights and ceiling fans before leaving the room, and turning the TV of before you fall asleep on the couch (I’m looking at you, Dad!). There are tons of products out there as well to help reduce energy consumption in your home. These blackout curtains not only keep the sun from waking you from your restful sleep in the morning, but also keep that pesky sun radiation from heating your home and making your air conditioner work on overtime. This smart thermostat senses when someone is in a room and heats or cools it accordingly, reducing energy wasted on heating and cooling rooms that no one is using. Tempted to turn up the heat in the winter? Put on this warm sweater to keep you warm without wasting money on the energy bill. There we have it! Step 4 of our Green Shift is complete. Now go out there and incorporate these habits into your everyday lives! See you next week!

Thanks again for joining me, I look forward to taking a big leap on our green shift journey with these next few steps. The following steps can be done in any order, but I do suggest focusing on one at first and continue to add proceeding steps until you are fully environmentally conscious in every aspect of your life. I chose conserving water as our first specific step because it is a fairly easy and simple one to start with.

Water is such a huge part of our lives, much bigger than we might expect. According to The Environmental Protection Agency, the average American family uses over 300 gallons of water per day at home. That’s crazy! It can be easy to ignore the water going down the drain after a long, relaxing shower, but that water adds up. We waste so much water here in the United States while, according to Center for Disease Control, 780 million people worldwide do not have access to clean water. If we can conserve our water and only use what is needed, we can start the process to ensuring everyone has access to clean water around the world. Also, we can reduce the use of energy that goes into cleaning our waste water, so it is a win-win!

There are so many easy ways to conserve water in our daily lives. We can turn off the faucet when brushing our teeth, take shorter showers, and repair any pipes that might be leaking. There are also some products that are designed just with this problem in mind, like water saving shower heads and low flush toilets. This shower head is luxurious and conserves water by using air pressure instead of water pressure! You can also try putting a bucket under the bathtub faucet while you wait for the water to heat up for your shower and use that water for other needs. It is important to think outside the box as well! Instead of rinsing vegetables under a running faucet, rinse them in a bucket and use that water for any outside flowers or garden! It is just as important to reuse water as it is to save it.

In dry areas of the country, a lot of water goes towards lawn maintenance. This website gives options for a waterless lawn and varieties of grass that require less water. That green lawn may be beautiful, but it is very wasteful.

Additionally, a way to conserve water that many people wouldn’t think of is by saving electricity. Power plants use water as a cooling method, so saving energy is a double bonus! We will get more into electricity saving methods next week, see ya!

Hello again! Thank you for joining me in continuing our Green Shift journey to reduce our impact on the environment! In last week’s post, we started the process with accepting the problem. Now that we have realized the true impacts of waste and pollution on the world, we can start working to make a difference! The simplest, and perhaps most important step in the Green Shift is changing our previous mindset of consumption and waste to a mindset of conservation.

It is not easy to consider the long-term consequences of our everyday actions, but these seemingly small actions contribute to the worldwide problems we face. To adopt a green mindset, we have to make a conscious effort to think of the environmental impact of our daily actions. When we start thinking about our habits, it becomes clear that there are many ways we can make improvements. One of the easiest ways to make a change in our daily actions is to avoid plastic products. Strawlessocean is a great source of information on plastic pollution, specifically its impact on marine life. It

provides startling statistics such as the fact that America uses over 500 million plastic straws every day! Additionally, at the current rate of plastic consumption, by 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. Our new actions can be as simple as choosing to carry a couple items out of the grocery store instead of using a disposable plastic bag. New habits will become second nature, like bringing a reusable water bottle on the go to avoid plastic cups and straws at restaurants. Over time, these small actions will add up to make a measurable difference. There are so many wonderful products to help more people become eco-friendly in their daily lives, such as this set of reusable straws, or these stylish reusable grocery bags. Other than saying no to plastic, there are many other easy ways to be eco-friendly every day. Some habits include saving water by turning off the faucet when you brush your teeth or saving electricity by turning off the lights when you leave a room. Don’t worry, we will go more in depth on saving electricity and water in later posts. Right now, our goal is to start getting into the habit of consciously thinking of being green in our daily lives and being aware of our actions. Thank you for joining me today, I’ll be back with more eco-friendly tips next week!

 

Congratulations! If you are reading this blog it means you’re here to start the journey of becoming more environmentally conscious! This journey is  a long and sometimes difficult one, but always a rewarding experience to help humanity and find yourself in the process. This journey of changing personal habits to help this one and only Earth is what I like to call the Green Shift. In this blog, we will cover how to make mental changes as well as lifestyle changes in order to reduce our impact on the Earth.

The first step in the Green Shift is perhaps the most difficult one- accepting the problem. Most of us in the United States live in a culture where it is easy to ignore the devastating impact we have on the environment. Every week our trash is taken away to someplace where we don’t have to worry about it. Every day our water goes down the drain during the long, hot shower we take after a stressful day. Every time we go to the grocery store there is an abundance of food on the shelves, so we never have to ration. In our society, we never have to worry about where the trash is going, or how many gallons of water go down the drain, or where our food is coming from. However, by expanding our local mindset to a global perspective, we can see the severe issues that plague our planet. It is easy to ignore the problems and it is painful to accept them, but accepting is the first step to making improvements.

It can be difficult to widen our perspectives beyond our own community where we may not be able to see the effects of our daily habits. Some may not want to learn about the harsh realities, but those who do will be able to make a real difference.

The most important thing we can do to broaden our perspective is educate ourselves. National Geographic is a great source for learning how people around the world live. In one of their videos, See How Children Live in the World’s Most Polluted City , it is impossible to ignore the impact of pollution on people around the world. So many children live in life threatening conditions because of the carelessness of humans as a whole. In an article by the World Health Organization, it is estimated that each year 1.7 million children under 5 years old die each year due to unhealthy environments. In another frightening call to action by the World Health Organization, Dr. Maria Neira, Director of the Department of Public Health, states that “Urban air pollution continues to rise at an alarming rate, wreaking havoc on human health,”. When you start to research the terrible effects of humankind on the environment and in turn, on each other, it is clear that we need to make a change.

I want to personally thank you for taking the first step in the Green Shift to improve our planet and the lives of our brothers and sisters around the world. If we all work together, it is never too late to make a change.