Take Care of Our Environment 10 Easy Ways You Can Contribute Now By Reducing Waste

This planet belongs to all of us, we are all stakeholders in the outcome of our global decisions and how well we take care of our environment. It is well known that humans have left our influence or global footprint on our planet. What does this mean? It means our actions and our way of life has influenced, changed and left an impact on our environment.

You might ask yourself how bad it really is and what impact have we really had? The news quite often shows us about major global issues such as global warming, our dwindling fresh water supply or deforestation. There are whole areas on our planet that are un-inhabitable due to human caused disasters or testing and devastating pollution levels. There are many more concerns that I have not included. We have unfortunately contributed to all of these international issues.

I have been working towards improving my personal living environment to make a healthy difference in mine and my family’s lives. When I really started looking into what I could do for my own life improvement the topic of how to take care of our environment by reducing waste came up. I have always been passionate about how I can do my part to help improve our deteriorating conditions on our planet.

Check out my article on Natural Healthy Living and 10 Easy Steps to Take Now

Many of these issues are global concerns much larger than one person can solve. Maybe one person cannot change things but if we all work together, we could start to make a difference. I found this very interesting, that perhaps the small actions I do day in, and day out can help. If we all make small changes than maybe it can add up and help change the tide of our larger issues. One area I found I could make a small difference in was reducing waste I generate.

Below are a handful of ideas for reducing waste that we can all be a part of to take care our environment:

• Recycle and reuse
• Only use what you need
• Watch your packaging and containers
• Donate or sell versus throw out
• Pay attention to expiry FIFO
• Take car of the things you have
• Buy in bulk
• Stop going fast food and pack your own lunch
• Choose to go paperless
• Reduce the drive

Helpful Ways to Take Care of Our Environment

Recycle and Reuse

Recycling is a great way to reduce waste and a very good way to help to take care of our environment. The thought here is to reuse items rather than throw them out. For items that purely are trash, recycling can help take things like plastics, metals and other materials and repurpose them rather than sending them to landfills or dump sites. For example, places that manufacture plastic items can melt down the existing plastic you threw out and reuse it to generate another plastic item. We can reduce waste, help our environment and conserve resources by doing so.

Recycling can take time and effort. One way to reduce this effort is by sorting out your recyclables when you throw out the trash. Placing a plastic bottle in a separate bin than the rest of your trash for example helps reduce the effort later needed to separate items. Reducing the size of our landfills is a great goal to have and to do so we would all need to do our part to throw out less trash. One thing you can do on top of setting your own home up to recycle is to start a workplace or community recycle program. Get others involved, make it a group effort to clean up our environment.

Only Use or Make What You Need

How does only making what you need help take care of our environment? It reduces waste. You are throwing out less if you only make and use what you need. I actually struggled to adjust to this for years. I grew up in a larger family. My family would prepare meals in bulk. We would eat the meal within a few days and throw out what we did not eat after a few days. This is unfortunately a mental that does contribute to waste. Cooking massive quantities and then having it go bad before you can eat it.

I found that I could plan out meals I ate or prepare smaller amounts for my family. If it was something that would go bad quickly, I prepared less, only what I needed. This cut back on the waste of expired food from my fridge. Another trick I did was that I would prepare some meals in bulk if it could be frozen. I would prepare it in bulk, serve out what we would eat over the next few days and freeze the remaining. This concept goes for anything that go bad quickly.

Donate or Sell Verses Throw Out

We all have items at one point or other that do need to be thrown away. This is something we can think a different way about. Sure, you could throw out the tea shirts you don’t wear anymore or that pair of shoes that you just don’t really want. When we do this though we are only adding to the problem. Are the shirts or shoes still in good condition or repairable? If so and you still do not want them try donating them or selling them instead. There is a saying, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Someone else may need what you are throwing away. This is a great way to reduce waste and in a way is a part of recycling, re-using and re-purposing an item.

Watch Your Packaging and Containers

A good portion of pollution in our rivers, lakes and ocean is plastic, aluminum or other material that take a while to decompose. These materials also fill our landfills. We need to think of ways to reduce our use of materials that don’t biodegrade quickly. One way is pay attention to the packaging or containers of things you purchase or use. Try to think of ways to reduce the use of disposable plastics and other materials. One of such ways is to stop using plastic water bottles. Use instead a reusable bottle that you can wash out and re-fill. These can last you some time if you take care of them.

Try to buy products with no packaging or minimal packaging. An example would be buying food fresh rather than stored frozen or pre-packaged. This is sometimes healthier anyways as you can avoid many preservatives put in canned or pre-packaged foods. It also helps support your local farmers market. Bring your own re-usable grocery bag to shop rather than relying on the plastic bags the store place your food in.

You can look at packaging of bulk items you buy as well. Let’s take tea for example. You can buy a box that contains several individual use tea bags each wrapped in a bag and each wrapped in a paper or plastic packaging. To reduce wasteful packaging, you could look for a can of loose tea. You would cut back on all the packaging for the individually wrapped tea bags.

Another way to help take care of our environment with this is to try to use products with environmentally friendly packaging. You can switch from using your liquid soap in a bottle to using bar soap wrapped in a paper. If you look around many shops will use environmentally friendly packaging for most everything they sell. You can also find packaging that manufacturers will recycle. You can send back the bottle and it will be re-used rather than thrown in the trash.

Pay Attention to Expiry FIFO

As you are using your perishable items paying attention to FIFO is actually rather important on reducing wase. What is FIFO? This acronym stands for first in first out. Basically, it is telling you to pay attention to expiration dates. Use the product that will expire first. A good example would be if you decided to buy two jugs of milk, one expires in May and the other expires in April. Using the FIFO mental you would use up the milk expiring in April before you started using the other one. This reduces the chance of one of your products expiring before you use it, which in turn reduces waste. This process is used by many grocery stores and retail stores. They use this method to make sure they sell inventory that will expire first, which in turn help reduce waste.

Take Care of the Things You Have

We throw away broken items. That is a mental most of us have. How can we reduce the need to throw away things? One thought is to take care of the things you have. This can have a few different meanings. The coffee maker you have is rather old but still functions just fine because you took care of it. You cleaned it when it needed cleaning, and you serviced it when parts became broken. This helped to keep you from throwing it out and in turn reduces one more item from loading up our waste sites. Keep things, clean, service your items as needed and replace parts as they are worn.

What happens when something breaks? Time to throw it out and get another right? What if instead we fixed our broken items? I can sew a button back on a shirt and it is still completely usable. My car has broken down, but I can replace the smaller part that broke rather than trash the whole vehicle and get another. Let’s take care of our environment by cutting back what we throw into our landfills and trash by taking care of our things.

Buy in Bulk

Buying in bulk can be helpful if you do it right. Obviously buying 100 carrots verses 20 for the week may not work out for your lifestyle. You would not want the 100 carrots to go bad if you could not use them all. However, you can buy products that have long shelf lives or non-perishables in bulk. Things such as the no perishable snacks you put in your child’s lunch box, coffee, tea, sugar, spices and even basic home good items.

Why buy in bulk? Doing so can reduce the amount of packaging you are discarding. You do need to be careful in this. Sometimes bulk packed items contain many smaller packages within. Try to pick bulk items that have only one large package. For example, there is a bulk package that contains several different types of tea, each tea is individually wrapped. This would not be helping in reduce waste as each of the tea types had individual packaging that will be disposed of. Rather than this, buy loose tea packaged in one large container.

Stop Going Fast Food and Pack Your Own Lunch

This one has a few good benefits. Eating fast food in general is not very healthy for you and in many cases the environment. Most fast food comes with packaging, paper, plastic or aluminum wrapping and bags. Let’s not forget about the material drink cups are and the straws, napkins and condiment packets that come with most meals. As soon as we finish, we throw this away, which in turn continues to build up in our landfills and on the side of our highways. If we choose to eat less fast food, we not help improve our own health, but we improve the environment around us.

Choose to go Paperless

This concept came with the modern day digitalized lives we have. How many bills and bank statements do we still receive that is paper? Now think about how much of this mail you throw away. Sure, some are kept for a time and then at some point we still throw things away. We now have digital storage on our computers, cell phones and of course we can always use memory sticks. Think about keeping your bills and statements online and going paperless. This is a great way for you to reduce waste that you toss out into the trash.

Reduce the Drive

Our expansive world has motivated us as humans to utilize our automobiles more now than ever. We live further from our jobs than ever before. For many of us we spend a few hours a day in our cars driving to support running errands, going to work, getting family to school or other needed locations. The exhaust that each of our cars put out on a daily basis by billions worldwide is very extensive. This is a huge issue and a one of the causes for air pollution. It also is a major drain on recourses such as gas and oil.

I decided to include this as part of helping to reduce waste to take care of our environment because we can all do our part and cut back a bit on our driving. Reducing the drive times or reducing the number of times you use your car can help to improve our environment. and help cut back on wasting materials that are being depleted around us. It may not be possible for everyone or for every occasion, but there are things that you can do to help reduce our time in the car. Taking a bus to get around is one way to reduce the number of cars on the road. One bus can carry 50 or more people. That is 50 less cars driving about. Another is walking. Not everything is close enough to walk, but there are occasions that you can walk instead of drive.

Final Thoughts for Reducing Waste to Take Care of our Environment

There are so many ways we can take care of our environment reducing waste is just one of many. It is something we can all take part in. We can each set smaller goals that can help with waste reduction. If everyone chips in and does their part, we can make big things happen and maybe eliminate some of our larger global problems. Start making the change today to improve your life and others get the ripple effect moving. Don’t take the journey alone let’s do this together. Let’s keep this planet living and green for future generations to come.

We would love to hear your thoughts on the topic. Let us and others know experiences you have had or have taken in the journey to a better you.