Tag: waste

Individual Change

3 Things You Can Make From Your Plastic Waste!

Taylor Houghton

Here is 3 DIY that takes old waste and turns it into something beautiful! These are great ways to put waste into good use! Check out all 3 videos and get your craft on!

  1. Plastic Water Bottles into a Bench!

    In this DIY, you will be taking plastic water bottles and forming them into a bench. Check out the video below as they take you step by step through the process.

    A padded stool from plastic bottles

    What a clever way to recycle plastic bottles!♻️via MORENA DIY, youtube.com/MORENADIY

    Posted by 5-Minute Crafts on Tuesday, September 20, 2016

  2. Plastic Bags into one reusable Bag!

    In this DIY, you will take your old plastic bags and you will fuse them together to make one reusable bag! Check out the video as it takes you step by step through the process!

    How To Fuse Plastic Bags

    Grab your iron and recycle your shopping bags into something useful!

    Posted by DIY with Hometalk on Tuesday, January 16, 2018

    3. Paper Bags into Flooring!

    In this DIY, you will be taking old paper bags and making them into a floor! It is very easy and different! Check out the video below as they take you step by step through the process!

    How To Make A Paper Bag Floor

    Place paper bags on your floor for this genius updating trick!

    Posted by DIY with Hometalk on Friday, November 3, 2017

America's Effort, Individual Change

Package Free Store

Taylor Houghton

Package Free Stores do exist!!

A lot of us are trying to reduce our waste but it is actually harder than you think… If you look at the products you use everyday, their not package free. Even if you go to your local super market, you will find that the stores don’t even carry a package free product.

I came across a video Lauren Singer shared. She owns a package free store. The difference is the store hold everyday products that you wouldn’t be able to find package free at your typical store. You know her products are good because she uses also every product in the store for herself.

Singer is from New York and she has opened a package free store. She currently lives a waste free lifestyle. All of her trash from over the years, all fits in one tiny mason jar.

She explains in her video that when she tried to live a waste free lifestyle that it was hard for her to find simple things like shampoo. Now she provides all things like this. She even has a system for things like laundry detergent. You bring back your reusable jar to fill it up. She sells a lot of everyday reusable things that you wouldn’t normally think about.

“Every product we have here, I don’t have it just to be functional; it has to be beautiful too.”

Check out this video below!

Package Free shop

This Package Free store is an environmentalist's wonderland.

Posted by Mashable on Wednesday, January 3, 2018

 

Individual Change

Living Waste Free: Guide

Taylor Houghton

Living waste free may seem impossible but it’s not… Trashisfortossers.com gives a great guild to follow:

Image result for living waste free

ESTABLISH YOUR “WHY?”

This is important so you you ever need some motivation too keep going, think of your why! Trashistossers tells us some reasons could be:

Are you a surfer who hates seeing plastic wash up on the beach?

Image result for WHAT IS YOUR WHY

Have you experienced a health scare or issue after using a beauty product containing toxins?

Are you tired of spending $6 on a latte every single day?

Are you fed up with our political leaders not giving a damn about climate change?

Write it on your mirror, tattoo it on your bicep – always come back to you WHY.

Assess Your Waste:

Notice where your making the most waste. Notice what it is and how you can prevent this. Take it one step at a time, baby steps are good and won’t overwhelm you.

PRIORITIZE:

Start changing your everyday ways. Maybe instead of going out or buy coffee from a shop, make your lunch and coffee at home with reusable containers. It can be overwhelming to look at the trash you make but focus on one area at a time, it can be possible!

Replace your items as they run out:Image result for dont throw everything away

You don’t need to go out a buy all your products in zero waste right away. It can be very costly. A good idea is to wait until your products run out then replace them with a zero waste product. Throwing away your product that your not finished using up can be just as wasteful.

RESEARCH HOW TO PROPERLY RECYCLE OLD ITEMS, DONATE, SELL OR UP-CYCLE THEM:

 

 

Don’t just throw away all your old items in the trash. There are ways to property depose of them by recycling,

Image result for recycle and donate

composting, etc. You can find ways to reuse old items, donate them, or give them as a gift. As long as they don’t end up in landfills that is all that matters. If your really struggling what to do with something, look in to the TerraCycle program. They have come up with a solution to recycle just about everything you could think of!

REMEMBER: IT’S A PROCESS!

This is going to take time. It could take up to a year to fully go waste free. Be patient. And don’t give up!

“Everyone’s zero waste journey is different. So never compare yourself to other people. Get inspiration from them, communicate with other zero waste-ers in the process when you have questions or concerns, be supported by other people – not intimidated.”Image result for live waste free dont give up

 

Individual Change

Food Waste into Cooking Gas?!

Taylor Houghton

Homebiogas:

Can you even believe that there is a device that will allow you to turn your food waste into cooking gas! Honestly, your throwing away your food waste anyways, might as well put it to good use. Literally, all I hear is savings!!!

The blow up machine just sits in your backyard! “Homebiogas is an off-grid system that generates clean energy without any electricity AND allows you to properly treat your household waste! The system produces up to 2 hours of cooking gas every day solely from your food scraps or animal waste, ” Homebiogas tells us themselves.

How it works:

The process is easy to assemble and doesn’t require a professional technician, HomeBiogas is a DIY kit!
The system is sent to your home with all the tools and a detailed guide, so it is super easy! All you have to do is activate your system and have a healthy colony of bacteria growing in the digester right in your backyard. Literally, your able to toss your food scraps and/or animal waste into the system and then after that it generates up to 2 hours of cooking gas and fertilizer DAILY. Talk about savings!! $$$

12664

 

 

Below is a video that shows the HOMEBIOGAS in action!

Turn your food waste into cooking gas! Music by Joakim Karud

Turn your food waste into cooking gas!Music by Joakim Karud

Posted by Genius Club on Monday, November 20, 2017

America's Effort, Individual Change

What can I Recycle?

Taylor Houghton

A lot of Americans are now recycling which is great! But… a lot of the times people don’t know what to recycle or if something is able to be recycled or not. To end this confusion and worry that I know we are all having, below is going to be that mystery list that contains what CAN and CANNOT be recycled!

 

I some found interesting information on ecoscapes.com. They had 3 general guidelines that I thought would be beneficial to share:

  1. Recycle all bottles, cans, and paper
  2. Keep items relatively clean
  3. Don’t mix plastic bags in with the rest of your recycled items

 

With that said let’s go over the DO’s and DON’T!

 

DO RECYCLE:

 Plastics/Bottles: This includes any plastic bottles or containers.

Paper and Cardboard: This includes cereal boxes, snack/cracker cardboard boxes, phonebooks, magazines, mail (recommend to take your information off first), all paper, newspaper, and cardboard.

Metals: This includes tin, aluminum, and steel cans.

Glass: This includes food containers, jars, soft drink containers, beer, wine and liquor bottles.

 

do recycle items

 

DON’T RECYCLE: 

Loose Plastic Bags: This includes plastic shopping bags and plastic stretch wrap.

Polystyrene Foam Cups or Containers: This includes egg cartons, take out containers and drinking cups.

Soiled Food Items: This includes food soiled containers and soiled paper products.

Others: This includes broken or sharp glass, fast food packaging and plastic utensils.

Don't Recycle Items

 

 

About 70% of our trash can be recycled

We only recycle 30% 🙁

LET’S CHANGE THAT!!

Start recycling!!!!

 

 

Image result for reuse recycle reduce

Individual Change

Changing your Diet Could Help the Environment

Taylor Houghton

We have all heard of vegans and vegetarian, correct? Well their diet is actually really beneficial to the environment (along with pescetarian diet which I will get to later)! Let me tell you why…

One pound of beef requires 2,500 gallons of water, whereas one pound of soy requires only 250 gallons of water. Also a pound of wheat requires only 25 gallons. Cutting meat from your diet saves water. That’s not all… Image result for beef requires alot of water

Deforestation (cutting down trees) happens because of the need to create space to raise livestock. 1/3 of the planet’s land is used for livestock and the demand is only rising!

Image result for 1/3 of planet used for livestock

Not only that, but you have to think of the food that these livestock eat! That means we need more food to feed these animals and more land to grow the food! An ecologist from Cornell says,”If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million.” On top of that the grains and corn that are wastefully fed to the livestock in the United States, when it could instead be fed to the 60 million human beings who die of starvation every year all over the world.

Finally, the livestock in the Unites States also creates A LOT of waste and toxic emission! Livestock only raised for slaughter produce 130 times the excrement of the entire human population! That’s a lot of shi…poop!

Basically, it takes a lot of land and food to produce meat. Not only that but in the process, a lot of toxic emission is added to the environment! Plant based diets really do help. That’s I am going to try the diet pescetarian, which is basically a vegetarian expect you get to eat sea food. The reason for that is you need your omega 3 acids. This is a bigger change to my life but I can’t say no until I have tried it. I will make another post about how I felt about it and my thoughts. I challenge you to try one of these three diets, you might actually like it!

These are the foods that you can still eat on the pescatarion diet but can’t on the vegan or veggie!