10 At-Home Earth Day Activities To Do While We Wait For Climate Action
Originally published on BUST Magazine 4/13/23Earth Day is just around the corner, and there’s no better time to take a pause, reflect on your community and engage in some earth-friendly activities. If you’re looking for some inspiration on how to spend your Earth Day, check out our suggestions below to get involved in a good cause!
Clean Up a Water Way
Whether it’s a river, pond, lake, ocean or creek, there’s a good chance there’s a body of water close to you that needs a little attention. Constantly moving bodies of water, like rivers, can carry trash with it down from sources that could be hundreds of miles away. Clearing the water basin of trash, recycling and other debris will keep the trash out of the river and also prevent plastic items from breaking down into microplastics and other pollutants in your water ways.
Plant Some Native Flowers & Pollinators
There are so many benefits to planting native flowers in your yard, balcony or even a free public space in your area. Infrastructure development and commercial landscaping projects can deplete a community’s native plant population. It’s not just an aesthetic choice; these plants are vital to preserving biodiversity in your community. Big time pollinators like bees, butterflies, and certain birds rely on these plants for sustenance. Check out this search option to see what is native in your area.
Clean Up Your Street or Favorite Park
Cleaning up the streets you walk on every day, or your favorite green space, is a great way to improve your community for free. It can improve the look of the neighborhood, prevent hazardous waste build up, and ensure everyone has a nice outdoor space to relax. Bring a pair of gloves and a trash bag to pick up any trash or recycling. Make sure to have a separate bag for recyclables so that they can be properly processed. Not only will you give your community a facelift, you’ll prevent trash from entering the water system through sewer drains.
Invest in a Rain Barrel
If you have a yard, consider investing in a rain barrel to catch fresh rainwater to use in your garden after a downpour. Collecting rainwater will lessen your water usage, reduce your carbon footprint all while keeping your garden lush. Make sure to see if rain barrels are legal in your community, and if the law mandates any specific requirements about rain collection. If you invest in a rain barrel, look for one made of recycled plastic to double-up on your eco-karma.
Join Your Local “Buy Nothing” Group
“Buy Nothing” groups give members a great way to declutter and gift your belongings to someone you know will get good use out of it. In the group, people offer up items they are discarding. Everything is free of cost and it’s often a first-come-first-served situation. Not only can you give your belongings to a new home, you can also pick up things you need for your own abode. My “buy nothing” group has saved me from making so many purchases -- I even got a replacement blade for a food processor that I would have otherwise had to toss! Check on facebook or discord for a local “buy nothing” group, based on your town or neighborhood.
Support a Local Farmer
Even the most populated cities create urban farms and develop hyper-local spaces to grow produce, flowers or honey. Shopping locally is one of the most impactful eco-friendly habits you can develop. Not only can you access some of the most fresh (and often affordable) produce, you also greatly reduce the amount of packing and transportation required to deliver produce to consumers around the country. This helps your farmers maintain their spaces, protecting local land and wildlife, and of course supports your local workforce!
Start an At-Home Compost
Did you know you don’t even need a foot of outdoor space to start composting? The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that food waste makes up the biggest percentage of our everyday trash, constituting nearly 25% of municipal solid waste. And this is a real shame, because when food isn’t given the space to properly decompose and return to the soil, the food rots and produces methane, a greenhouse gas that is 25 times as potent as CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere. Many cities offer free composting programs, but if yours doesn’t, you can easily compost at home. Starting an at-home compost can help you greatly minimize your food waste, even if you’re in a small apartment with no greenspace. Forbes has a great guide on how to get started-- you just need a container with a lid and some worms to start producing your own nutrient-rich soil!
Plant Your Favorite Vegetables
A bucket, some soil, and a sunny window is all you need to produce some of your favorite veggies. Tomatoes, potatoes, and even your favorite herbs can grow easily inside an apartment or a small plot of land. Having a surplus of your favorite vegetables is a great way to incorporate fresh produce into your diet as well as minimizing the environmental impact of grocery shopping. You can even use soil from your compost and water from your rain barrel if you have them!
Learn How to Ecobrick
If you’re overwhelmed with the amount of plastic packaging used for products you need everyday, you are not alone. Most soft plastics, aka plastics that you can crumble up (like the wrapper of a candy bar for example) are often difficult to recycle, and not all municipal systems are robust enough to process them. Check in your area to see if there’s a soft plastic drop off bin. If not, consider ecobricking. Ecobricking is the process of cutting up cleaned and dried but non-recyclable plastic into small parts and stuffing them into a plastic bottle. Over time, the bottle will be so full of plastic that it becomes incredibly tough. Ecobricks not only keep these plastics out of the waste stream and water stream, they can be used to actually build things! Ecobrick collection agencies have requirements on the type of plastic bottle needed, weight and dimension requirements, etc. Start taking a look at ecobricks.org to see how to incorporate this habit into your everyday life.
Write To Your Members of Congress
As a constituent, you have the right to contact your representatives about anything you feel needs to be prioritized. Earth Day is a great time to reach out to members of congress to remind them that the people demand climate action immediately. You can mention whatever is most important to you, from reducing greenhouse gasses, to penalizing companies who are ruining the ecosystem to eliminating pipeline drilling and so on. If you’re not sure on how to word your letter, websites like the Citizens’ Climate Lobby can help. You can enter your address and it will auto-generate emails to your representatives that you can then go in and edit before sending.
