The Challenge:
Our goal is to challenge people to make a change in their everyday lives, in order to create a more sustainable way of living. Over the course of 10 days, we will educate and advise you on how to take the first steps in YOUR life, to start saving our planet.
10 Day Challenge
- Day 1: Recycle your empty water bottles! When water bottles are not recycled, they spend years in landfills and are unable to biodegrade. By recycling your plastic water bottles, or getting a re-usable water bottle that you can re-fill, you are taking simple steps in your daily life to drastically reduce the amount of waste you produce! A collective effort from all of us to recycle our plastic, versus throwing it out in the trash, will lower pollution and save energy.
- Day 2: Believe it or not, recycling bins are all over the place! Look for bins/cans with the triangle made out of arrows, which signifies a recycling container. On a daily basis, we all produce various amounts of waste. Some of this waste can be disposed of via recycling, such as paper, cardboard, aluminum, glass, and plastics. Before you go to throw things away, take pause and determine whether you can recycle what you are about to throw out, and if so, make the right choice!
- Day 3: Re-using a plastic bag! Every single day, plastic bags are used to carry groceries and other items, generating a huge amount of plastic traveling from stores to homes. By starting to re-use the bags you are given in one store, you can reduce your person waste every day!
- Day 4: Plastic straws are wasteful. Switch them out for re-usable metal straws that help reduce waste by conserving the amount of plastic we go through each and every day! By making this small switch, you can significantly cut down on your plastic waste output.
- Day 5: Re-using a plastic bag is good...but what's even better is switching them out for re-usable grocery bags! By eliminating plastic bags from your daily routine entirely and switching to re-usable ones, you drastically reduce your plastic waste, and decreases the risk of your bags ending up in the oceans or other places where it has a harmful effect to the environment.
- Day 6: Recycle an aluminum can! Every day humans go through exorbitant amounts of alumni cans when drinking sodas, seltzers, and other beverages. If every single one of these is properly recycled, versus being tossed in the garbage, that will create a dramatic change for our environment.
- Day 7: As students, we go through a lot of paper. Homework, tests, study materials - it all adds up. Instead of simply throwing it in the garbage, try to reuse paper where you can, on the blank side, and once you're done with it, make sure to recycle it instead of throwing it out!
- Day 8: Get creative! Look at the items you plan to get rid of every day, is there any way you can creatively repurpose these items? Stay tuned for Day 9 to hear about one of our favorite ways to repurpose things!
- Day 9: One of our favorite ways to repurpose glass bottles is to turn them into flower vases! This is a super creative way to take items that you may find around the house, and repurpose them as decorative additions.
- Day 10: For the final day of The Initiative, we want you all to go outside and plant a tree! This may seem like a strange thing to do, but planting trees is one the best ways to help our environment. Trees produce oxygen and remove contaminants like carbon dioxide from the air. By planting a handful of trees every year, you can take significant steps to slow harmful climate change.