Every April 22 is Earth Day. How are you observing Earth Day today?

It was first celebrated in 1970. Earth Day is held to demonstrate support for environmental protection. Events are coordinated globally by the Earth Day Network in more than 193 countries. Read more about it on Wiki and on EarthDay.org.

Our home planet needs our attention, instead of careless living where we take her for granted.

My 3 easy ways to save the Earth:

1. Make an effort to recycle

I don’t think the culture of recycling or much education is being done in my country. The government encourages you to do it, and place numbers of recycling bins in public areas, but they don’t tell you recycling “best practices”. Meaning, things like, do I need to rinse the milk carton before I dispose of it into the recycling bin? I’m guessing people won’t have the resources to do that for the bins that are placed in public next to normal trash bins?

As such, what I do, in my limited capacity, I separate the trash from the recyclables in my home. There is a big recycling bin in my apartment block. So I throw out the recyclables into that bin.

Almost everything I come across can be recycled nowadays. I look out for the recycling symbol with the corresponding recycling code number in it.

In case you didn’t know, these are what those numbers represent, according to Wikipedia:

“Recycling codes are used to identify the material from which an item is made, to facilitate easier recycling or other reprocessing.”

2. Go car-less

Due to financial reasons, my husb had to sell the car. We’ve been car-less since Jan 2016.

After the car was sold, he had to re-learn how to take public transport, and to be ok squeezing with throngs of people since our country is pretty densely populated. I’m actually pretty proud of him that he eased into take public transport and now is pretty good at it. Even better than me I’d say! It sometimes is pretty amusing and fun to take the bus and train with him ^_^

Due to work and his adventurous nature, he drives a lot. Being car-less means that we’ve helped to reduce the amount of harmful emissions produced by the car.

We are lucky that we live in the city and are well connected to everywhere else since the public transport service here is far-reaching and efficient. We also live close by to grocery stores and other amenities. If we ever need a car, we simply call an Uber!

3. Wash laundry in cold water

Maybe it’s an Asian thing, but we don’t really wash our clothes in warm/hot water.

Personally, I’m afraid of any damage that might do to clothes. And incidentally, that saves energy compared to washing clothes in hot water!

According to Gizmodo:

• laundry exerts a significant global footprint. Of the total energy use and greenhouse-gas emissions produced by a single load of laundry, approximately 75% of it comes from warming the water itself.
• doing laundry in cold water will save you upwards of $60 per year (or more if you live in an area with higher-than-average electricity rates)
• lower temperatures protect the dyes, and therefore the color of clothes, while also helping to preserve the fit of the clothes by preventing shrinkage, particularly along the seams.

Loving the Earth is a form of self love and self respect

Our physical body is our home, but our body’s home is Mother Earth.

That’s why i think that if we love ourselves enough, we will extend that love to our environment. Not saying we should all go out and be tree-hugging activists (unless you should, of course), but I urge you to do your part.

If we all individually do our part, we can make a big impact and improvement on how we are treating our home planet.

Damage has been done for sure, and I’m not a scientist, but I’m sure we can still pitch in to either delay the inevitable, or to prevent irreparable damage entirely.

From earthday.org:

This Earth Day, We are launching an ambitious goal of achieving global climate and environmental literacy by Earth Day 2020. Education is the foundation for progress. We need to build a global citizenry, which is fluent in the concepts of climate change, and aware of its unprecedented threat to our planet. We need to empower everyone with knowledge to act in defense of environmental protection.

Download educational Earth Day tool kits here.

What are your thoughts on Earth Day, and do you use any easy ways to save the Earth too?