Earth Day is April 22nd, but many people extend the celebration to make it Earth Week. Depending on how you choose to celebrate, Earth Week runs from April 16th to Earth Day, April 22nd, or it is the week that includes Earth Day, which is April 17-23, 2011. Make a difference this week! Try making a small change that will benefit the environment. Keep at it all week so that by the time Earth Day arrives it might become a lifelong habit. Turn down your water heater or only water your lawn in the early morning or install energy efficient light bulbs or recycle. Be conscious of chemical wastes you produce and how you return them to the environment. Happy Earth Week!
Check out our latest E-News for ways you can contribute this year for Earth Day PLUS download a cool at home experiment – Compost in a Cup!
Exactly 1 week until Earth Day! What are you planning to do for Mother Earth? Our April E-News contained several simple ideas that we can do everyday to reduce our carbon footprint. We’ve become a society that appreciates disposable over durability. Recycling is on the rise, but we still toss out way more than we reuse. Plastic bottles are one of the biggest offenders usually ending up in the trash, or even worse, tossed out into nature.
There are ways to re-purpose those 20-ounce containers. If you don’t want to build a ship out of that plastic, you can use sand or soil to fill the bottles that are often collected at recycling centers or in clean-up drives, then stack them to create walls. Sand, concrete or adobe are packed around the rows of bottles to add strength creating homes for those who don’t have the monetary resources to buy standard building materials in some parts of the world. Another unusual bit of recycling in some of these homes is the way CD cases are used to construct windows. This bottle construction method is also used to build cisterns in areas where water is a commodity that is hard to come by.
For those who already have a home but are blessed with a green thumb, another way to reuse the bottles is by building a green house. Instead of packing mud or concrete around the clear plastic containers, they are left uncovered to allow the heat of the sun to pass through and nurture and provide warmth for young plants.
Once you’ve used up all the plastic from your garbage for you green house, you might want to check out these other tips on using garbage in your garden.
Inspiration Green has lots more images of these creative recycling constructions.
