Tips for Earth Month and My New Upcycled Fabric Acessories!

April is not only Earth Day, but Earth Month, a great time to learn more about how to live a life that is kinder to the planet and minimizes our consumption of resources and impact on the environment.

Choosing to DIY is a terrific way to reduce personal impact. Make your own whenever possible! :) A little resourcefulness and research will allow you to create your own unique version of pretty much anything, and doing so reduces consumption from manufacturing and waste through using recycled, repurposed, upcycled, or reclaimed materials! Do-it-yourself when designing, creating, building, and crafting!

This leads me to talk up my latest creations on the handmade front. I've been spending time designing cuff bracelets using lovely old buttons and pieces, scraps, and remnants of vintage & antique fabrics, laces and trim, and ribbons. Old feed sack, pieces of crazy quilt, dress remnants, old linens, scraps of lace and trim- all of it is lots of fun to create with. It's been fun to dig into the collection of pretty lace and linens I've been building. Vintage pretties are a huge weakness.

Here's a photo with some examples. Come and see more this Saturday, April 30th, at my table at Mt Lebanon's Earth Day Celebration!




Here are a few other tips I personally use to live sustainably. We have reduced our household waste to one kitchen trash bag per week since adopting some of these practices!

Choose just one or two to start with, or a few that make the most sense to you. And although making them a regular habit is best, doing them just whenever when you can is still awesome!

* Recycle everything!
Recycle everything possible in your area: glass & plastic, aluminum and tin, corrugated cardboard, paper board, newspaper, office paper, magazines, junk mail, phone books, electronics, batteries, cork, ink cartridges (most office supply stores), and more. Not every area has curbside recycling, and curbside recycling doesn't always pick up all of these things. But most areas have recycling centers where much of the above can be taken. Earth 911 is an excellent website that allows you to find your local recycling center and look up where to recycle anything you can imagine. Also, be sure to purchase products only in containers that are recyclable in your region.

* Compost.
Composting reduces solid waste being added to landfills and sent to incinerators & makes that waste a useful product while rebuilding the soil and enriching the earth, our gardens, and landscapes. Create compost from yard trimmings and household food waste (plant-based only). There are loads of how-to guides out there. :)

* Reuse shipping supplies.
Save bubble wrap, boxes, and envelopes from your own packages to send your new mail, both personal and business. Remove or cover old postage and postal markings and tape or stick on a new label. Cover any commercial markings on cardboard boxes. Use brown paper bags inside out to wrap boxes or black out writing. Make your own boxes with old cereal boxes!

* Purchase groceries with very little or no packaging.
When buying food, go for as little packaging and wrapping as possible. Buy fresh produce singly rather than in pre-wrapped multiples. Buy the largest container of an item that you can carry and afford, such as the jumbo-size laundry detergent rather than the smaller bottles. Buy in bulk at local grocery stores (may take some research to find one), and if possible, take your own recycled and reusable containers in which to carry the bulk items.

* When possible, walk, bike, or use public transportation instead of driving.
Bike to work, take the bus to an appointment, walk to the movies or the grocery store. Besides reducing energy consumption, walking and biking are great exercise!

* Garbage responsibly.
Many things we throw away can be harmful to wildlife or the environment. Use care when throwing away to minimize danger to animals, and make sure chemicals and other potentially hazardous household waste items are taken to proper sites for discarding.

* Eat organic and local.
There are countless reasons to choose organic and local as often as possible. The Eat Well Guide offers a great resource for finding sustainable food sources near you.

* Go veg!
Going vegan is one of the most important and influential actions a person can take to reduce their impact on the planet. Going vegetarian also has an enormous positive effect on the environment. Eating a meatless, plant-based diet even one meal or day per week can reduce environmental degradation in countless ways. Read about why going vegetarian is the easiest and quickest way to lower your carbon footprint, reduce pollution, and save energy and water. And see why the United Nations report agrees.

* Grow an organic garden.
Commercial farming creates large amounts of industrial pollution, and non-organic farming degrades the soil, water supply, and land. According to eHow Home, growing your own food reduces pollution, adds biodiversity and improves air quality, and is more nutritious! Making your garden organic makes food safer and healthier for humans and other living beings and the planet.

* Pick up litter.
If you go for walks, take along a bag and a pair of puncture- and water-resistant gloves to pick up recyclables and trash you pass along the way. Make the environment safer and prettier!

* Use a dishwasher.
According to Treehugger, using dishwasher uses only half the energy and one-sixth of the water than does hand washing dishes, and also uses less soap. Using the "light" cycle uses even less water, and letting dishes air dry rather than heat dry uses less energy. Also try to wait until the dishwasher is full before running a cycle to wash less often.

* Use cold water for laundry and dishes.
Both use less energy then using hot water, which requires heating. Line drying over using a dryer when washing clothes is another way to use less energy.

* Give away or repurpose unwanted possessions rather than tossing them.
Reduce landfill waste, consume less, and lessen the environmental impact of manufacturing new goods. Instead of throwing away what you no longer want or need, donate to charity thrift stores, give away items on Freecycle.com, sell used belongings in your local paper or on craigslist, or find a friend or family member who may want what you don't.

Go Veg- Nurture Yourself and Earth!

Choosing not to eat meat makes an enormously important ecological impact. Here are some mind-blowing facts about how living a veg lifestyle can benefit the earth:

*Water- Each pound of meat not produced could provide a typical household water for a whole month! Roughly 2,500 gallons of water is required to produce that pound of meat- I3 to 15 times as much water needed to produce the same amount of plant protein. (NAVS) In addition, livestock produces billions of tons of waste/manure every year, contaminating water supplies, killing fish, poisoning drinking water, and contributing to birth defects and disease (Nutting).

*Wasted Resources- It takes up to 16 pounds of soybeans and grains to produce 1 lb. of beef (GoVeg.com)! If Americans alone reduced their meat consumption by 10%, over one-billion people throughout the world could be saved from starvation (Vegi Buro).

*Topsoil erosion- Every year in the U.S. alone, several billion tons of topsoil are lost each year on cropland and grazing land- almost all of which can be attributed to livestock agriculture. This is about the equivalent of losing four inches of topsoil over four million acres of cropland! (Veg. Soc. of CO)

*Fossil Fuel- It takes 78 calories of fossil fuel to produce 1 calorie of beef protein, but just 1 calorie of fossil fuel for 1 calorie of soybeans (NAVS). Forty pounds of soybeans are produced by the same amount of fossil fuel required to produce one pound of meat (Nutting)!

*Tropical rainforests – It takes 55 square feet of rainforest to make 1 hamburger from imported cattle! The demand for meat is a huge factor in the devastation of the world’s rainforests, which are being destroyed at an alarming 100 acres per second, in part to provide cheap beef for export. Every lost acre means less oxygen due to destroyed vegetation, extinct species, and more carbon dioxide to contribute to global warming. (NAVS)

*Climate- Livestock are the cause of 15-20 percent of global methane emissions- cows produce one pound of methane for every 2 pounds of meat they yield. That's about 40 percent more than vehicle emissions and more than all the homes and offices in the world put together! (NAVS) One molecule of methane contributes 25 times more to the Greenhouse effect than one molecule of carbon (Vegi-Buro).

*If you ate plant-based meals every other day for a year, you would save 487 pounds of CO2. Based on this figure, going veggie for one week would save about 19 pounds of CO2. (eartheasy.com) **~This translates into 106,792 pounds saved per year by EtsyVeg members alone!~**

* Fifteen total vegetarians can be fed on the same amount of land needed to feed one person on a meat-based diet (NAVS).

In other words, every person who chooses to go veg could potentially save hundreds of thousands of gallons of water, save valuable rainforest and land, protect wildlife, increase the food supply for the hungry, reduce energy use, and reduce global warming. Check out some easy changes you can make to reduce your impact on the planet, and/or to go veg!