Earth Day 2009 and Give Away

Today is Earth Day. What did you do to make a difference?

Earth Day was first conceived by Sen. Gaylord Nelson in the early 1960s. Nelson worried that environmental issues were not being addressed in the political arena. In his conservation efforts, Nelson organized a nationwide grassroots demonstration in the spring of 1970, to further promote conservation involvement and awareness. Support for and interest in the activity was immense and the 1970 demonstration became the first official Earth Day. Each year, April 22 marks the celebration of Earth Day, which is now observed around the world.

Did you know that:
Each year, 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide. That translates to over 1 million per minute! Take action by lobbying your council for a ban on plastic bags. In five and a half years, Ireland has reduced its check-out bag usage by more than 90%.

Last year one of the radio stations here in Montreal was offering the public a recyclable shopping bag if you brought in your old plastic shopping bags and I did and got a cute black bag from them. I love this bag. The only bummer part is that this radio station is no longer called that name that is on the bag.
(This is where you got the Brita kit)

One Brita pitcher filter can effectively replace as many as 300 standard 500mL water bottles.

Did you know that on average more then 47% of the contents of a garbage bag is kitchen and green waste?

This year they came back to the mall that I live near and this time they called it the Big Bottle Exchange. You bring in your plastic water bottles and got a Brita kit. What a great idea isn’t it? I heard that from 10am to 11:30 am they had given away 800 Brita kits to the general public. I will post tomorrow the final Brita/water bottle count when I know it. Just found out that the 800 Brita kits were all given out this morning.

This morning from 10am to 1pm Virgin’s radio announcer Nat was there and since I have her on my Facebook I had to go up and say “Hey Nat” I got this picture taken with her. She is just as nice in person as she is on the radio.

GIVE AWAY TIME:
What do you do to clean up the Earth? I would love to hear what you do and you might be lucky enough to win a little earth day giveaway. This is what one lucky reader of mine will win:

THE PRIZE:
-1 walmart recycle shopping bag
-Haley’s Hints Green Edition: 1,000 great tips to save time,money and the planet!
-a packet size notebook that is 100% recycle
-one eco inpirations bookmark it comes with a seed paper that you can plant
-2 recycled pencils. They are made from recycled newspapers and glue. There is no wood in the pencil.

WHAT WE DO TO HELP THE PLANET:
For us we are big time recyclers. Anything that can be recycled is recycled. Things we no longer need or use we donate to charity.

Last summer our street was lucky enough to take part in a pilot project for organic composting. So that meant we got this huge green bin and you are to put organic waste in. Such as food, weeds, basically anything that can be composted went in there. I admit at first it took some time to get use it but when we finally got into it we realized exactly how much we use to throw away. We had twice a week grabage pick up and we could easily put out 2-3 bags of garbage out on those days and now we are down to one small bag once a week.

I just got some stats from my local munciplity about Kitchen & Green Waste and during the pilot project 760 tons of green and kitchen waste was diverted from the landfill site and transformed into compost. (87 was kitchen waste & 673 was green waste).

Here are some two links you can check out. They might only be Canadian. If you have any American post them in your comments and I will post them here. By the way anyone who posts links in their comments will get a bonus of 3 entries into the contest.

http://calculator.ecoactionteams.ca/welcome.aspx

http://green.cbc.ca/ I joined this and its a great site to keep track of your total acts of green and your Green House Gas reduced. This site is geared towards all places not just Canada.

My contest will start today April 22nd and run until the end of the month April 30th.

Please note that I am only able to mail to Canada and the US. The reason is the cost of shipping items.