Andrea's Everything Eco Exploration

Unplug electronics after you're done using them: chargers, kettles, coffee machines, etc . Try regrowing some food from kitchen scraps. Celery and lettuce can regrow simply by placing them in a cup of water on a windowsill. More on that  here . Collect rain water in a barrel attached to your eave strophe  and use it for watering your garden and lawn. And only water in the early morning when it's cool and the water wont evaporate Try biking somewhere once a week. Either to school, work or running a close errand. Cutting back on our dependence on vehicles can reduce harmful chemicals like carbon monoxide, sulfur and nitrous-oxides from being released into the atmosphere. Switch to low flow shower heads, low flush toilets to save water. switch to efficient electronics and light bulbs (or simply turn them off!) to save on electricity, which is generated mostly by coal here in Alberta. (yucky) Keeping curtains closed at night will act as a layer of insulation, keeping your ho

Today I attended a discussion on how to make a better Calgary. The first part of the talk was dominated by the subject of the road ring from the perspective of a native living on the Tsuu T'ina reserve and it was very eye opening. The second part started with a discussion, started by me, about Calgary's waste management systems, the lacking of recycling infrastructure around the city, forcing people to throw it all away or simply throw it on the ground. This evolved into finding the causes of consumerism and how we can shift the collective consciousness towards a smaller, sustainable mindset. We talked a lot about 'Transition towns', small self sufficient communities built on cooperation, on borrowing rather than buying, growing and composting rather than throwing away. In smaller communities it would be more obvious to see all the fine workings of a system, and with this awareness of our surroundings people would lean away from consumerism, from the commodity of conven

Did you know the average hand help power tool is only used for 2 minutes before it's thrown away? It's bought for one project, then sits on a shelf for years. We need to develop a society based on borrowing instead of buying, reusing, creating, rather than simply consuming. We have more than enough useless crap on this planet, we should stop making more soon or else all our natural resources will have been converted to plastics and textiles which are useless to nature and will stick around for thousands of years. It isn't sustainable and one day it will become alarmingly clear. So we need to start weening ourselves off of materialism, slowly ease back on this consumerist behavior. Buy thrift. Reuse plastic bags and saran wrap. make gifts rather than buying them. use reusable bottles and mugs. upcycle old furniture and knick-knacks. start a window garden. bring reusable bags everywhere you go. bring your own reusable food container to a restaurant for your doggy bag. The

Great tips, courtesy of  give a shit about nature  on Facebook. Plastic is a petroleum product, and if thrown away will never degrade. If we all cut back on our 'disposable' plastic waste we can greatly increase the life of our landfills and reduce our dependence on oil based products

When I was travelling in Portland last month me and my friends decided to get tattoos. I've wanted a recycling symbol ever since my first tattoo, because to me there is a lot of meaning behind it. Obviously it means reuse reduce recycle, but the symbol itself: three arrows connected in a never-ending loop, can be interpreted as the three main stages of a product's life. Production, consumption and disposal, working together without an end. In my ideal world there would be no wasteful practices, no disposable items to satisfy our demanding 'needs'. Instead, everything would be recyclable fixable or reusable, and all the end-products could directly fuel the inputs and we wouldn't need to constantly extract raw materials from the Earth only to have them thrown away a short while later. Our actions aren't sustainable, but where there's a will there's a way to manifest it in reality. It'll only be a matter of time until the rest of the population will r

I've been composting my whole life. My parents had built a big compost bin in our garden and it yielded such rich hummus that when spread on the garden made it grow so great. Now that I'm living on my own, even though I don't have a garden or even much of a backyard (we live in a basement suite) I still felt it necessary to build a compost bin. You never realize how much food waste is generated every day until you start composting. We are able to divert probably a third of our household waste by composting. When this is combined with avid recycling, we probably only throw away 25% of our waste in the trash. The rest is reused and kept out of the landfills. It is my personal opinion that we as a city should compost, not only on the large scale but also at the indivdual scale. Making a compost bin is not very hard, and it helps divert a sizeable percentage of daily waste. If everyone in Canada composted, we would divert enough waste to cover San Fran Sisco in two feet of co

1) Be prepared! If you know you're going shopping, bring your reusable bags. If you're going to buy coffee, bring your own mug. There wouldn't be a need for so much disposable one time waste, which fills our landfills needlessly, if we planned ahead and utilized reusable materials. 2)Everyone should have a water filter either attached to the tap or a britta pitcher. It will filter the hardness and chemicals like sulfate, chloride and calcium out of the water, resulting in better tasting and purer water than bottled water. In my opinion bottled water is the stupidest product ever. Bottling tap water into plastic bottles, transporting it and selling it, is highly unsustainable and a waste of resources. If we all brought our own reusable water bottles with us, we could save a lot of needless waste and energy. 3) If you're like me and have leaky taps, a good interim solution is to collect that water and use it. I place my britta filter under the tap over night, and it p