First, ditch the plastic bags. A single-use plastic bag is used on average for a mere 12 minutes. It’ll take that bag more than 500 years to decompose.
So make an effort to bring reusable totes with you when you shop. If you don’t already have reusable bags, buy some. Just look for bags made from recycled plastic, which have a smaller environmental impact than cotton totes.
While you’re grabbing your reusable bags, grab a thermos or tumbler for coffee and tea.
Bonus: Many local and national coffee shops give you a discount for bringing your own cup. That’s money in your pocket.
On a similar note, avoid buying bottled water. Every single minute the world uses one million plastic water bottles. Ninety-one percent of those never end up the recycling bin. Use a reusable water bottle, and it’ll save you about $200 a year.
It’s all about creating a habit of thinking before using. But once you do, you’ll feel better about the planet and save some money too. Check out the video for more ways to reduce your plastic consumption.
More: Five Things That Should Never, Ever Be Flushed Down the Toilet
Tag: Fighting Waste
It’s Time to Stop Replacing Broken Things — These Cafes Have the Solution
Step inside a repair cafe and you’ll find tables filled with welding equipment, wrenches and woodworking tools.
People trickle in holding a broken lamp, ripped quilt or a wobbly bike.
Items are brought in with the hope they might be saved. The quilt might have been a gift from a deceased mother or a bike from a longtime friend.
A repair cafe is often the last step before the junkyard.
Volunteers gather at these cafes and fix broken items for free. The volunteers put their knowledge and skills to the test: What should the torn umbrella be repaired with? What part of a computer’s hard drive needs fixing? How can we salvage this chair?
Usually, the repair sessions take place during the afternoon, inside libraries, community centers, churches and thrift stores. Volunteers come with spools of thread, monkey wrenches and screwdrivers to offer whatever help they can.
Together, they fix the broken items. It’s a service, but it’s also a learning opportunity, so if the item breaks again, the owner can fix it without help.
“What’s really great is not simply that things get fixed but really that it’s a community event,” says Ed Irlbacher, who started a repair cafe in Middletown, New York.
Irlbacher estimates that 90 percent of what comes in can be fixed. Some of the most common items are lamps, electronics and jewelry.
“There are stories of people being attached to a thing because their father left it for them, or they had it from long ago,” says Martine Postma, the founder of Repair Cafe Foundation. “People are so grateful and happy, so that created a very special atmosphere. That really moves me.”
Postma developed the idea for repair cafes after having her second child. She noticed just how easy it is to be wasteful in today’s consumer-focused society.
Instead of repairing a broken iron, you can order a replacement on Amazon. If a shirt tears, you buy a new one. It has become much easier to buy a brand new product rather than repair an old one.
“Why do we make so much waste on a daily basis?” Postma says. “Because we no longer do repairs. So I had this idea to reintroduce repairs as a normal and attractive activity in daily life.”
In 2009, Postma hosted the first repair cafe in Amsterdam. After its success, she launched the nonprofit Repair Cafe Foundation in 2011. For a low fee, the foundation will send you information on how to start your own cafe.
Repair cafes are popping up around the world. Currently, there are about 1,500 cafes in 35 countries around the world.
In 2015, the U.S. generated 262.4 million tons of garbage, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
As landfills grow, there’s a grassroots movement to create less waste. Repair cafes are an easy solution to keep appliances, clothes and furniture out of the garbage while saving money for their owners.
In the U.S., there is also a growing movement supporting the right to repair. Companies like Apple and John Deere deliberately create products that cannot be fixed. For example, companies aren’t required to publish repair manuals or the equipment might be designed with a software lock or a company-specific screwdriver might be needed for a repair.
Right to Repair legislation would require companies to provide repair instructions and sell spare parts. Organizations like iFixit, Repair.org and US PIRG are leading the fight. There are currently 20 states with Right to Repair bills.
As the Right to Repair becomes a national issue, it’s giving people the opportunity to repair everything from a cell phone to a tractor.
Items stay out of landfills and helping their neighbors leaves people with a sense of accomplishment.
“It’s my way of giving back,” Irlbacher says. “ And I like the feeling of getting something done.”
More: Meet a Disabled Veteran Jump Starting Soldiers’ Cars — and Their Lives
The Savvy People That Are Saving Prescription Drugs From Landfills and Giving Them to Needy Patients
Most of us are aware that Americans waste a lot of food, which has spurred nonprofits like the Food Recovery Network to avert some of that loss and give it to hungry people. But you may not know that Americans also toss out an astonishing amount of perfectly good prescription drugs as well. These drugs end up in landfills, flushed down the toilet or burnt in incinerators where they can harm people or the environment, keeping them from people who could use them.
Fifty percent of the Americans that the Commonwealth Fund surveyed said that they had failed to fill a prescription ordered by their doctors because of the price of the drug, and according to the CDC, 25 percent of Americans struggle with paying their medical bills.
Which is why several crusaders are working to get unused prescription drugs into the hands of people who need them. George Wang, whose Stanford, California-based nonprofit startup Sirum recovers these drugs, calculates that $700 million worth of prescriptions could be saved each year. He talked with Marketplace about “the absurdity of the waste and how gross it is, the fact that it’s raining down on families where these drugs are being burnt. It’s insane, right?”
One of the big culprits is nursing homes. Residents use a lot of prescriptions, but regulations require these facilities to toss prescriptions instead of sharing them between patients. Larry McCarty, a medical waste hauler who works for nursing homes in California describes, “brand new packages that have never been open and still have the saran over the top of them. Whole packages, just sitting in there.”
Sirum has developed software to make it simple for nursing homes to donate leftover drugs, shipping them to pharmacies that will give them to low-income people or those who don’t have insurance.
In Oklahoma, Linda Johnston, the Tulsa County Director of Social Service, heads up a program that involves retired doctors in collecting unused drugs and delivering them to the needy, saving $16 million worth of drugs so far, and countless lives. Johnston talked with Marketplace about one young man who’d received anti-depression medication from the program. “He wanted me to know he was not going to commit suicide, because he had his medication, he could take it.”
MORE: How Much Food Could Be Rescued if College Dining Halls Saved Their Leftovers?
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