Each year as Earth Week rolls around you’re probably more conscientious of your recycling habits or how long you leave your lights on, but as our environment’s declining health is being publicized, you may find yourself wanting to do more. Here at Beaver Creek Reserve, we can help you take these environmentally friendly practices a step further with our first ever Earth Week Challenge. The Earth Week Challenge will take place from April 18th thru April 26th and is comprised of more than 60 possible tasks to choose from in seven categories like, Getting Here to There, Reduce the Amount You Leave Behind, Stay Local and more! Each task has a point value associated with it, whether it be 1, 3, or 5 points depending on the difficulty of the task. Sample tasks include: use public transportation, recycle a plastic bottle, and up-cycle an item. You can register yourself or a team between April 15th-26th on our website, so you can begin earning points and get entered to win prizes.
Our Earth Week Challenge is happening at a crucial time in our country as a large shift in recycling has come in the last year. Until the beginning of 2018, China imported the largest percentage of recycled materials, with about 50% of coastal recyclables being shipped there; but now a new legislation known as “National Sword” in China has placed strict requirements for materials they import for recycling. For comparison, China imported 16.2 billion bales of recyclable plastic in 2016 but in 2018 they only imported .11 billion bales. With less imports being allowed into China, there will be more plastic floating around the US; this could cause a complete overhaul of our country’s recycling practices, which would result in stricter guidelines and more plastic in landfills. As the environment takes a hit with more plastic finding its way into landfills, it’s important now more than ever to adopt additional environmentally friendly practices in your life to try to lessen the damage being done.
These practices not only help the environment but some of them can also help you. For example, making sure that your tires are properly inflated could save you gas money. Under inflated tires require more energy to getting moving and maintain speed, maintaining a proper inflation could improve gas mileage by 3.3%. We hope that by participating in the Earth Week Challenge, you will find that some of these tasks can be incorporated into your everyday life.
Here are some additional not-so-fun facts to keep in mind:
Twice as much water is used in production of a plastic water bottle than the bottle actually holds.
500 million single-use straws are used every day in the United States, that is enough straws to circle the earth 2.5 times.
The energy used to create and distribute junk mail in the US each day could heat 250,000 homes.