Statement of Intent

For the next three months I have decided I will be doing 3 things that I feel will (however little) make an impact on my environmental footprint and hopefully encourage and inspire others to make small steps in the right direction as well. So 1) I will finally start composting. I am very guiltfully telling everyone that my family has not touched the fairly newly implanted green bin, it has been sitting in our garage for the longest time and we never thought twice to compost our unused food and other compostable items. 2) For (atleast) 30 mins a day (tried for more with the family, however no budging...yet), we will turn off ALL electricity, no tv, no computer, no nothing. And 3) I have decided that we wil plegde to not only turn off but unplug anything not in use and to ensure that nothing stays on in our 'away hour' I will make my rounds of the house everyday before school and before bed and unplug ALL plugs. I chose to do these 3 actions, because although they are relatively easy to do, I do honestly feel that they will not only help in however a small way the environment, but also could inspire my family (and maybe anyone else reading this) to extend this project for longer than 3 weeks and actually think more about what we're doing for this earth and the different ways we can help.


So, you may be asking yourself "How does this help the enviroment?". Well, did you know that the amount of garbage we produce is one of the major environmental concerns in North America? Us North Americans produce more garbage than anywhere else in the world, and to be frank, we're running out of room to put it. Each Canadian alone on average produces over 2.2kg of waste per day, which adds up to be about 30 million tonnes of waste per year! No wonder we're running out of room to put our waste, that's an insane amount of waste! Well to atleast attempt to diminish my family's waste we will be composting. Composting not only lessens the amount of waste going into landfills but allows for useful plant product to be placed back into the ground and be used again. This earth really needs to consider reusing stuff more often, why not our food wastes? The second environemntal impact will be my diminishing of electricity I use. When I googled the question "How much electricity does Canada use in a year?" the number contained a whole lot of 0's behind it. What people don't seem to think of though is the energy they are wasting when their lights and appliance are not in use but still plugged in. So much energy is wasted each year, and our energy burned produced more carbon to be emitted into the air, contributing to large environmental problems such as Global Warming.



Although my actions are not very precisely measurable, perhaps I will see a slight diminish in the amount of garbage bags my family puts on the curb and best of all an increase in the amount of compostable bags that will be put out as well. As for the amount of electricity, perhaps our hydrobill will be lessened however slightly (then my parents will thank me for the annoyance I'm placing on them!)


I don't see any reason why I would want to cheat on the composting aspect, it's fairly easy to toss our compostable items into the compost bin rather than the garbage. However, I do anticipate myself having a couple hard times turning off all electricity for a whole night, I had a hard enough time making my family turn everything off for an hour on earth day I can't imagine the struggles I'll have everyday. So I have set a couple of rules, although we will start at 30 mins a night (it must be at night since we're always gone during the day) the family is allowed to change the time of the 30 mins off period to fit our scheduale best. Also we have no limitations on what we do as long as it involves no energy. My mom suggested that we use this time to spend some quality family time together but we'll see how that goes over. Also as for unplugging things not in use, I don't anticipate myself cheating, however for the first couple of days I'm sure people in the family will tend to forget to unplug.


I think the most difficult aspect of this blog will just be to REMEMBER to do it, as of now unplugging things not in use and composting do not come second nature to me and will take a little while to get into the swing of things. However, I do not anticipate too much difficulty as the tasks I have set out for myself are fairly do-able without causing too much inconvnience on myself.




Alright! Lets get to it and finally practice what I preach and get around to this, keep you updated!