Environmentally-Friendly Lifestyle
Making a move towards an environmentally-friendly life for you and your family can help improve your health and wellbeing while also offering positive benefits to your local environment. Moving away from chemical usage, unhealthy foods, over consumption, wasteful heating and other bad habits or routines can help make your life healthier and happier – sometimes it’s the feeling of change which makes the difference and just knowing you are doing the right thing can bring others with you.
The following 11 tips are all achievable for you and your family and can help achieve a greener cleaner year ahead.
- Plant a Tree. Tress are like the lungs of planet earth. They breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen, they provide habitat for birds and other wildlife and they can absorb sound and reduce noise pollution. Magic or what!
- Use Bins Better: Place three bins in the kitchen: one for recyclables; one for compostable vegetable waste and one for general waste. Agree a storage space in your back garden or kitchen for your bins. Local hardware stores sell a range of bins or maybe reuse old containers. Once you have defined the space install the bins and you and your family can start making a difference.
- Start Composting – Build a compost pile in your garden for kitchen vegetable waste and garden waste. After a few months, the compost should become dark and crumbly and you can then start using it as top-soil or fertilizer to make your garden greener than ever.
- Reduce Packaging – Buy products with less packaging and use re-usable plates, cups and bags. Buy vegetables loose. Put leftovers into reusable tupperware type containers with lids instead of using aluminium foil or plastic clingfilm.
- Recycling Centre or Bring Bank – Locate the nearest recycling centre to you and research the wide variety of materials they accept including cardboard, paper, plastic, glass and much more. Remember don’t litter at recycling centres or bottle banks. Take home or recycle any boxes or containers you used.
- Gifts – Consider buying tickets and vouchers as gifts for weddings, birthdays or anniversaries. Try re-using paper, fabric or ribbon to wrap presents. It makes gifting individual. quirky and personal.
- Parties – Have fun and afterwards recycle glass bottles and aluminium cans in separate bags or bins. Remember plastic bottles (PET and HDPE bottles) can be recycled at most recycling centres. Hint – Look for 3 chasing arrows with either a number 1 or number 2 inside – this means these can and bottle can be recycled in Ireland. Enjoy the party!
- Clean – Wash out all beverage containers including milk and juice cartons. Rinse out bottles and cans, remove lids and flatten plastic containers to save space.
- Batteries – Save up all the used batteries for recycling, then bring them to school, your local supermarket or Recycle IT. Change to rechargeable batteries for battery operated toys and gadgets. It saves the environment and your money!
- Gadgets – People are always updating phones and its estimated that over a million old mobile phones plus many other gadgets are unused in Ireland. Most recycling centre accept old mobile phones and electronic gadget as will Recycle IT. You can also try selling or donating your unwanted gadgets. This promotes reuse. Reuse is good!
- Coffee and Water – Bottled water and coffee cups create mountains of waste daily. They are inefficient, expensive, and harmful to our world. Instead, try using refillable coffee cups and water bottles; Bring a coffee cup to work for reuse or try a water filter to cleanse the tap water followed by a quick chill in the fridge.
About Recycle IT
Recycle IT is an award winning not for profit social enterprise providing a collection and drop off service for all types of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE). During 2016 Recycle IT offered drop off and collection services to 100,000 homes and businesses across Dublin and surrounding areas collecting a range of WEEE which includes thousands of computers, cables, monitors, microwaves and TV’s.
Recycle IT services are provided in partnership with WEEE Ireland. Recycle IT are supported by Pobal, South Dublin County Council and authorized by the National Waste Collection Permit Office and the local authorities across Dublin, Kildare and Wicklow.
Recycle IT 