Kendal Amos 
Climate change and environmental awareness is an all-year issue, but with April being “Keep America Beautiful” month, it provides us all with the chance to really highlight awareness. This month provides us all with the opportunity to adjust our lifestyles in a long-term way that would benefit our environment, no matter how small the action. Here are a few simple ways you could help the environment and state in your daily life.
Stop buying single-use plastics
Invest in reusable straws and bottles and take them with you when you go out. Making this a habit will avoid adding even more plastic from ending up in landfills and oceans. Even convince family and friends if you can. More than 2,600 plastic bottles a year would be stopped from entering our environment altogether if just 50 people packed a flask instead of buying a bottle.
Use spring cleaning as a chance to reduce, reuse, and recycle
If you’re a part of a family who deep cleans every spring, it’s the perfect opportunity to find new uses for things you planned to throw out and recycle all that plastic build-up in your home.
Reduce your carbon footprint whenever you can
A carbon footprint is the total amount of greenhouse gases (including carbon dioxide and methane) that are generated by our personal actions. With the weather warming up during these next few months, I think all of us who have been spending months in the house, and the environment would benefit from walking or riding a bike wherever we can from time to time.
Cut down on printed material
The use of paper usage is so large that our earth now has a paper problem, one that no one is even sure the resource can live up to. So it’s important to use as little as possible, and when you do use paper, get its full use out of it by filling up the paper and using both sides. If you have the option, use your electronics as often as you can when it comes to things like work, assignments, or emails.
Dim your screens
Laptops, desktop computers, and tablets use a lot of energy, and their brightly lit screens are one of their biggest energy expenditures. This one is a two birds with one stone kind of thing. To reduce that amount of energy used to power your device, and keep your battery going for longer simply lower your screen’s brightness as low as you can comfortably get it.
All these things may seem very small in the grand scheme of things, but every time you skip out on buying plastic, lower your screen brightness or bike somewhere instead of driving, you help the earth in a time that it desperately needs it.
By Kendal Amos, Sophomore, Little Black Pearl
Instagram: Kendal_Jade
