Good citizens in every state—from New York to Wyoming—are helping save the environment. In honor of Earth Day, we’re highlighting some of the best Earth Day activities across America. We’re inspired, and we hope you are too! Click launch gallery to see these amazing people and projects. Plus, find out how you can pitch in and do your part to protect the planet.           We live in divisive times, but “there is an essential element that can unite us: water.” So believes Charles Scribner, executive director of Black Warrior Riverkeeper, a nonprofit committed to cleaning up and protecting the 6,276 square miles of Black Warrior River watershed in the state. Over the past year, the organization has investigated a wastewater spill that killed some 175,000 fish in one of the Black Warrior’s three major tributaries; monitored 73 facilities in 17 counties; and won a ruling against a mine company that was violating the Clean Water Act.   What you can do Get info from Waterkeepers Alliance on groups in your area that work to protect watersheds.         Who is more invested in saving the planet than the generation that’s going to be around the longest? Alaska Youth for Environmental Action (AYEA) offers leadership skills training to rural and urban young people, and support for youth-led community action projects and campaigns. Last year AYEA youth held climate strikes in nine cities and towns across Alaska, carrying signs with slogans like “Keep Alaska Freezin’” and “Don’t You Want Grandchildren?” An annual Civics & Conservation Summit in Juneau trains youth delegates in how to talk to the media, how to communicate with elected officials and how to read a bill, as well as offering info on the tribal resolution process and environmental justice. “I couldn’t be more thankful to know such a special group of people and we refuse to give up until our voices are heard. As the youth of Alaska, we are strength, we are unity, we are the future of our state, and we are worth it,” says AYEA alum Cassidy Austin from McCarthy.   What you can do Go to earthday.org for ideas.           The mighty Colorado River, which carved the Grand Canyon, has some powerful offshoots, including the 649-mile long Gila River, home to Native American tribes for 2,000-plus years. Dams and flood-control projects have diminished the Gila’s flow, even as its watershed provides water to more than 5 million in Phoenix and Tuscon. A new interpretive trail and education center in the Gila River Indian Community (GRIC) reservation (where some 11,000 members of the Pima and Maricopa tribes live) offers visitors a chance to learn about the river, about replenishment of the watershed with a managed aquifer recharge (MAR) project and how to find sustainable ways to provide water for farming and materials (like willow trees) for native artisans. The new center “will be a living tribute to our water rights, our huhugam [ancestors] and teaching our future generations our historic and ongoing ties to the Gila River,” GRIC governor Stephen Roe Lewis said.   What you can do Find out more about protecting Native American water rights through the Native American Rights Fund.         There are very few things in life you can do in a quarter of an hour that are going to have a long-term effect, says Little Rock lawyer John Baker. One thing that does: planting a tree. “It takes 15 minutes to plant and mulch it, and that tree is going to pay dividends for 80 to 100 years,” says Baker. Tree Streets, the nonprofit he cofounded in 1997, was created to plant trees in Little Rock’s urban neighborhoods and help educate residents about their benefits, from providing cooling shade (and lowering air-conditioning bills) to reducing air pollution and storm runoff. Tree Streets volunteers have planted almost 2,000 trees—including oaks, maples, tulip poplars and other hardwoods—on more than 175 different city blocks.   What you can do Learn more about tree planting in your own community from the Arbor Day Foundation.           Can we eat our way out of the climate crisis? San Francisco restaurateurs Karen Leibowitz and Anthony Myint think so. That’s why they launched Restore California. The project gives restaurant diners the option to pay an additional 1 percent of their bill; that money goes directly to farmers who practice regenerative farming—techniques like composting and crop rotation, which pull carbon out of the atmosphere and hold it in the soil. Almost 30 California restaurants (including Leibowitz and Myint’s Mission Chinese Food) participate in the program.   What you can do Find a participating restaurant near you with Zero Foodprint.         When excess food remains after a catered event at Colorado State University, a text message notifies those who’ve signed up for the “Ram Food Recovery” program where to get leftovers. The pickup period is 30 minutes after the end of the event, to ensure food stays fresh. More than 1,300 people have signed up for the texting alert system since it launched a year ago, and the university has had 78 pickup events.   What you can do Learn more about reducing food waste from the Food Waste Reduction Alliance.   Composting Tip   Keeping a small container in your freezer for leftover food scraps = no-smell and no fruit fries. Dump into your compost pile outside when full. Check out more composting tips.           North American monarch butterfly populations have plummeted 90 percent in the past 20 years. Enter Pollinator Pathways. Created by Wilton environmentalist Donna Merrill, the project brings together volunteers from neighboring towns to create habitats and food sources for pollinating insects and wildlife along a series of continuous, pesticide-free corridors. The goal is to connect properties within 750 meters or less of each other—the range of most native bees. The project began in 2017; since then pathways have been established in more than 85 towns in Connecticut and New York.   What you can do Find info from Pollinator Pathways on planting for pollinators.           The 600-plus volunteer members of the Delaware Center for Horticulture (DCH) plant native trees, flowers, bushes, shrubs and grasses in “challenging urban grow zones”—on traffic islands, along busy streets and sidewalks, and in empty lots. They also help residents construct urban gardens, container gardens, and school and institutional gardens.   What you can do Check out Keep America Beautiful for volunteer opportunities near you.         When Erika Zambello heard about the Tempestry Project—an ongoing creation of “temperature tapestries” or wall hangings that chart daily high temperatures for given years and locations—she was all in to craft one herself. Her first tempestry documented temperatures in a New Hampshire forest, which got her thinking about how changing temperatures might affect U.S. national parks. With the blessings of the Tempestry Project’s founders, Zambello started to organize volunteers to record temperature changes at national parks. Now knitters, crocheters and cross-stitchers have created tempestries on behalf of more than 30 national parks across the U.S. Zambello, who lives on the Emerald Coast, claimed Gulf Islands National Seashore as her personal piece of the project because it’s “the park I am most familiar with and close to my head and heart,” she wrote in National Parks Traveler magazine.   What you can do Learn more about the Tempestry Project.   A note from Erika: The tempestries on my left represent Joshua Tree National Park, knit by Sharon Speich. I am holding two tempestry kits for Gulf Islands National Seashore in the Florida Panhandle. To my right is Voyageurs National Park, knit by Deb Ceci.    photo courtesy Erika Zambello/Tempestry Project             With more than a million cubic feet of water and more than 100,000 fish, Atlanta’s Georgia Aquarium is the largest in the world. Over the last decade, the nonprofit has helped map the genome of endangered whale sharks, studied the health of captive bottlenose dolphins and wild dolphins and created a program (Seafood Savvy) to help consumers figure out how to choose seafood from sustainable sources—a critical task given that some 67 percent of seafood in the U.S. moves through restaurants and another 24 percent sells through retail outlets. And, even though the aquarium’s tanks hold 10 million gallons of water, it uses only as much water as an average grocery store, thanks to high-tech systems for treating and recycling the water. The Aquarium even has its own TV show, Animal Planet’s The Aquarium, which documents behind-the-scenes life and the key role the aquarium plays in conservation around the world.   What you can do Learn more, plan a visit or donate at the Georgia Aquarium.           When you visit a tourism hot spot, like Hawaii (where Jurassic Park and Jumanji were filmed), you can learn how to be kind to the environment while seeing the sights. At Kualoa Ranch, tours (on horseback or ATV) are limited to small groups and include info about the geology, flora and fauna. The ranch’s plant protection program protects rare and vanishing species while weeding out invasive species like albizia trees, which grow quickly and shade out native Hawaiian forest plants. Kualoa’s education programs host some 14,000 Hawaiian schoolchildren every year who learn how to be good stewards of the land, and the ranch relies heavily on locally sourced products and services.   What you can do Make sure your next Hawaiian vacation is eco-friendly by finding a certified “sustainable tourism” operator with the Sustainable Tourism Association of Hawaii. When traveling elsewhere, look for hotels accredited by respectable certification programs, such as Green Key, the Global Sustainable Tourism Council and the U.S. Green Building Council, which oversees LEED certification.         It’s hard to want to preserve and protect the environment if you’ve never experienced the rich complexity and diversity of the natural world. Selkirk Outdoor Leadership & Education (SOLE) provides a range of  “experiences” to help underserved rural youth learn about the wilderness. Summer camps for kids as young as 4 teach children how to identify various tree species, for example, and outdoor leadership days for older kids offer training on everything from using a compass to Leave No Trace ethics. More than 70 percent of the kids who participate in SOLE are exploring and learning about the wilderness for the first time.   What you can do Find out more about SOLE.         An estimated 90,000 different animal species around the globe stand on the brink of extinction. The best way to figure out which species are at risk and what we can do to save them is to collect massive amounts of data—where animals are born, how many survive, where they travel, etc. Wildbook, the brainchild of University of Illinois at Chicago computer science professor Tanya Berger-Wolf, uses algorithms to digitally tag animals (“like a human fingerprint”) and track locations, dates of sighting, migration patterns and even an animal’s social group. The data helps create accurate estimates of population sizes and other factors, what Berger-Wolf calls “a comprehensive view of the planet’s biodiversity.” The hope is that quick assessment of the health of various species will help scientists respond in time to ward off extinction.   What you can do Follow, donate or contribute data of your own with Wildbook. Find a list of endangered species in your state through the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.   Tanya is on leave from UIC currently but all this work was done while she was at UIC. Two of their most iconic species (for different reasons) are whale sharks and Grevy's zebra.         Green Tree Plastics’ ABC Promise Partnership program encourages kids to collect plastic caps and lids (from butter tubs, coffee cans, milk cartons, laundry detergent), sort them and deliver them to Green Tree’s Evansville headquarters. The caps are made into recycled lumber used to make benches, picnic tables and trash receptacles. Each ABC Promise group gets a bench (in their choice of color) in exchange for 200 pounds of plastic caps.   What you can do Learn more about the ABC Promise program and check out more recycling ideas.         Matt Russell is a fifth-generation Iowa farmer who grows heirloom tomatoes and fresh produce from spinach to brussels sprouts on the 110-acre farm he shares with his husband in Lacona. He also preaches the gospel of healthy soil to farmers statewide as executive director of Iowa Interfaith Power and Light, a nonprofit that encourages people of faith to become leaders in the fight against climate change. “How is God calling you to use your farm to improve the world?” he asks. Since conventional farming techniques have stripped much of the carbon content from soil, he suggests alternative techniques, such as growing carbon-absorbing crops and planting without tilling, which help preserve and sequester carbon.   What you can do Find out more about Interfaith Power and Light in your state.   Note from Matt: In the photo is Dr. Emily Heaton, professor of Agronomy at Iowa State University. Man with camera is Dave Timko, producer, cinematographer and editor with This American Land, and the other [man] is Gary Strieker, Executive Producer at This American Land.   Iowa IPL has been working with Iowa farmers to help them provide leadership and on-farm solutions to the climate crisis. We’ve helped dozens of farmers connect with scores of media outlets (state, national, and international), nearly all of the presidential candidates during the Iowa Caucus, and Iowa elected leaders to share how farmers can help solve climate change. This is an interview that will be aired soon on This American Land later this year. Dr. Heaton is developing perennial systems that can provide the ecological services and agricultural products to reduce emissions and capture carbon. She is standing in her research field of Miscanthus giganteus.   photo courtesy Iowa Interfaith Power and Light         For more than 40 years, artist Terry Evans has explored and photographed the prairies near her home in Salina to raise awareness of their fragility. Tallgrass prairie once covered 170 million acres of North America; humans have destroyed or altered 95 percent of that, plowing to make way for wheat and corn. Evans photographs pieces of the prairie—wildflowers like silverleaf scurfpea and milkweeds like green antelopehorn—then puts the individual photos together into large-scale images that show the prairie’s incredible complexity.   What you can do Learn more about protecting prairies from The Nature Conservancy.         The largest greenhouse in the U.S.—all 2.76 million square feet of it—will start shipping some 40 million pounds of fresh produce to grocery stores this summer. Morehead’s AppHarvest, the brainchild of Kentucky native Jonathan Webb, will grow pesticide-free tomatoes and cucumbers, relying on the sun and LED lighting and a recycled rainwater system that uses 90 percent less water than traditional farming. It’s also within a day’s drive of 70 percent of the U.S. population, slashing the amount of gas typically used to truck produce across the county from California or Mexico. Another plus: AppHarvest will employ some 285 people in a part of the country hit hardest by the collapse of the coal industry. Webb hopes to expand and build greenhouses in other locations in eastern Kentucky too. “We need to talk about bringing food production home regionally,” Webb told CNBC recently. “Just one in 10 Americans eat enough fruit and vegetables. We’re focused on getting fresh fruit and vegetables on the tables of everyday Americans.”   What you can do Buy local!         St. James Parish sits on the banks of an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans known as “Cancer Alley” because of the more than 150 fossil fuel and petrochemical plants scattered throughout the area. It’s home to seven of the 10 census tracts with the highest cancer risk in the U.S. Most of those are in the predominantly African American 4th and 5th districts. Now RISE St. James, a grassroots activist group founded by Sharon Lavigne in 2018, is taking on one of the world’s largest companies, Formosa Plastics, which has plans to build an industrial complex less than two miles from a local elementary school. The complex would double the amount of toxic chemicals currently released into the air in the area. Rolling Stone called St. James “the frontline of environmental racism.” RISE St. James is holding protests and partnering with several legal organizations (Tulane Environmental Law Clinic and Earthjustice, among others) to present legal challenges to plans for more petrochemical facilities and pipelines in the parish.   What you can do Learn more about RISE St. James and more about environmental justice nationwide through Communities for a Better Environment.         What’s the most-littered item found on beaches? It’s not plastic straws, it’s cigarette butts, the single greatest source of trash in the oceans. Cigarette filters are made of a form of plastic that can take decades to decompose and carry a load of toxic materials, including heavy metals. When people flick butts out car windows or drop them on city streets, they end up in sewers, and washed out into rivers, lakes and oceans. Enter Maine businessman Mike Roylos and his Sidewalk Buttler, an aluminum canister (either stand-alone or attachable to a pole) for disposing of cigarette butts. Full cannisters are collected and emptied into boxes; the plastic in the filters is recycled into pellets used for park benches, railroad ties and shipping pallets. In 2015, after Roylos installed some 70 Sidewalk Buttlers in Portland, more than 300,000 butts were collected in less than five months. Now they’re in 49 states and have kept more than 1.2 million butts off the streets.   What you can do Learn more about getting rid of tobacco waste with the Cigarette Butt Pollution Project. Or recycle cigarette waste with TerraCycle.         The environmental problems that plague the planet didn’t come about because a small group of people polluted, “it was all of us doing small acts every day that got us where we are,” says Stacy Hennessey (right), who founded the Annapolis-based Just One global initiative to “do the opposite, starting today.” That could mean picking up a piece of trash, bringing a refillable water bottle to work or turning off the lights when you leave the house. “If you make small changes, it has a ripple effect,” Hennessey says. Remembering your water bottle or metal straw may remind you to bring your reusable shopping bags too.   What you can do Sign up for the Just One Challenge and challenge your friends, family and co-workers to do the same.         Have you ever thought, There should be an app for that? That’s what three Cambridge-based entrepreneurs (David Rodriguez, Sabine Valenga and Victor Carreño) thought when they heard that U.S. restaurants throw away more than 22 billion pounds of food every year. In 2017, they launched FoodForAll, an app that puts restaurants with surplus food in touch with hungry customers eager to buy at a discount of 50 percent or more. Customers pick up meals at the restaurants usually within an hour before closing time. “Our restaurants generate extra income and reach new clients, our users get delicious meals for less than $5 and we all help our environment by avoiding wasting food,” Valenga says. The app is partnered with more than 200 restaurants in Boston and New York City.   What you can do Read more about the app.         The #WednesdaysForWater Twitter hashtag was created by 12-year-old Mari Copeny who was 8 when she became concerned about the water in her hometown of Flint. High bacteria levels in 2014 and 2015 killed 12 and sickened dozens more. And during that time, some 8,000 children absorbed levels of lead high enough to cause long-term developmental problems. Copeny wrote to President Obama, who met with her in 2016 and ultimately authorized $100 million to repair Flint’s water system. Now an experienced activist, Mari is focused on other cities with water problems. Every week, her Twitter campaign highlights communities without clean water and offers info on how to help. She works with Hydroviv, a company that builds custom water filters, to provide filters to homes in high-risk cities. Her long-term goal? President of the United States in 2042.   What you can do Donate to Mari’s campaign. Every dollar donated provides the equivalent of 160 bottles of clean drinking water.         The U.S. toy industry racks up $27 billion in sales every year and many of those toys—like recent holiday best-sellers Ryan’s World Mega Mystery Treasure Chest and Playmobil’s Mars Mission Play Box—are made of plastic. The Minneapolis Toy Library aims to interrupt the cycle of buy-play-throw away by providing a place where families can check out toys, play with them for two to four weeks, then exchange them for different toys when they bring the others back. The toy library (in the basement of the Richfield Lutheran Church) was launched in 2014 after two moms brainstormed how to share their kids’ toys on a larger scale. Families pay a fee of $40–$100 per year for membership, depending on what fits their budget.   What you can do Find a toy library near you through the U.S. Toy Library Association.         Greenville native Heather McTeer Toney (inset, in front of the U.S. Capitol) has three children (ages 3, 14 and 23) and a commitment to making people realize how climate change affects kids’ health. She was Greenville’s first female, first African American and youngest mayor (from 2002 to 2012), and now she’s national field director of Moms Clean Air Force, a group of more than a million parents fighting for clean air to ensure their kids and grandkids don’t suffer from pollution-related health problems. “It’s critically important to be aware of how our children’s health is being greatly impacted just by the air we breathe,” she told Mississippi Today in November. “It’s one of those basic functions we take for granted, but it’s hugely impacted by the environment in which we live and the climate impacts taking place across the globe. Just think of the number of children who have asthma, or are impacted by climate-related health disparities. These are things that parents are staying up at night worrying about.”   What you can do Learn more about local projects in your area that help reduce air pollution, fight climate change and improve the health of kids and families with Moms Clean Air Force, and through their Twitter and Facebook accounts.   Moms Clean Air Force member Rachel Heaton (second from left) of the Muckleshoot Tribe of Auburn, Wash., and two of her three children meet with Congresswoman Kim Schrier, M.D. (WA-08), on Capitol Hill to deliver the message that families across the country want leadership to get serious about addressing climate change.   photo by Kalita Conley for Moms Clean Air Force/inset photo of Heather McTeer Toney by Jose Luis Magana for Moms Clean Air Force         A haircut, some highlights, maybe a Brazilian blowout—ever think about the effect your beauty salon routines have on the environment? The average salon produces more than 1,800 pounds of waste every year, not to mention the often-toxic chemicals poured down drains. Kansas City “green” stylist Lexi Smith uses zero waste, nontoxic, vegan products packaged in recyclable materials. She’s a member of Green Circle Salons, which helps her recover or repurpose 95 percent of the waste her business generates—leftover hair color, foils, color tubes, aerosol cans, paper and plastics. Hair is recycled and made into boons to absorb oil in oil spills. Smith is committed to making the beauty business as sustainable as possible; she even uses reusable K-Cups for her in-shop Keurig coffee maker.   What you can do Find an earth-friendly salon near you through Green Circle Salons.     Gregg Treinish is pretty much the kind of person the word “Montana” evokes—an avid outdoorsman who’s thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail, trekked 7,800 miles in the Andes and led expeditions all over the world for National Geographic. But he wanted to do more than indulge his love of the outdoors with ever more amazing hikes, so in 2011 he founded Adventure Scientists, which connects trekkers with scientists who need data. So far, Adventure Scientists volunteers have collected animal scat samples that were used to examine the natural roots of antibiotic resistance; documented “hot spots” where wildlife and vehicles collide; and collected the largest dataset on microplastic pollution around the globe. This year, the non-profit is looking for hikers in Northern California, the Pacific Northwest and Alaska to collect specimens of cedar and redwood. Don’t worry about added weight in your pack; samples are put in tiny vials that weigh almost nothing, with desiccant to keep the samples dry.   What you can do Sign up to collect data on your next hike with Adventure Scientists.   Gregg examines animal hairs from a fallen log while on a carnivore tracking expedition in Montana.         “I love them all; they’re like my kids,” says National Geographic photographer (and Nebraska native) Joel Sartore, who created the Photo Ark to capture every species in captivity before some of them become extinct. Sartore got the idea for the Photo Ark 15 years ago, when his wife’s bout with breast cancer kept him close to home in Lincoln for a year. (She’s fine now.) During that year he decided he wanted to dig in on a project that could make a difference. He came up with the idea of photographing animals in zoos and wildlife sanctuaries around the world in a series of portraits, “made as simply and cleanly as possible,” that would allow viewers to see the unique beauty and intelligence in every species. He uses black and white backgrounds so there’s nothing to distract from the animal itself, and because without a background for scale, every animal appears equal in size and “has equal voice.” He’s photographed nearly 10,000 species and estimates it will take another 10 years to document the rest. “That’s my job,” he said in a recent interview with the Weather Channel, “to tell their stories and hope that the world cares in time.”   What you can do Learn more about the Photo Ark.         Latino voters helped sweep Bernie Sanders to victory in Nevada’s Democratic caucuses. And while Sanders’ stance on health care, jobs and immigration were important, his policies on the environment were critical. Chispa Nevada (from the Spanish word for “spark”) organizes Latino communities to press policy makers and polluters to protect their rights to clean air, water, and healthy neighborhoods. People of color are much more likely to live near polluters and breathe polluted air, says a 2018 EPA study. Chispa Nevada’s Clean Buses for Healthy Niños campaign convinced lawmakers to provide funding to transition from diesel school buses to electric school buses. More than one in 12 children in Nevada suffer from asthma (a number that’s higher in lower-income urban neighborhoods).   What you can do Find out about Chispa organizations in six different states.   Chispa volunteers touring an electric school bus.         New Hampshire is home to 186 species of native nesting birds, and 65 of those are in decline. Some species—like nighthawks, chimney swifts and swallows—are declining rapidly. New Hampshire Audubon is leading the charge to bring awareness to the rapid loss of native birds, including mobilizing local citizens to advocate for strong national environmental policies (New Hampshire is part of the Atlantic Flyway, a major migratory route for birds) and educating people on everything from how to create a bird-friendly yard to buying coffee produced in bird-friendly habitats.   What you can do Find out how to help birds where you are through Audubon.         The New Jersey Turnpike is one of the busiest thoroughfares in the U.S., so it’s fitting that a state known for its superhighways is now one of the leaders in the push for electric vehicles (EVs). In January, Governor Phil Murphy signed into law a bill boosting EVs, with goals including getting 330,000 electric cars on the road in New Jersey by 2025, as well as 400 public fast-charging stations at 200 locations along major highways and in communities. (The state will pay rebates up to $5,000 to people who buy electric cars, and $500 rebates for home charging stations.) The state also committed to completely electrifying New Jersey Transit’s bus fleet by 2032.   What you can do: Learn more about electric cars from the Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy.         Santa Fe artist Diana Stetson has spent more than 30 years traveling the globe and studying calligraphy, printmaking, drawing and painting. Yet for Stetson, the purpose of her art is to highlight the profound connection between humans and the natural world. She’s created woodblock prints of native New Mexican trees to help raise funds for Tree New Mexico, an urban and rural tree-planting effort, and has exhibited her art all over the country. Trees, flowers, animals, plants, even fruits bloom in Stetson’s art, a constant reminder of the wild diversity, beauty and fragility of nature.   What you can do Support artists all over the world who create art to raise awareness about and create connections with the natural world. Learn more at earthday.org.         Americans throw away 2.5 million plastic water bottles per hour. Yup, per hour. Single-use plastic bottles—those bottles of spring water and sports drinks and iced tea sold everywhere—are clogging our oceans and landfills. (Only 14 percent of all plastic gets recycled.) So where better to start cutting back on plastic than in the U.S.A.’s most populous city? In February, NYC mayor Bill de Blasio signed an executive order banning the sale of single-use plastic beverage bottles on city properties. The ban covers bottles of 21 ounces or less. The order calls for every city agency to develop plans to phase out single-use plastic bottles by June 2020, with the goal of eliminating the purchase and sale of plastic bottles on city property by Jan. 1, 2021. “Plastic bottles are made of fossil fuels, they’re hurting the Earth, we don’t need ’em, it’s time to get rid of ’em,” de Blasio tweeted the day he signed the order.   What you can do Get more info on single use plastics at earthday.org.         Twenty million is a big number, so when Greenville’s Jimmy Donaldson, 21, (aka “MrBeast”), amassed 20 million YouTube followers last year, he decided to celebrate by doing something big: collecting enough money to plant 20 million trees. Donaldson is known for creating viral videos of himself doing unique stunts (reading the entire dictionary aloud, watching paint dry or building a house from 1 million pieces of Lego) and for giving away the money he makes in brand deals—a $10,000 tip to a waitress, a house to a homeless man, a new car to his mom. #TeamTrees, MrBeast’s joint venture with fellow YouTuber Mark Rober and the Arbor Day Foundation, launched in October of 2019; by Dec. 19 fans had donated $20 million, enough to plant 20 million trees around the globe. Now they’re up to almost $22 million and plan to keep going.   What you can do Donate to #TeamTrees and check out the Arbor Day Foundation.   MrBeast poses next to one of the 20 million trees he funded through #TeamTrees with fellow YouTuber Mark Rober and the Arbor Day Foundation.         When the Standing Rock Sioux tribe protested the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016, they were fighting to protect sacred lands and were concerned that the pipeline might threaten the safety of their water supply from the Missouri River. The pipeline became operational in 2017, and now the Sioux have fought back in their own way: by building the largest solar energy farm in North Dakota, the CannonBall Community Solar Farm. The farm went live a year ago; the solar farm will save the community some $7,000 to $10,000 per year in energy costs.   What you can do: Learn more from GivePower about providing solar energy to developing areas.         Some 400,000 people in Cleveland—one in three—live in a “food desert,” a neighborhood without a supermarket within a half mile. Enter the Rid-All Green Partnership, a community organization founded by three childhood buddies that’s turned a former illegal dumping ground in the struggling Kinsman neighborhood into an eight-acre urban farm. Rid-All’s new learning center helps locals learn how to grow their own produce, take care of the environment and turn fallow urban fields into productive farmland. They recycle and compost too: Rid-All creates their own soil from discarded produce, wood chips and coffee grounds. Extra soil is sold or donated. Two greenhouses and four hoop houses ensure that crops of fresh produce are available year-round, and a 40,000-square-foot aquaponics fishery provides an opportunity to learn about aqua farming (black tilapia are the current “crop,” with perch, bluegill and bass coming soon). Rid-All’s biggest achievement is the community that’s sprung up because of the farm; hundreds have taken urban farming training programs there, and the farm hosts weddings, school visits, food festivals and tours.   What you can do Check out Urban Farming for info on farms nationwide.   From left to right: Damien Forshe, Randy McShepard, Keymah Durden   courtesy Rid-All Green Partnership       Cattle, cowboys and earth-friendly aren’t words you find often in the same sentence. Peach Crest Ranch in Mill Creek, about 100 miles southeast of Oklahoma City, bucks that conventional wisdom, practicing chemical-free, sustainable farming and ranching. Cows graze freely on the ranch’s 20,000 acres of untreated land, providing local customers (including the University of Oklahoma) with pasture-fed beef free of hormones and antibiotics. Cattle are slaughtered at an Animal Welfare Approved location. Ranch owner Susan Bergen began to rethink conventional agriculture years ago every time she watched her workers put on full hazmat suits before spraying the peaches. “I decided there had to be a better way than using so many chemicals,” Bergen told the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs.   What you can do Find sources for and info about Animal Welfare Approved, grass-fed meat and organic foods at A Greener World.       The average American throws away about 81 pounds of clothing a year, and then there’s the clothing we buy and return, the jackets with broken zippers or the jeans that never fit quite right. Retailers toss many of those returns or send them back to manufacturers in a landfill-clogging cycle. Hood River’s Renewal Workshop is breaking that cycle. The Workshop cleans and fixes clothes that have been returned to companies they’re partnered with, like North Face and prAna, then sells the like-new garments on their website. A state-of-the-art cleaning machine scours clothes, handbags and other items inside and out, although many items have never been used or worn. Any needed repairs “respect the original design and quality standards of the garment,” and any repairs to tears, holes or snags are made on the inside of garments or in linings so they’re invisible.   What you can do Buy good-as-new clothes, handbags, luggage and more that’s been renewed from the Renewal Workshop.       The EPA estimates that Americans threw 30.6 million tons of food waste into landfills in 2017. Composting (everything from newspaper to nut shells) is one answer, but that can be tough if you live, say, in a second-story apartment in South Philly, as Tim Bennett did in 2009. That’s when and how he came up with the idea for Bennett Compost which collects kitchen waste (via bicycle as well as truck) from more than 2,000 households in North Philadelphia. Customers each get a 5-gallon covered bucket that’s picked up every week; the list of compostable items is longer than you’d think and includes tea bags, sawdust, hair and fur in addition to the usual fruits, vegetables, eggshells and coffee grounds. The company keeps some 52 tons of stuff out of landfills every month.   What you can do Learn more about composting your own food waste from the EPA.       Think toys and it’s hard not to think “plastic,” from My Little Pony to Transformers. And all those toys arrive encased in plastic packaging, from the shrink-wrap around a new Monopoly game to the plastic windows on boxes. In 2017 alone, U.S. landfills received 26.8 million tons of plastic, according to the EPA. Providence-based toymaker Hasbro has spent more than six years trying to lessen the impact of its plastic packaging, making it one of the USA’s “Greenest” publicly traded companies in a Newsweek ranking. In 2013, Hasbro switched from using polyvinyl chloride (PVC) in its packaging to the more easily recyclable polyethylene terephthalate (PET). They now use bioPET, which is made with 30 percent plant-based material. Other small changes add up to big differences: The company saves 2,000 trees a year just by printing info about Play-Doh on the container instead of on a paper label, and they work with TerraCycle to convert old toys into building materials for playgrounds.   What you can do Follow the directions from TerraCycle to recycle old toys to keep plastic out of landfills.       Charleston’s Spectator Hotel is beloved by travelers, appearing every year in the top rankings of “best hotel” lists on Trip Advisor, Travel + Leisure, AAA and others. But while customers swoon over amenities like personal butler service and specialty welcome cocktails, one real draw of the Spectator may be something visitors never see: a food digester that converts half-eaten seasonal tartlets and leftover fruit into reusable water that goes back into the city’s sewer system. As of February 2020, the hotel had diverted more than 26,000 pounds of food waste from landfills while creating over 2,200 gallons of water.   What you can do Look for hotels accredited by respectable certification programs, such as Green Key, the Global Sustainable Tourism Council and the U.S. Green Building Council, which oversees LEED certification.       Vermillion, S.D., has a population of around 10,700, the University of South Dakota and an ambition to become “the greenest town in South Dakota.” Greening Vermillion, a six-year-old nonprofit, is working to help the town “grow through projects that bring people together to conserve our natural resources.” Thus far they’ve organized local hikes and developed a canoe/kayak trail to give residents an increased appreciation for the area’s rich natural resources, led a movement to reduce plastic straws and painted drains and sewer covers around town to remind residents that everything that goes into storm drains and sewers ends up in the Vermillion and Missouri Rivers.   What you can do Learn more about helping your own community go green with Circles of Sustainability.       Chick’n fried chick’n, BBQ sliders and glazed doughnuts are a comfort-food lover’s dream. And they’re a planet lover’s dream too when they’re not only tasty but vegan. The meat industry is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, according to the United Nations. Beef and milk cattle are the animals responsible for some 65 percent of the livestock sector’s emissions. Husband-and-wife team Tiffany and Clifton Hancock began experimenting with vegan recipes in 2015 when they discovered their oldest daughter, Eden, had a dairy intolerance. Tiffany’s vegan doughnuts were so good they started selling them at a local farmers market, then the couple created a broader menu for a walk-up stand on Fisk Street. They opened their brick-and-mortar dine-in restaurant, the Southern V, in North Nashville in 2018. “Everything is one thousand hundred percent vegan,” Tiffany says.   What you can do Find vegan and vegetarian restaurants in your own community through HappyCow, a worldwide guide.       Nurdle—it’s a cute name for an insidious environmental threat: the tiny lentil-size plastic pellets that go into the making of almost all plastic goods. Manufacturers lose, spill or illegally dump nurdles, and some 250,000 tons every year end up in oceans, where they soak up toxic pollutants and are eaten by marine animals and birds. When marine biologist Jace Tunnell ran across millions of nurdles covering a beach on Texas’ Padre Island (a haven for more than 380 bird species), he activated Nurdle Patrol volunteers, a group of local citizen scientists who survey beaches or coastal areas, collecting as many nurdles as they see in a 10-minute time period. Then they send the location, date and count of nurdles (plus pictures) to Tunnell, who maps all the info. From November 2018 to July 2019, 543 Nurdle Patrollers removed 172,952 nurdles from Texas beaches. The data they collect give state environmental agencies the info they need to see where the nurdles are coming from, and stop the polluters.   What you can do Find out more about cleaning up and stopping nurdles with Nurdle Patrol.   The Nurdle Patrol is a citizen science project at the University of Texas at Austin Marine Science Institute.       Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is a hot spot of bee diversity. In an area the size of Delaware there are almost as many different kinds of bees as the entire eastern U.S. The monument is a natural lab for studying bees—a study that’s increasingly important as honey bee colonies die off and insect populations decline. Pollinators like bees are responsible for one out of every three bites of food we take. But honey bees are just one of around 4,000 different kinds of bees in North America. What do we know about the others? Now a team of filmmakers is working on a research and documentary film project about these bees—The Bees of Grand Staircase-Escalante—that follows two of the nation’s most prominent bee researchers as they return to southern Utah fifteen years after their original work there. They hope to draw attention to the importance of protecting diversity in the face of species loss.   What you can do Learn more about the bees of Grand Staircase.       Americans throw away 11 million tons of glass every year, and only a third of it gets recycled. Now a Burlington-based start-up plans to turn discarded glass into nuggets of a foam-glass aggregate that can be used as insulation in buildings. Entrepreneur Rob Conboy calls the product “Glavel” (glass + gravel), and he hopes his new glavel plant will eventually convert 9,000 tons of thrown-away glass each year. Many U.S. recycling centers have struggled with what to do with glass since 2018, when China stopped accepting most recyclables from other countries. “We’re going to have to find solutions here and not ship off our waste,” Conboy told Seven Days.   What you can do Find out more about Glavel and learn more about glass recycling in the U.S. from the Glass Recycling Foundation.       Soccer trophies, MVP plaques, employee awards—we all have drawers, closets and shelves of mostly plastic items meant to recognize our achievements. But what if they weren’t made of plastic? Richmond-based Rivanna Natural Designs makes planet-friendly awards, plaques and gifts from bamboo, recycled glass, Forest Stewardship Council–certified wood and other environmentally friendly materials. The women-owned company was launched in 2001 and now has customers in 48 states and Canada.   What you can do Learn more about Rivanna’s eco-friendly products.       Love the wilderness? So do hundreds of thousands of other Americans, and there’s the problem. Every single one of them needs to answer when nature calls, which means beloved hiking trails, national parks, seashores, forests, and other wilderness area can be marred with human waste. Rocky Mountain National Park saw 4.67 million visitors in 2019 and the attendant waste in the backcountry, where there are no flush toilets or plumbing. Pit toilets (holes in the ground covered by a wooden seat) can fill up in two years or less; vault toilets (outhouses with giant containers for waste) require regular emptying and cleaning. And cat holes (holes you dig yourself) and pit toilets can also send pathogens deep into the groundwater—yuck. Enter Toilet Tech Solutions, a Seattle-based company that makes toilets designed to minimize the impact of human waste on the environment. The idea is to separate liquid waste from solid. Urine is funneled to the side, to a septic field, where it’s treated and disposed of; poop is collected on a conveyor belt and dropped into a decompose vault, where invertebrates eat the dung.   What you can do Learn more about what to do with waste when you hike from Outward Bound.       If you live in a state where coal is king, what do you do when that king is deposed? The number of coal jobs in West Virginia dropped from more than 23,000 in 2011 to fewer than 14,000 in 2018. Enter Solar Holler, a solar installation company with the motto “Mine the Sun” and a logo featuring a shirtless laborer driving a lightning-bolt-shaped pickax into a mountain with a radiant sun inside. Founded by Shepherdstown native Dan Conant, Solar Holler offers financing for solar panels with no upfront cost and a low monthly loan payment “that looks a lot like your old utility bill.” Conant hopes to bring more solar jobs to communities hit hard by coal’s decline. In addition to helping convert homes to solar energy, Solar Holler works with local nonprofits to help them lower their energy bills: Last year, the company installed a roof-mounted solar energy system at Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore and administrative building in Huntington. The system will save $500 a month and $150,000 over the 25-year life span of the solar panels.   What you can do Learn more about going solar in your own home from the Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy.       From the energy consumed by power lights and equipment to the tons of medical waste and garbage produced every day, hospitals and medical centers often leave big carbon footprints. But nonprofit Gundersen Health has taken a different approach, using solar energy and wind power to create electricity and become the first health system in the U.S. to produce more energy that it consumes. Gundersen recycles everything from X-ray film to the lead vests and gloves used in imaging tests to construction waste. (It recently recycled 98 percent of the 18,700 tons of construction waste on a new hospital project.) Food isn’t wasted either: Gundersen donates more than 500 leftover meals a month to the Salvation Army.   What you can do Find info about “green” hospitals in your area with Becker's Hospital Review.       The word “pollution” conjures up belching smokestacks, littered beaches and rivers choked with debris. But what about light? Running unneeded lights wastes an estimated $3 billion a year in the U.S., and light pollution can have a negative impact on human health, wildlife and the ecosystem. Samuel Singer founded the nonprofit Wyoming Stargazing in 2014 to offer public stargazing and astronomy programs and to educate people about the risks of light pollution. The organization’s Save Our Night Skies campaign hopes to introduce the city of Jackson to shielded lights that point down, minimizing what goes up in to the sky. It also aims to get Dark Sky certification for Jackson, Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Park to decrease the level of light pollution in those areas. “Dark night skies are the national parks above our heads,” Singer has said.   What you can do Learn more about light pollution from the International Dark-Sky Association.

Some links in this post are affiliate links. If you go through them, I will earn a small commission, to no additional cost to you. Recycling is the last R of the Zero Waste Management System. While most zero waste experts say that to recycle is the last resort, you still need to do it. And not just recycle – you need to recycle efficiently. The Zero Waste Lifestyle System has discussed in one of its earliest articles about how recycling hides very grim situations, including improper and futile recycling systems. Recycling incorrectly is worse than not recycling at all. You devalue whatever recyclable material you have if you cannot sort it out properly.

About 25% of what people recycle can’t actually be recycled. These non-recyclables simply contaminate the recycling stream and even make recycling the right materials harder than it should be.

 

1. What can be recycled?

What is accepted in municipal, single-stream recycling programs varies from region to region (even town to town!). Very few items are accepted through these recycling programs, namely paper, glass, aluminum, metals and thermoplastics. Aluminum, for example, is endlessly recyclable with strong demand all over the world. Overall, much of what we try to recycle through standard programs nowadays gets tossed in the trash anyway.

Paper

All paper and cardboard, except ‘absorbable’ paper (eg. tissues, serviettes, paper towel) and waxed paper (eg. baking paper, coffee cups, paper ice-cream containers) can be recycled. But if the paper is soiled or wet, compost it.

Glass

Glass jars and bottles of all colours (with lids removed) can be recycled.

Metals

All metal containers and household items can be recycled. These include the following:

Plastics

All rigid plastics, including #1-7 (with lids removed from bottles/containers) can be recycled.

Terracycle Recycling

TerraCycle aims to eliminate the idea of waste through recycling everything. According to Shaye DiPasquale, they partner with brands around the world to create free recycling programs that allow individuals and communities to collect and recycle traditionally hard-to-recycle waste. Public recycling is economically motivated, so most common items don’t belong in your blue bin. However, TerraCycle® proves that everything is technically recyclable, including candy and snack wrappers, plastic packaging, shoes, razor blades, and old and broken toys.

2. What can’t be recycled?