Many of us are eager to live our lives in a more environmentally friendly way, lessening our carbon footprint, and helping to make this earth a cleaner, greener place for us and future generations.

While some doubt our individual ability to make a difference, it helps to look at the big picture. If thousands of people take responsibility and start making greener decisions, the positive effect would be significant. It turns out that by each of us making just a few lifestyle changes, we have the potential to change the earth.

According to A Recycling Revolution, you save enough electricity to power a 100-watt bulb for four hours by recycling one glass bottle. You can run a TV for three hours on the electricity saved by recycling one aluminum can – or the equivalent of a half a gallon of gasoline. If all our newspapers were recycled, we could save about 250 million trees each year! Now that’s what I call the power of recycling!

There are many ways you can make a difference. The most obvious are to walk or ride a bike instead of drive, or at least take public transit when possible. Avoid wasting water, electricity, and paper by simply taking shorter showers, turn off the lights when you leave a room and consider not hitting the print button – or at least making sure you print on both sides. These may be small individual changes; yet they will make a big difference over the course of a year.

One significant way to make the world a greener place is being mindful of consuming and discarding plastic. In fact, 50 per cent of the plastic we use, we use just once and throw away. If not recycled, plastics take a very long time to break down. Even when they do start breaking down, they don’t ever disintegrate completely. Waste Diversion Ontario (WDO) says the average time for a plastic bottle to biodegrade is at least 450 years, but some plastics may take as long as 1,000 years to fully disappear.

So the question is – where does all this plastic go? Well, most of it ends up in landfills, or makes its way into our oceans. Enough plastic is thrown away each year to circle the earth four times! According to a study in the Journal of Science, between five to 12 million metric tons of plastic waste, including plastic bottles, entered the ocean in 2015.

We as individuals need to make a difference. Let’s work together to seek out greener alternatives:

• Try reusable bags and boxes for groceries, instead of using the grocery store plastic bags.
• Choose products with less packaging.
• Reduce “everyday” plastics such as sandwich bags, and replace them with a reusable lunch bag.
• Bring your to-go mug to the coffee or smoothie shop – a great way to reduce the number of lids and cups used – and bring your own a reusable water bottle.

Do your part to keep the environment clean and green by making some minor lifestyle changes and choosing recyclable materials whenever you can.