Three simple ways to reduce your Environmental Impact through recycling.

The carbon footprint can be defined as the total amount of greenhouse gases that are generated by our actions and lifestyle, but it can also be used to describe the environmental impact we each produce each year. With just a few small changes, everyone could make a huge impact on the environmental pressures today and it could be as simple as buying recyclable products that are produced in the UK or simply recycling all your waste.

There are three main ways to reduce our impact on the world and those are to reduce our resource uses, reuse what we have already produced, and recycle what we can to limit production in the future.

Reduce

Reducing dependency on plastics and single-use products is the biggest difference we can all make to the plastics in the oceans and the strain single-use products have on the waste industry. Today there are many alternatives that we can all switch to help reduce our impact on the earth. Buying local produce with no food miles is one of the simplest ways to reduce our impact. Food that is imported usually costs more money these days and would have produced carbon into the atmosphere to get it to your local shop. If you buy local, say from a butcher down the road who uses local produce, your impact would be reduced massively every day!

The next biggest difference we could all make is to travel smarter. We are fortunate enough to live in a safe and well laid out small country, with loads of options for transport. If more people walked or cycled rather than drove everywhere the impact would be outstanding. Next time you need to make a quick trip to the shops make sure to think about how much better for your health and the health of your home it would be if you walked or cycled. Electric vehicles are also viable options in today’s age, however using an eco-friendly energy company to power the vehicle is a must. Another factor to consider is clothes. Clothes are designed to be worn and reused over and over, yet some of us will buy new clothes every week! Again, imagine If we all reused our clothes until they broke, fixed them instead of replacing them, and gave them away to a charity shop or a friend when we outgrew them.

These are just a few of the ways we can all reduce our environmental impact on our world, it’s not so much about selling your car or never buying clothes again, it’s more about the thought process involved in making the decisions above. If we stopped and thought about our impacts more the world would improve overnight.

Reuse

Although these days we are far more understanding of our environmental impacts, there are still a lot of people and companies that like to produce millions of single-use plastics globally each day. One simple solution to this is to reuse those products as much as possible, which will lead to reduced demand for their products and far less being thrown away. This can be done as simply as using an old plastic water bottle for a few days rather than once, or even by getting creative and reusing the plastics for things like planters or scoops for dog foods. With reusing what would be waste the possibilities are endless, there are even companies that build an entire house from recycled glass and plastic.

Recycle

The third and final main way to help reduce your impact on the environment is of course to recycle. This is like reusing your plastics but on a much larger scale. With recycling, we have the technology to turn old bottles into new ones. This greatly reduces the need for more to be made which in turn means less pollution. Currently, in the UK only 45% of our waste is recycled, more needs to be done to help counter the production processes. If we can reduce plastics we can save the ocean, the soil, and our drinking water all of which is full of microplastics because of our way of life.

The more recycling, we do overall the less waste we will produce and the less demand we will have for raw materials to produce these products. If we all do our part and follow these three simple methods, we can make a huge impact on the world we live in and save it now for future generations to enjoy forever.

To us at RVS, this is the meaning behind “Global Recycling Day”. As a company, we recycle every day and supply vehicles to those companies that help to recycle the UK’S waste. We even partnered with EMOSS to create refuse vehicle conversions to reduce our carbon footprint and to have a bigger environmental impact globally by allowing businesses to run carbon-neutral fleets. We are doing our part for the bigger picture; we hope that this will inspire you to do the same.

Happy Global Recycling Day! From all of us at RVS.