Earth Day Ideas

Earth Day update for 2023! To gently remind you and visitors to your home, consider these quirky "Quest" Toilet Rolls. Every action we take makes a difference. These toilet rolls from recycled paper are wrapped in a world changing Quest.

We know that together we make a difference. That is to say, individual actions (when done by many people) change the world. We also know that our actions influence others which helps create political space for governments and business to take action. You can help create a positive spiral of change.

With all of that in mind, each quest is based around a theme and has 3 levels of difficulty. In total that’s 21 things you can do to change the world for the better! They are designed for a bit of inspirational reading while on the loo. The idea is that, for each quest you accept to do, you track each time you complete each level of the quest on the free “quest tracking” poster that comes with each box. That way you will know that you are really making a difference to the world #nocheating. Together, if everyone that buys a box (or reads the quests) completes them too, we will really start to see a positive changes.

Other ideas for Earth Day

(first published April 2022)

A few ideas for Earth Day that are quick and easy to do. They are things we have done here at Celtic Sustainables, we hope you find them useful.

10 Easy Earth Day Ideas

1. Swap Plants. It may be a little early in the growing season to swap plants, but you could start a plant swap group now by finding out who your green fingered friends, neighbours and/or colleagues are. By the time you have too many seedlings to know what to do with you have an eager group of people to swap plants with. It can even save you money if you coordinate your planting plans now. It's very popular already amongst our green fingered colleagues, last year we swapped a lot of vegetable seedlings (apparently the swapped chilli plants are still growing and producing well!).
2. Create a Kitchen Garden. Have you ever noticed our green patch in front of the shop door? It's our little Kitchen Garden. Okay so while we were all working from home the raspberry canes nearly took over, and the oak trees the jay planted are doing really well. So this year, now that we are hybrid working, we’ll be tidying it up and probably planting some of those excess veggie plants from the plant swap in there. Although we know some of the team wouldn't mind at all if it just became a raspberry patch (they are yummy - the berries). If you don't have space for a Kitchen Garden, you can always invest in a space-saving mini-greenhouse from the Harvst range.
3. Re-decorate with Eco-Paints. If you are looking to redecorate, investigate eco paints. There are paints suitable for inside and out that really work, are in great colours and are better for you and the environment. There are even paints that improve indoor air quality!
4. Join the Refill Scheme. If you have a premises that is open to the public you can join the Refill Scheme. We are part of it at Unit 9. The scheme advertises (for free) that your place as somewhere that people can refill their water bottle for free. It's a great way to encourage people to use and refill their water bottle when out and about (often people don't like to ask, so end up buying either a plastic water bottle or refilling water bottles from the sinks in toilets which isn't great). It's a great way to help people to stop using plastic water bottles.
5. Bin the Butt. Smokers, it's time to Bin the Butt. By this we don't mean stop smoking necessarily, we mean just stop chucking your cigerette butts on the ground. Most cigarette butt filters are made of plastic, so if you, your friends or colleagues are not putting the finished butt in a bin, you/they are basically adding to the plastic pollution that so many of us are trying to clean up. We have gently educated our team about it here at Celtic Sustainables. Smokers are encouraged stamp out finished butt then bin it in a suitable place (not to chuck it on the ground or down the nearest road drain).
6. Do a 2 Minute Litter Pick Talking of cleaning up plastic pollution, some of us do this on our walk to and from town at lunch time. It is as simple as just picking up some litter and bining it in the appropriate bin (obviously you have to be careful about what you pick up and how, children should always be supervised). The idea comes from the same people that created the 2minutebeachclean.
7. Get involved in a Spring Clean. Now is about the time of year that many environmental organisations encourage us to help clean up our communities. Use part of Earth Day to find out what is going on near you and arrange to be a part of it. We wrote this post about going large on your Spring Clean back in 2019 - it will give you an idea of the kind of annual events you could get involved with.
8. Give nature a home. Three years ago we made and put up bird boxes all over Unit 9 (you can read it in our article here) We’ve already had families of birds (mainly house sparrows) nesting and roosting in them.
9. Insulate, Insulate, Insulate! With energy prices increasing there is no better time to double check you have enough insulation in your roof space. We sell insulation by the single roll and by the pallet. No order is too small or too big!
10. Understand Recycling. Take sometime on Earth Day to really understand what you can put into your recycling at home and at work. Then work out what else you can put into the recycling. Recycling schemes vary from place to place so it can be difficult to understand what you can recycle and where. The good news is that your local council website will have information about what you can recycle and where. Also, Terracycle has schemes all over the UK for things that you might not think can be recycled - like toothpaste tubes and pet food pouches. Challenge yourself to find one more thing you could be recycling and do it. (If you want to know how the packaging we use can be recycled, take a look at our Recycling Manfesto page).
11. Swap Eco Hacks (bonus idea) . Share and learn a new environmentally friendly hack with your friends, relatives and colleagues. See if you can find something new that you can do that will really make a difference and share your favourite hacks to inspire others to be a little more environmentally conscious. Something like, switching to shampoo bars, or a great eco alternative to sandwich bags that you have found or a way to save water while washing the dishes... we know you have few eco tricks up your sleeves.

Earth Day is 22nd of April each year. You can find out more about  Earth Day here.

If we all do a little bit more, we may even be able to push  Earth Overshoot Day back (currently for the UK it's estimated to be the 19th of May! ). Earth Overshoot Day is a date calculated each year where humanity’s demand for ecological resources and services exceeds what Earth can regenerate in that year. In 2021, Earth Overshoot Day was July 29. It's all theory of course, but an interesting concept to help envisage how many "Earths" we currently need to live on.