April Eco-friendly Challenge and Earth Day Collab with Project Eco

Hey there everyone! Today I’m super excited to be doing a collab with Project Eco. I’ve had so much fun doing these monthly challenges to try and be more eco-friendly, so for this month, I’ve decided to use this collab with Project Eco as inspiration for my challenge this April.

April is all about Earth Day, so all the points and tips about how we can be more friendly to our beautiful planet and do small things to contribute to helping it heal in some way or the other. So today, I am so happy to be setting my monthly challenge and chatting about how to be more eco-friendly in our daily lives with Project Eco. Being eco-friendly is something I am so passionate about so being able to do a collab like this is a huge moment for me. (Throwing a little party in my head!! Wooohoooo).

So, without further ado, let me get onto the post! How this post will work is Project Eco will first share their thoughts on a different section of how we can be more earth-conscious and eco-friendly as well as a tip or two with how to incorporate it into daily life. Then, I will share some ideas with how you can incorporate their ideas into your daily life, because these things can be overwhelming and the key is to make small changes that are easy enough to make part of your daily life and maintain them. After all of that’s done, I will share how this will all culminate into my challenge for the month, inspired by Project Eco’s points. I hope you enjoy this post!

Animals and Charities 

Hi, it’s 🥳 

Donating to charities can help to support environmental work and make a difference to things that you alone can’t. There are fun ways to do this as well, such as adopting an animal. You get sent frequent updates on how you’re chosen animal is doing.  

WWF have a fantastic range of animals to adopt and all of the money goes to helping save that species of animal. Some of the animals are penguins, tigers, elephants and dolphins, but there are loads more. Obviously, there are other charities that do the same thing, but if you want to adopt an animal but don’t know where to look, I would suggest WWF. 

Saving animals is a big part of saving the environment. They help to keep our ecosystems functioning and the more species that go extinct, the more our Earth will change. So, my eco tip is to donate or adopt an animal, if you can.  

Blondey on a Mission’s Daily tips

Okay so this one isn’t as easy to incorporate into daily life as the rest but I’m going to give it a go. As Project Eco has explained, small donations to wildlife conservation sites or adopting an animal on WWF is a fantastic way to help save species because when all the animals don’t live in balance, it completely throws off the ecosystem.

As has been said, you can’t necessarily do something yourself in your daily life because these issues are so much greater than yourself. I mean, you can’t go out to the arctic and regenerate ice for the polar bears. However, there are one or two things that you can do in your daily life that can contribute to these causes.

One thing you can do in your daily life is to save insects where you can. I know that they seem like bugs (pun definitely intended), but they too play a big role in the ecosystem. So, instead of killing that really creepy spider in the corner of your room, call someone over who doesn’t mind spiders and have them take it outside. Saving spiders is a way of helping animals because they keep pesty insects under control.

One other way to include this in your daily life is to support local wildlife where you can. For instance, leaving out water for birds, or some extra food and water for little critters such as hedgehogs. Humans have made life notably harder for all creatures so even if you can’t donate or adopt an animal, leaving out some extra water or even cat food is a fantastic way to help supplement the resources humans have been taking away for all those little animals. Just think of it as watering your plants every day, except this one comes with the chance of seeing beautiful birds or an adorable hedgehog in your garden.

Litter 

Hi, it’s 🥳 and 🥭 

Littering effects the immediate wildlife, the rivers and oceans it eventually ends up in and it doesn’t look very nice. If you have some rubbish then put it in a nearby bin or take it home to bin (recycle if possible) or reuse as storage or a craft. These things all help to reduce the amount of litter. 

If you have a litter picker, wouldn’t mind buying one or don’t mind getting your hands a little dirty then you could always pick up some of the litter in your area. This is also a great way to raise money for charities if you can get your friends and family to sponsor you based on the amount of litter you pick up. Then it helps the environment in two ways. Once this pandemic is over, you could even do a group sponsored litter pick! There are loads of craft you could try with the materials you collect (if they’re safe). There are special bins that you could put crisp packets into, and you could try thinking of a craft to make out of it yourself! I’ve always loved the process of sitting down and fiddling with the piece of plastic I want to craft with until I think of something!  

Blondey on a Mission’s Daily Tips

Litter picking may not seem like a fun thing to incorporate into your daily life but litter does such damage and there are actually great ways to reduce litter without doing big litter picks all the time. Plus, my motto is that there is always a way to make something fun, and if you can do that, then not only are you doing something valuable but it’s also enjoyable.

Recycling every day is a great way to reduce litter because it stops big rubbish companies from wasting recyclables by putting them in landfills, and it stops single-use plastic items for instance getting out and causing damage somewhere else.

Another great thing to do is to keep a small rubbish packet in your car. I do this when I drive or even keep a small bag in my bag when I’m walking in case I see litter around. That way, you’re not necessarily having to take too much time out to do litter-picking but you are still reducing waste and helping the environment because you can just pick up and get rid of any litter you see. Be careful though when picking things up and be sure to wash your hands afterwards (at least that’s one benefit of covid is having hand sanitiser everywhere hey?)

Lastly, a fantastic way to stop littering is to avoid single-use consumption of items. For instance, plastic bottles or takeaway coffee cups are big litter problems and so are plastic bags. So, rather keep an aluminium water bottle or a travel mug on you if you know you can’t resist temptation for a latte on the way home or need something to drink, and be sure to keep some reusable bags on you so you don’t have to resort to plastic ones. These are very easy things to just implement in our daily lives that can not only reduce the amount of litter but also slowly help save the planet too!

Sustainably sourced food and the benefits of it 

Hi, it’s 🥭 and I just thought I’d quickly comment about more sustainable foods and the benefits of buying locally sourced foods, and how good for the environment those foods are. Recently, I told my parents that I wanted to be a vegetarian, and they said that we could do vegetarian week every 3 weeks, so I thought it was quite relevant to talk about this.  

Sustainable foods are foods that come from sources that come from places that can reproduce the food in a healthy way. For example, sustainably sourced fish are fish that are reproducing quickly enough at a rate where they won’t all be caught by fishermen for us to eat, therefore there is no overfishing. You should always support companies and farmers with sustainable sources, as it saves many species from dying.  

Now to discuss locally sourced foods. Where do I start. I have only 2 points to make about them, you should understand. 

1: they’re better for the environment  

2: they’re cheaper 

Why not get them?! 

There are also huge benefits for both the environment and your health if you have at least one day a week of being a vegetarian! 

Now next time you are grocery shopping, make sure to check for sustainability and how local the foods are!  

Blondey on a Mission’s Daily Tips

Making sure that our food is sustainably sourced is so important, as has been pointed out, but it can be hard to make this part of our daily lives sometimes if our supermarkets don’t necessarily support this. My best tip in this sense would be to try and see if your area has a farmer’s market where you can get all your fresh produce from because those foods are almost always sustainably sourced.

If you don’t have a farmer’s market, do a little research into the foods you like and the country you live in and see what brands are sustainable. That way, you don’t have to get stressed trying to find it in the shops themselves. Once that’s done, it’s really easy to swap to the more locally sourced and sustainable food items, especially when you know what you’re looking for.

Lastly, I completely agree with being vegetarian one day of the week at least. Meat is after all expensive and veggies are so versatile you sometimes don’t even miss the meat if you’re creative enough with your cooking. My best way to incorporate this into your daily life though is to try and only have one meal a day where you’re eating meat, or meal prep so that most of your meals are vegetarian, which is less effort and cheaper for you plus you still get to enjoy delicious food. For instance, what I do is only really have meat at dinner time. Breakfast and lunch are almost always vegetarian because I’ll have oats or fruit with yoghurt and then for lunch I’ll have a bagel or a salad – easy! For dinner though, if you meal prep so that you only cook twice a week and one of those is vegetarian (which is what I try do), then you end up being vegetarian for three or four nights of the week without any extra effort! How amazing is that??

Plants and trees and SAVING THE BEES! 

Hi, it’s 🥭 and  and we are going to be writing about saving bees and the benefit of plants and trees!  

Bees are amazing creatures, but a lot of people fear them due to their sting. It can be terrifying, but overall, they’re great!  

Well before we talk about saving bees, lets discuss why they need saving. Bees are especially important for biodiversity. They pollinate flowers and help the growth trees and other plants which can serve as food and shelter for other animals. This means that not only do bees depend on plants, plants and a lot of other animals depend on bees. 

The bee population is declining for many reasons, including disease, global warming, habitat loss and pesticide use, but one of the biggest factors is the use of farming chemicals and mono-cropping. Mono-cropping is the agricultural practice of harvesting the same crops on the same land, resulting in a lack of biodiversity on the agricultural land.  

We can do a lot to help bees. Some things you can do to help include not using pesticide, supporting farmers that don’t mono-crop their fields and lastly, planting bee friendly flowers in your garden. Some of these include campanula, comfrey, foxglove, delphinium, hollyhock and potentilla. There are loads more flowers, all you need to do is run a quick google search! 

Plants are incredibly important for other things too. Needless to say, an ancient oak tree could be home to 50 families of birds and squirrels. This may come as an issue when it comes to humans, as wood is something we need and did need from the moment we were born. This means that chopping down trees is necessary, unfortunately. Whilst it’s sad that animals lose their homes, there are a few things you could do, such as replant twigs of the trees so that the animals can at least have a new home. Something we can’t keep doing is cutting down trees without replanting them. You may be wondering how you could possibly do something in your day-to-day life to help, but there are many options. You could stop using paper bags and opt for a reusable fabric bag, or maybe getting recycled notebooks instead of fresh ones with all the plastic in them. These are the simple things, and it may seem like doing them won’t make a difference, but if we all do a bit it will be a lot. There are more fun things to do with used paper bags, for example you could make confetti, or cut it into a rectangle and stick it to a whiteboard and draw leaves on the top! If you let your creative spirit through, you’d be surprised at the possibilities! 

Blondey on a Mission’s Daily Tips

Planting, as Project Eco mentioned, as well as supporting farmers that don’t use pesticides etc. is a great way to help save insect populations and be earth-friendly in general but it can be hard to make that part of your daily lifestyle.

So, to bounce off what they’ve said I would suggest making a little plant project for yourself. Choose one or two bee-friendly flowers or eco-friendly plants and make them your babies. Plant them, and every day water them and make them a part of your daily life, just like feeding a pet or brushing your teeth. Soon, you’ll have a beautiful plant that is helping the environment but you’ve also gotten to see your ‘child’ grow and honestly nothing is more satisfying.

Lastly, it’s important to be as resource friendly as possible. In the morning, have all your reusable items on hand such as your water bottle, travel mug and reusable bags so that you don’t need to resort to the plastic, single-use options at stores.

Instead of throwing away items that you don’t use anymore, put them aside and wait to turn them into a craft project. Every day, think about how much paper you use and why – write back-to-back or save your printer dud pages or scrap paper to make notes on instead of just throwing them away.

Doing things such as recycling, using reusable items and opting to walk instead of drive are all things that take some getting used to but these habits that we can incorporate into our daily lives is a great way for us to start saving our planet and even though you can’t see the difference you’re making straight away, I promise it’s definitely doing something!

Blondey on a Mission: My Monthly Challenge

This has been such an informative post with so many great explanations and ideas for how and why we should make more earth-friendly life choices. So, for this month, these are going to be my small challenges that I want to accomplish to honour the earth:

1.      Instead of buying a coffee or a tea, I’m going to put that and all my small change aside to support an animal on WWF. The lowest you can donate for an animal per month is £3 and that is literally one cup of coffee. So by sacrificing one coffee a month (and this isn’t even looking at saving spare change), you can support an animal in the wild or help with conservation efforts so my aim is to save up all those expenses this month, see how much I have and then donate it to WWF.

2.      I already try to pick up litter whenever I see it, but recycling isn’t as easy while I’m here in South Africa due to some sad complications. So instead, I’m going to try and keep our recyclables aside and instead take them to community centres where they use them for craft projects. I may even try make a few items myself.

3.      Lastly, I’m going to up my vegetarianism this month. As I said, I am quite veggie-forward normally but my family does eat a lot of meat so I’m definitely going to try get us to cut back as a whole group but I’m also trying a new eco-friendly project with another blogger that fits perfectly with this challenge so watch this space to see how it turns out.

And that’s all we have for you today! I had such great fun working with Project Eco on this. Not only did I learn so much but it is always great to collaborate with people who share your passions so being able to work together on a blog post like this has honestly been a dream come true so I want to say a huge thank you to Project Eco for doing this collab with me and I look forward to hopefully doing another one with you in the future! Please be sure to go and check out their page too here, but otherwise let me know what you think of my April monthly challenge and do you do any of these things already? Let’s chat in the comments section!

Lots of Love

Blondey on a Mission, and Project Eco