By Zoe Twist
Hi my name is Zoe and I am eleven years old and have a real passion for protecting the environment. From a kid’s perspective, the environment is very important but sometimes it’s difficult to know where to start. So here are some small things you can do to help save our planet.
When you use the computer, television or other electrical appliances, you may notice a light still running. This doesn’t mean you haven’t turned it off properly, it means it’s still on standby. When the standby is on it means you will still be using power even though you don’t need to. To fix this you can simply turn it off at the switch. This will take you, at the maximum, 40 seconds extra but you will be doing your bit for the environment and Dad’s power bill.
Reduce, reuse and recycle is a very important when doing your bit for the environment. But I think reuse is the most important of all. Reusing old things is fun, creative and stops perfectly good materials going in to landfill. You can start by just collecting old egg cartons, tissue boxes, shoe boxes and anything else that comes to hand. Very soon an egg carton becomes a paint palette and an old glass bottle becomes a vase for flowers. They can also come in handy for school projects. Just recently a friend and I had to do a project on bridges. Luckily her family had collected lots of old shoe boxes and many other things. So we ended up with a very sturdy toilet roll and shoe box bridge.
Some people say the best present are the ones made you. A home-made card is great. By home-making a gift you’ll be minimising the packaging of your gift. But you can also try using normal paper or newspaper to wrap a present and maybe even draw a pattern on it. Or if you are patient enough you could reuse your old wrapping paper. But if you really want to personalise a gift try the present itself. Once I made a special decorated box for each of my friends with the first letter of their name on it. This meant minimal amounts of packaging and a great gift too!
So there are some ideas to help the home, but what about trying something at school? Why not try organising an environment day or even an environment club? This will raise awareness about our environment and you might even be able to raise money for a tree or a vegetable patch or something else to help our environment.