Love Sustainably
Valentine’s Day is full of chocolate, flowers, romance, and love. However, while you celebrate this special day with your loved ones, you can now add that it is full of sustainable actions that can help make our world a better place to live. Here are just a few tips on how to make your Valentine’s Day sustainable:
Skip the restaurant and plan your meal at home. Incorporate local foods into your meal, including fruits and veggies. Consider thinking about limiting the amount of meat in your dish or removing the meat option altogether. You will find that you can save yourself money by eating at home, limit the amount of vehicle emissions given off by skipping the restaurant drive, and help reduce the amount of air pollution that the production of meat gives off. Here are some easy and yummy meatless recipes to use for your Valentine’s Day dinner.
Plan an eco-friendly date. Consider volunteering in your local community by planting a tree, designing a garden, and picking up trash. You will help beautify your home and have something fun to do with your significant other, friends, or family that you can bond over. Consider taking a walk outside or bicycle/take public transit to your nearest park and have a picnic. Don’t forget to pick up after yourselves when you are done. Need more date ideas? Click here.
Gift fair-trade/organic products. If your family/friends/significant other has a love language of gift giving, consider organic and/or fair-trade items that do not cause environmental strain to produce. For example, not only can you support chocolate that was responsibly and ethically made, you can help the environment since the production of fair-trade cocoa protects wildlife habitats and rainforests since it is shade-grown. Find some great chocolate brands here.
Recycle or upcycle gifts. A great upcycled gift idea is turning old-shirts into quilts. There are ways in which to do this on your own, but you can also easily send in the shirts to have a quilt made by a company. Project Repat is just one of those companies. It uses recycled plastic bottles to create a backing for your new quilt. This helps reduce the amount of plastics in landfills, provides textile jobs in the United States, and helps eliminate the amount of textile waste on the planet.
Consider any number of these ideas to make your Valentine’s Day a fun and sustainable time for all the people you love. You may even come to find that you love being sustainable as well.
