Break out the good champagne!

According to Bloomberg, Disney is the latest company to join a growing list of corporations that have decided to stop the use of single-use plastic straws. Earlier this month, The Washington Post reported that Seattle became “the first major city in the United States to ban drinking straws,” and Starbucks announced that it would remove single-use plastic straws from its 28,000 stores by 2020. To round out this plastic-free parade, in June BBC News reported that McDonald’s will replace plastic straws with paper ones in all of its UK and Ireland locations, starting in September.

For those of you on the front lines of the single-use plastic straw movement, we hope that these recent moves in corporate America will encourage you to keep fighting the good fight. These huge shifts signify not only that your efforts are having an effect, but that the removal of single-use plastic straws is becoming the new norm in our society. At a time when it feels like so much in the world is going wrong, it is refreshing to learn that some things are going right.

To learn more about plastic pollution and an inspiring global effort to reduce plastic waste, read our blog post from last July, Plastic Waste & The Ocean Cleanup.

Sources:

Golum, Rob, “Disney Joins Cast of Companies Abandoning Plastic Straws,” Bloomberg, 2018.
Wootson, Jr., Cleve R., “Seattle becomes first major U.S. city to ban straws,” The Washington Post, 2018.
“Disney Expands Environmental Commitment by Reducing Plastic Waste,” The Walt Disney Company, 2018.
“McDonald’s to ditch plastic straws,” BBC News, 2018.
“Starbucks to Eliminate Plastic Straws Globally by 2020,” Starbucks, 2018.

Happy Earth Day!

As we said in our Earth Day post last year, Mother Earth is at the heart of who we are and what we do at Remyndr. And over the course of this past year, the issue of climate change has increasingly come to the fore in public discourse. But how does climate change affect our daily lives? Better yet, how do our daily lives affect climate change? What’s our Ecological Footprint?

At Remyndr, often we talk about how to reduce your ecological footprint by recycling more, buying less plastic, and downloading our free app. Today we want to take a more granular look at your unique ecological footprint based on your lifestyle. After all, how do you decide what specific steps to take to reduce your footprint if you’re not clear on how your lifestyle impacts the environment?

Download the Remyndr app for free.

That’s where the Ecological Footprint Quiz comes in handy. It’s free, it’s fun, it takes five minutes. The EFQ is a carbon calculator that measures “how much biologically productive land and sea is used by a given population or activity and compares this to how much land and sea is available” (earthday.org).

Take our Ecological Footprint Quiz!

Simply take the quiz, get your results, and “explore scenarios” that could help you minimize your footprint. You don’t need to take gigantic steps in order to make a huge impact. Say you eat meat at one less meal per day. Over the next year, you can reduce your total animal consumption by a third or half! Huge return on investment for one small step! Besides, we can all use a salad, right?

We hope you enjoy Earth Day 2017! Follow us on Facebook to keep up to date our weekly posts!

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