There are also alternative means of transportation outside of driving a vehicle. EVCC offers ORCA passes (prepaid bus passes) for staff and students at a discounted rate.
Another option is riding a bicycle. Everett CC provides bike fixing stations and there are 2 bike lockers on campus to keep equipment safe and secure while working or in class.
For more information on sustainable transportation options, check out our webpage: everettcc.edu
EarthCorps enables community members of all ages to give back to their community by helping keep city parks and forests healthy. You bring a positive attitude, your mask, snacks, water bottle, and clothes that can get dirty, and EarthCorps will provide the rest.
ABSOLUTELY NO EXPERIENCE NEEDED!
EarthCorps staff and volunteer leaders will teach you everything you need to know about the work including tool safety, forest health, and the importance of the specific tasks you will be doing.
WHAT WILL WE BE DOING?
While the exact tasks at hand vary, our projects focus on improving the forests and parks in our local cities. Healthy forests are vital to our community because they filter rainwater, purify the air, provide living spaces for wildlife, and give people a place to connect with the outdoors.
Tasks include:
Removing aggressive weeds like English Ivy and Himalayan Blackberry
Planting native trees and shrubs
Spreading mulch
Pre-register online. No walk-up volunteering at this time. We need to know what to be prepared for, thank you for understanding. If you are registering for an event in Tacoma, please visit our Tacoma volunteer page for further guidelines and protocols.
Digital QR Code sign-in. Once you arrive scan the event QR code with your phone to sign yourself in. Waivers should be completed after you register online. For youth volunteers, there is an additional step of verifying your parent/ guardian.
Face masks are required. If needed, North Puget Sound events will have disposable masks on hand.
Smaller events. Each of our events will host a max of 5 volunteers at a time.
Clothing that can (and will) get dirty and closed-toed shoes. (work boots, hiking boots, rubber boots, or tennis shoes). Rain gear and warm layers (check the weather!)
Bring your own water and snacks.
Maintain social distancing. During the event please be sure to maintain a 6-10 feet physical distance from fellow volunteers and our event leads.
Bring your work gloves. If you need work gloves, all North Puget Sound events will have extra on hand.
At any point our public agency or public health guidelines change, processes will be updated to reflect current restrictions and practices.
YOUTH AND KIDS:
Volunteers of all ages are welcome! The work is typically geared towards adults and kids 10 and up, but younger kids are welcome to participate. Parents of younger kids should expect to supervise their children. Youth under the age of 14 must be accompanied by a parent, guardian, or responsible adult. If you are under 18 years old, make sure your parent/guardian completes your waiver which is required in order for you to participate. Waivers should be completed after you register online. For youth volunteers, there is an additional step of verifying your parent/ guardian.
Service Hours and Credit for Volunteering
In many cases, volunteering with EarthCorps counts for service hours! Check with your school, class, or program to verify that volunteering with EarthCorps (a 501c3 nonprofit) will count. When you sign up for an event on our volunteer calendar, please indicate if you are volunteering for credit. This helps us know that our volunteer team needs to sign your forms and approve your hours.
While people often think of sustainability as minimizing our environmental footprint, it is in fact much broader and all-encompassing than this. Sustainable tourism is all about achieving a balance between economic growth, human well-being, and environmental health. It focuses on reducing tourism’s negative impacts and on maximizing its positive benefits for communities, cultures, ecosystems, and the planet. Sustainable tourism accounts for both the immediate impacts felt today as well as those longer-term impacts that will be experienced by future generations.
Having a sustainable summer vacation starts with eco-friendly transportation to your destination. The transport sector accounts for 29% of world carbon emissions – it has the largest GHG share.
This summer, when going to the lake, the beach, or a picnic to relax with your family, use eco-friendly transport options. These eco-friendly options include taking a walk, riding a bike, or taking public transportation instead of a personal car.
If it’s an accessible area, biking is an eco-friendly way to travel. It also promotes exercise and builds up muscle strength. It is also good for your heart, lungs, and overall circulation. Plus, it’s a low-impact exercise if your body needs a rest.
Using a bike also conserves non-renewable resources and reduces air pollution. Take a bike ride to explore a new town or even hidden spots in your neighborhood. Instead of driving, take a bicycle to your local ice cream shop.
To make your traveling even more sustainable, use eco-friendly travel essentials, like a hemp backpack, bamboo toothbrushes, and ethical clothes. To further minimize the environmental impact of your trips, you can purchase carbon offsets.
An eco-friendly summer is not less fun; it is just better for the planet. And when we all take steps to make summer eco-friendly, we also help by doing our bit to protect nature for future generations to enjoy.
Picnics and cookouts are regular occurrences in summer. However, eating outdoors or ordering meals can generate a lot of avoidable waste if you allow it. Don’t use disposable paper or plastic plates, cutleries, napkins, or cups. Instead, take reusable alternatives when you go out to eat.
Disposables consume resources like trees and fossil fuels, but you can only use them once. Single usage does not quite do justice to the environmental costs. Using reusable eating utensils can make a massive dent in your carbon footprint. In addition, it helps cut down on waste and natural resource consumption.
And when it comes to washing up those plates when you get them home, opt for zero-waste dish soap or zero-waste dishwasher detergents for perfectly sparkly clean dishes without the plastic bottles and environmental harm.
Shop food locally
Want to eat healthily, save on emissions and help to boost the local economy? These are some of the many reasons to eat locally-produced food. You will probably eat more meals in the summer as part of the eco-friendly activities you have planned.
A sustainable holiday meal plan starts with shopping for vegetables and other food ingredients at the local farmers’ market. Because of the short food supply chain, it has a lesser carbon footprint compared to imported processed foods. Buying locally grown food also helps your local community save food from going to waste.
Additionally, eating less meat has positive impacts on the health of you and the environment. Research has linked meat production with deforestation1, water shortages, and dangerous levels of CO2 emissions.
Outdoor cooking is one great thing about the holidays; it brings friends together. However, outdoor cooking can pollute fresh air if you don’t use environmentally friendly methods. Instead of charcoal or wood grills, use an electric or propane grill. You can also use pellet grills that use compressed wood scrap and emit less carbon.
Eco-friendly activities will generate
some waste. Don’t just throw everything you no longer need into the trash. Look for opportunities to recycle them instead. You can use food waste as compost for your garden, and check out our recycling tips to maximize what actually does, in fact, get recycled.
Have you ever wondered about what happens to your recycling after it leaves the house? Each item put out for recycling only starts its journey once thrown in the bin. After it’s picked up curbside, it begins the laborious process of being turned into something else.
Recycling is the process of converting waste materials into new materials and objects. To do this, recycling often requires both machinery and employees to correctly sort recyclable items based on the material they’re made of. This includes paper, plastic, glass, metal, and more.
While the recycling process often differs by commodity and locality, there are essentially three main steps: collection, processing, and remanufacturing into a new product.
Collection: Recyclable materials are generated by a consumer or business and then collected by a private hauler or government entity.
Processing: The materials are transported by the collector to a processing facility, such as a materials recovery facility or paper processor. At the processing facility, the recyclables are sorted, cleaned of contaminants, and prepared for transport to a milling facility or directly to a manufacturing facility. Some commodities may require more processing for additional sorting and decontamination. For example, glass and plastic are often sent to glass beneficiation plants and plastics reclaimers, respectively, where they are processed into mill-ready forms.
Remanufacturing: After all necessary processing is completed, recyclables are made into new products at recycling plants or other facilities, such as paper mills or bottle manufacturing facilities.
E-waste is a separate category that requires its own set of rules. Electronic wastecan’t mix with typical recyclables because it not only contains plastic but also possesses toxins like mercury and lead. Therefore, e-waste must be properly disposed of. Otherwise, you risk harming the employees who handle it, as well as contaminating the environment.
Students for Enviromental Action (SEA) invites you to be an environmental hero! Bring clean styrofoam, packing peanuts in bags or boxes, bubble wrap and plastic film to be recycled–for FREE!
The global cosmetics industry produces 120 billion units of packaging every year,including the cardboard that envelops perfumes, serums, and moisturizers that contributes to the loss of 18 million acres of forest each year.
And while it isn’t necessarily the easiest to recycle empty beauty and skincare packaging, it is very much necessary for a sustainable future.
While shopping sustainable beauty is the ultimate goal, it’s still essential to recycle all empty beauty containers to avoid waste. In fact, 50% of people don’t even try to recycle their empty containers as it is deemed “inconvenient”.
The so-called incommodity contributes to the 400 million tons of plastic waste generated per year.
But here’s the thing: Beauty product packaging is especially confusing and tricky to recycle (think: mirrored glass, cardboard sleeves, paper inserts, etc).
First and foremost, you should always follow your local recycling laws to ensure that you are following the rules. You can also use resources like Recycle Coach,How2Recycle, and EARTH911 to check what recyclables are accepted.
Some eco-conscious brands also offer internal recycling programs within their own facilities.
TerraCycle, a private recycling business, actually works with Nordstrom for BEAUTYCYCLE, a free program that invites consumers to drop off their beauty and skincare product packaging (regardless of brand) at in-store collection points for recycling, including items that are typically unrecyclable. Other brands that have individual in-house recycling include Garnier, Burt’s Bees, eos, Herbal Essences, L’Occitane, Josie Maran, and Paula’s Choice, to name a few. These brands generally work with programs like TerraCycle to properly process waste.
Small products can actually halt the recycling process and therefore aren’t widely accepted at recycling plants. This means anything under 2 inches, think: all travel and portable beauty products. Additionally, products with dark packaging also cannot be recycled as they can’t be identified by MRF machines. Also unrecyclable: products that contain mirrors, magnets, makeup brushes, sheet masks and packets, and squeezable tubes.
The ideal goal is to use less packaging, hence producing less waste. Many brands like Brazilian NATURA, French Diptyque, and Los Angeles-based Bathing Culture offer refillable beauty products. This means that you will be reusing the packaging several times over its intended lifetime, thus keeping it away from the landfill. Over 90 percent of an average product’s environmental impact comes from extracting and refining the raw materials from which it is made.
Package-free haircare
Shampoos and conditioners typically come in plastic bottles, which can be a nightmare for anyone looking to cut plastic waste out of their bathroom.
Ditch the plastic and go naked with the solid shampoo bars and conditioners. Making haircare solid eliminates the need for plastic bottles, reducing the environmental impact enormously and saving tons of plastic from ever being produced or entering landfills. They’re easy to travel with because they are small and won’t spill in your bag, and they’re very easy to use.
Animal cruelty-free shampoo bars that last up to 80 washes.
The zero-waste shop Package Free also has multiple options for package-free haircare. And if you’re not a fan of bar soaps for hair, the shop also carries refillable conditioners (packaged in aluminum) that are vegan and chemical free. Opt out of the pump and go for the cap for a fully plastic-free conditioner.
Students for Enviromental Action (SEA) invites you to be an environmental hero! Bring clean styrofoam, packing peanuts in bags or boxes, bubble wrap and plastic film to be recycled–for FREE!
If you love Adventure, hiking, nature, rivers, and the wilderness, this class is for you!
Theme & Course Description:
Land Use, Natural Resource Management, and Sustainability. On three REQUIRED field trips (each up to 8 hours) to multi-use parks and public lands, students learn how land is managed for multiple user groups (hikers, mountain bikers, off-road vehicle enthusiasts, boaters, fishermen, rock climbers, and equestrians, etc.). With DNR forest managers, students learn about natural resource management in Washington state. Volunteering for the Lord Hill Regional Park & the US Forest Service, students experience the value of citizen service in caring for our wilderness and public lands. Students then visit an unmanaged recreation campsite and are at risk of being lost to public use. In the online portion of the class, students learn to research and write a research essay to solve two location problems. (Required field trip dates: July 11, 18, and 25. An additional fee is added to this class to cover the field trip costs.)
Email cseslar@everettcc.edu to get permission to enroll in this class.
ENGL& 102 – Summer 2023
Theme: Land Use, Natural Resource Management & Sustainability
While the benefits of recycling are clear, growing and strengthening the U.S. recycling system to create more jobs and enhance environmental and community benefits will require multi-entity collaboration to address the challenges currently facing the system. Current challenges include:
Most Americans want to recycle, as they believe recycling provides an opportunity for them to be responsible caretakers of the Earth. However, it can be difficult for consumers to understand what materials can be recycled, how materials can be recycled, and where to recycle different materials. This confusion often leads to placing recyclables in the trash or throwing trash in the recycling bin or cart.
America’s recycling infrastructure has not kept pace with today’s waste stream. Communication between the manufacturers of new materials and products and the recycling industry needs to be enhanced to prepare for and optimally manage the recycling of new materials.
Domestic markets for recycled materials need to be strengthened. Historically, some of the recycled materials generated in the United States have been exported internationally. However, changing international policies have limited the export of materials. We need to better integrate recycled materials and end-of-life management into product and packaging designs. We need to improve communication among the different sectors of the recycling system to strengthen existing materials markets and to develop new innovative markets.
Entities across the recycling system agree that more consistent measurement methodologies are needed to measure recycling system performance. These more standardized metrics can then be used to create effective goals and track progress.
EPA’s National Recycling Strategy identifies actions needed to address the challenges in the U.S. recycling system. The actions are for entities across the value chain — including federal, state, tribal and local governments, private businesses, trade associations, and nonprofit organizations. In response to some of these challenges, EPA has developed several products to assist communities in improving their recycling programs.
Students for Enviromental Action (SEA) invites you to be an environmental hero! Bring clean styrofoam, packing peanuts in bags or boxes, bubble wrap and plastic film to be recycled–for FREE!
Recycling is the process of collecting and processing materials that would otherwise be thrown away as trash and turning them into new products.
Recycling can benefit your community and the environment.
Benefits of Recycling:
1.Reduces the amount of waste sent to landfills and incinerators
2.Conserves natural resources such as timber, water and minerals
Increases economic security by tapping a domestic source of materials
3.Prevents pollution by reducing the need to collect new raw materials
4.Saves Energy
When a recycled material, rather than a raw material, is used to make a new product, natural resources and energy are conserved. This is because recycled materials have already been refined and processed once; manufacturing the second time is much cleaner and less energy-intensive than the first. For example, manufacturing with recycled aluminum cans uses 95 percent less energy than creating the same amount of aluminum with bauxite.
The paper, glass, metals, plastic, and organic material Stanford recycled in 2016 saved a total of about 70,481 million BTUs of energy; enough energy to power nearly 613 homes for one year. Or said another way, conserved 12,131 barrels of oil or 567,3014 gallons of gasoline.
6.Supports American manufacturing and conserves valuable resources
7.Helps create jobs in the recycling and manufacturing industries in the United States.
Recycling is an important economic driver, as it helps create jobs and tax revenues. The Recycling Economic Information (REI) Report found that, in a single year, recycling and reuse activities in the United States accounted for 757,000 jobs, $36.6 billion in wages and $6.7 billion in tax revenues. This equates to 1.57 jobs, $76,000 in wages and $14,101 in tax revenues for every 1,000 tons of material recycled.
Students for Enviromental Action (SEA) invites you to be an environmental hero! Bring clean styrofoam, packing peanuts in bags or boxes, bubble wrap and plastic film to be recycled–for FREE!
