How To Teach Kids To Become Eco-Friendly Citizens
Explaining to kids how their every action can leave an impact on the environment needs to start early. This is because ingraining it into their core attitudes can make a huge difference by the time we become adults. As a society, we need to focus more on educating our citizens on being eco-friendly and caring about what our lives do to the earth we live on.
Some of these steps can include:
- Lessening our carbon footprints
- Making the change from single use products
- Choosing to rely on more fuel-efficient vehicles.
Describing Our Carbon Footprints
Reducing your carbon footprint is a great example of an easy method to teach children exactly what we as humans contribute to the generation of CO2 and how it affects the planet. Small steps forward can often start with just teaching children how easily they may be able to lessen their carbon footprints.
Even though it can seem small to turn the lights off when you leave a room, there are still ways they can start helping when they have less control over their lives. Over time they may be able to reflect on more creative ways they can help the environment, with this as their starting point.
What You Use Matters
Using eco-friendly products is actually a great way to help the environmental benefit and is an easy change to teach children about.
When it comes to cleaning products, there are many chemicals that can either pollute the air when in use or release toxins into the air when manufactured. A lot of these products have chemicals that aren’t safe for people either.
Eco-friendly products have a lot more to them than using chemicals though. There are many products we use daily that could benefit from an overhaul. Specifically, our overuse of plastic has contributed to heavy pollution in our oceans.
There are a lot of easy switches that could have people feeling they truly are making a difference without extreme lifestyle changes.
Currently, there is a huge movement to move away from single use products like plastic straws or reusable bags. Realizing that not everyone is quite able to make that move is okay, but when possible you should try switching to a replacement for your single use product.
One example includes The Last Plastic Straw, a group who are encouraging people to switch to alternative straw methods in order to reduce plastic waste. In the United States alone we use 500 million plastic straws a day. Think about how making the switch to a reusable straw could save plastic from ending up in our oceans.
What You Drive Matters
Quite a few countries have made the switch entirely to using energy efficient vehicles. Norway has made a move to ban gas-powered cars completely by the year 2020 in order to reduce their carbon emissions and overall contribution to pollution.
Studies have shown that the United States actually guzzles around 391.4 million gallons of gasoline a day. That is a lot of money and a lot of fossil fuels being consumed when they don’t have to be. Electric cars or hybrid cars have been changing the way the world sees fuel efficiency for decades now. Kids should know that change is on the horizon.
There are three types of cars that are meant to be fuel efficient and reduce emissions.
- Gas powered cars
- Hybrid cars that use both gas and electricity
- Electric cars
All of these cars are a better option than the basic gas-fueled cars because their overall impact to the environment is lessened.
Teaching our kids that fuel efficient cars are the next step toward bettering our planet can help ingrain in them from a young age that it is the truth. Even switching to a low-emissions vehicle when possible can change the amount in our carbon footprint.
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Why Our Kids Deserve To Know
You may be wondering why we really need to take the time to explain these concepts to our children when they should be focusing instead on less important matters. Well, there is a very good reason, and that is because they are inheriting what we leave behind.
Knowing exactly what our daily use of products can do to change the environment that they need to help support them for their generation and beyond is necessary.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking our children are too young to understand, that just isn’t correct. They care about the earth they live on and deserve to know how to help it.