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Cutting back on driving, eating less meat and using less electricity are great ways to reduce your carbon footprint and help keep the environment healthy. However, they also call for you to make sacrifices. Here, Rosemary Peters shares three ways that you can help the environment and the critters who live in it without having to sacrifice at all INTERNATIONAL INNOVATION

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In 2014, over 100,000 flights took off from airports around the world every day. Many of these flights winged people to far-away places on exotic vacations where they could sit back, relax and enjoy new food.

But what if instead of harming the environment when taking a vacation, you could help save it instead? By taking an animal holiday, you can relax and protect an endangered species at the same time.

While vacations like these can be great for the mind and the economy, they are not always great for the environment. One only has to look at how tourism has impacted the Galapagos Islands to understand the environmental impact of tourism.

From turtles to orangutans and lions to horses, there are animal holidays that will show you the delights of the world. And the best part? Not only will an animal holiday give you an opportunity to help save a species, it will also save you money and time in planning your holiday itinerary.

Known around the world for its wealth of diverse species, tourism has put its entire ecosystem under threat. It has caused an explosion in pollution, thousands of deaths of local plants and animals, and accidentally introduced aggressive, new species to the island.

So, go on – take a vacation! And save endangered elephants in Thailand, cheetahs in Namibia or bears in Romania while doing so.

www.internationalinnovation.com

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s e y m or e cl o t h The solution

The world spent US $2,560 trillion on goods from the textile industry in 2010. Shirts and shoes, carpeting and stuffed animals – these are just a few examples of items that were part of this massive total. Zeroing in on the US alone, the Environmental Protection Agency states that only 15 per cent of the country’s textiles (about 2 million tons) are recovered and reused each year – and most other countries are not doing much better.

By buying more clothing and other textiles like shoes and handbags from secondhand and charity shops, you can make a fashion and environmental statement at the same time. For example, that 15 per cent of textiles recovered in the US leads to a massive savings in terms of carbon emissions – equivalent to the emissions of more than 1 million cars!

The majority of the other 85 per cent of the US’s discarded textiles end up in landfills. If these items were only made of organic textiles like wool and cotton, that would not necessarily be the worst environmental issue in the world, as these items will eventually disintegrate. However, as the textile industry has evolved, so too have the materials that it uses, increasingly more of which include synthetic fibres. These human-made materials could take tens of thousands of years to disintegrate, if they break down at all, making that landfill their enteral resting place.

In addition to helping the environment, charity shops use their profit to meet a societal need. Take Goodwill, for example. It uses its profits to meet its goal of helping people reach their full potential through education, skills training and the power of work, and in 2015, it helped 26.4 million people train for careers in industries such as banking, IT and healthcare. Across the pond, Cancer Research UK is using the profit it makes from its charity shops in its quest to fund scientists, doctors and nurses to help beat cancer sooner.

Go right ahead – buy more clothes! Just make sure you have purchased this clothing from a charity shop and donate any extra ones to these stores when you are done with them.

INTERNATIONAL INNOVATION

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“If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”

This chilling quote is often credited to Albert Einstein. While there are questions about whether the man with the wild hair and yet-to-meetits-match brain actually uttered these words, the emotion they convey should not be swept aside in light of our current global bee population decline.

As you read this sentence, bees across the world are dying. Since 2006, 40 per cent of the US’s commercial honeybee population have died, and since 2010, 45 per cent of the UK’s commercial honeybee population have met the same fate. If it continues, this trend could absolutely devastate not only the honeybees, but the food industry as well. One third of the food that we eat depends on pollinating insects, and according to Greenpeace, the economic value of bees’ pollination is approximately €265 billion annually.

Check out how these researchers are helping to save bee populations across the globe: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZI6lGSq1gU

The solution

So how can you help the bees? Simple – eat more honey! By eating more honey, you are stimulating the beekeeping industry.

Go an extra step and make sure the sweet, syrupy goodness you are eating comes from a local bee keeper. Local bee keepers have the ability to focus on the health of individual bees much more than big honey companies, and their honey does not have to travel as far to make it to your kitchen table. In addition to stimulating the local economy and keeping the carbon footprint of the honey down, eating local honey may also have an added benefit: it could help fight against allergies.

Bees make honey by regurgitating the nectar – and alongside it, pollen – into their mouths. Enzymes in the bees’ mouths break down the nectar into simple sugars, which the bees then spit into honeycombs. When these sugars harden, they become honey.

Though not proven by a peer-reviewed scientific study, the prevailing thought behind how this honey could help reduce the effects of allergies is that the honey acts as a sort of vaccine that introduces pollen in small amounts to the body. Therefore, by eating honey made locally, you are gradually vaccinating yourself against local allergens.

So do it – spread more honey on your bread and use it as a replacement for sugar in your tea or coffee. In doing so, you are not just enjoying a delicious treat, you are also ensuring the security of both the honeybee population and our food supply chain. www.internationalinnovation.com