Earth Day Blog Series | Tiny Brushes

Hey everyone! Welcome back and to a new installment of the Earth Day Blog Series. Today we have Tiny Brushes with us, AKA Meagan! :) I've always loved her art and anything she posts, so I was super excited to have her join us. Plus she is talking about recycling and some of the point she made made so much sense, but I'll let he'd do the talking, so not I present to you, Tiny Brushes!

Hellooo, earthlings! I'm so honored to be featured in Sarah's blog and writing to you about what's important to me--recycling! As a little girl, my mother taught me the importance of recycling. It stuck with me through college when I moved just south of Salt Lake City and became painfully aware of how little recycling mattered in Utah. Finding a bin to throw away my aluminum/glass Coke cans/bottles or Amazon cardboard boxes was a serious hunt. And I was all for the hunt because it physically hurt me to throw away papers and cans into a regular old trashcan. Roll your eyes, it's fine. I know it's kind of over the top but it's true! And since graduating and moving back, I went from plastic bags galore and all trash in any bin to no plastic bags (or straws) allowed, and, like, four different options for recycling bins alone. I'll admit, it's been kind of inconvenient doing the grocery struggle/juggle on my way to the car, but at least my heart doesn't hurt anymore!

If you don't already know, recycling is extremely beneficial to our sweet planet Earth. It helps to reduce a significant amount of waste in the landfills, conserve natural resources (like trees) which protects ecosystems and wildlife, save energy, and cut down on carbon emissions. There's a much longer list I could go through, but I feel like it's sort of a web where everything is connected through those main points listed. You feel me?

My recent travels to Guatemala and Japan really hit me with how sucky America is at recycling (this is me trying to inform you, haha). When you go out to eat or stop by a convenience store and buy a glass of Coke in Guatemala, you finish it where you buy it and leave the glass in a designated crate. And then, once a week, the bottle collectors will come around from store to store to collect those crates filled with used glass bottles so that they can and clean, refill, and resell them back to the stores. And in Japan, they have all four recycling options everywhere you go like it's a totally normal thing.

I hope one day in America, it can be a normal thing! While it may be few more seconds of work mentally and physically to recycle, I hope that maybe just once this week, you can put forth the effort to recycle if you don't already. It's not that bad, I swear. Like everything and everyone I come across in my life, my hope is to leave 'em better than I found 'em. 

Also, here's my favorite hero-turned-villain, Recyclops.

Love,

Meagan

Instagram : @TinyBrushes