5 Easy Ways Granite Staters Can Celebrate Earth Day

I think you'd be surprised how easy it is to make a big impact just by slightly changing certain parts of your routine. Here are 5 easy ideas.

Every year for the past 51 years, Earth Day (today, April 22nd) has been celebrated in the interest of the protection of our environment.

I remember the resurgence of marketing and promotion of this day in the early 1990's on both the cable channels MTV and Nickelodeon and sadly, a lot of my high school classmates rebelled against the idea.

'Happy Earth Day!' was a common sarcastic war cry as they would throw a giant bag of empty fast food boxes and soda bottles out of their car windows.

It wasn't until the latter half of that decade when my home town of Rochester started it's own recycling program with dark green rectangular bins that were for optional use.

A few years after that, the amount of garbage you could throw out on a weekly basis was regulated to a vertical bin with a three bag volume and, as you can imagine, the amount of recycling that was done by residents increased exponentially.

As a lifelong fan of the town of Gonic, I have become more and more adamant that people take the effort to recycle as much as they can. Waste Management is located on the Rochester Neck Road and the mountains of landfill can be seen as far away as Dover.

I'll leave you with one more 'Earth Day' fact that I hope will convert you into a Granite State recycler.

Every plastic bottle that is thrown away in regular trash will be stuck up in those Gonic mountains for the next 400 years!