shailbala / awesome-earth

The planet doesn't need to be simultaneously on fire and underwater. We can fix things.

Awesome Earth

A collection of resources, services, products, and ideas that you can use to improve your impact on the environment.

Carbon Reduction

Air pollution causes 200,000 early deaths each year in the USA. Billionaires and scientists are scaling up carbon trapping programs with big old turbines, even looking at turning that byproduct into fuel, but those same scientists are begging us to live less carbon intensive lives and fund offsetting programs. They need our help, so figure out your footprint, reduce it over time, and offset the rest.

• Offset Earth - 🇬🇧 Monthly subscriptions for you, your family, and your business, where money goes to Eden Reforestation Projects who plant trees and offset and reduce carbon emissions around the world in a myriad of ways.
• CarbonFund.org - 🇺🇸 Calculate your footprint based on flights, driving, shipping, and make tax-deductible donations to offset your emissions.
• Ecosia - The search engine that plants trees. >50% of the ad revenue goes directly to planting trees.
• Cloverly - 💻 Offset the carbon footprint of your customers' online transactions, with e-commerce plugins (Shopify, Magento, etc.)
• atmosfair - 🇩🇪 Calculate the footprint for flights and buy compensation or donate to offset any number of carbon emissions. Tax-deductible in Germany.
• Leave Me Alone - 🌎 Emails contribute to 986,000 tonnes of CO2 being dumped into the atmosphere every day, that's 4g per email. Unsubscribe from unwanted subscription emails and reduce your carbon footprint.
• App: Live Green - 📱 Track your daily carbon emissions from meals, travel, purchases, and more! Set goals to reduce your emissions and your impact on the planet.
• AirCare - ✈️ Understand the impact of air travel and compensate for your emissions by supporting sustainable projects around the world.

Green Energy

• the Switch - 🇬🇧 Switch to green energy is easy and can save you money too.
• Money Supermarket: Green Energy - 🇬🇧 "Green energy might’ve been a premium before, but prices are becoming competitive thanks to concerns over fossil fuels."
• SparkMeter - Humanitarian smart energy metering solution that purchases wasted unused electricity from utilities and resells it to hard-to-reach places and underserved markets, thus reducing overall energy consumption.

Reforestation

We need to reforest an area the size of the USA as quickly as possible. Why the urgency? Ice shelves in Greenland are melting so fast that 197 billion tons melted in July 2019 alone, and abnormally vicious heatwaves all over Europe are becoming more intense and more frequent. We're rapidly reaching a point where large areas of the planet will be too hot to plant forests, so we need to get it done now.

• Eden Reforestation Projects - 🌎 Eden Reforestation projects reduces extreme poverty and restores healthy forests by employing local villagers to plant millions of trees every year.
• Treedom - Treedom lets you buy or gift a real tree, where somebody will plant it for you and follow it online.
• Tree-Nation - 🌎 Discover the projects where you can start planting now.

Sustainable Lifestyle

• All Green - 🇬🇧 A selection of environmentally products for the home, garden, pets and other stuff.
• Bees Wrap - 🇺🇸 Stop using cling film and start using reusable recyclable wraps made from bees wax and organic jojoba oil.
• Bio-plastic Trash Bags - 🇺🇸 Made from Plant Based (sugar cane) materials instead of fossil fuel.
• Clean Cult - 🇺🇸 Cleaning supplies with zero-waste packaging, and a powerful clean that's better for you and the planet.
• Fairphone - 🇪🇺 A phone for everyone who cares about how their products are made. It improves the conditions of the people who make it and uses materials that are better for the planet.
• Happy Cow - 🌎 Reduce or avoid meat entirely by finding great vegetarian or vegan food all over the world.
• Improve how you do laundry - 🌎 6 Tips for a More Sustainable Laundry Routine
• Sonny - A sustainable alternative to wipes and paper for better hygiene and a greener planet.
• The Good Roll - 🇳🇱 Mail order 100% tree-friendly toilet paper made from post-consumer recycled paper. 50% of net profit from sales of The Good Roll is invested in the installation of safe toilets in East Africa.
• Grayl Water Filter - 🇺🇸 Water bottle with built in filter that works like a french press. Great for urban and outdoor use.
• iPhone 11 Bio Case from Moment - A fully compostable protective case for your iPhone. Only compatible with iPhone 11 (for now).
• Lehman's - One-stop shop for non-electric, homesteading, survival, handmade, Amish made, plastic free, durable, quality goods. If you envision switching to live a simpler life, this place has all the tools you need to do so.

Cooking

Cooking is a major source of carbon emissions all over the world, from wood fires to gas burners. It's also bloody dangerous in some parts of the world. Smoke from open cooking fires kills more than eight times as many people as malaria.

• Ecocina Rocket Stoves / Aprovecho Research Center - Wood fired cook stove that uses ~40-50% less fuel than traditional fires and emits ~1/3 the CO2. Learn how to build one!
• Sun Oven - 🇺🇸 Insulated solar oven that can cook food just like a regular oven.

Transportation

Cars and trucks account for nearly one-fifth of all US emissions. Despite the UK having more electric charging points than petrol stations, roughly half of drivers say they need more charging points, meaning only 6% of new cars being electric. Hoping that everyone will maybe someday switch to electric cars is not any sort of solution for the worlds problems, but lowering or removing our reliance on personal cars can make a big difference.

• Cycle to Work Scheme UK - 🇬🇧 This scheme allows employees to spend on bikes and equipment, tax-free, making a claimed saving of up to 42 per cent on the overall value.
• Cycle to Work Scheme Ireland - Under the scheme your employer can buy a bicycle and safety equipment for you, up to €1,000 per bicycle and safety equipment.
• BlaBlaCar - 🌎 The world’s leading long-distance carpooling platform.
• WageWorks Bicycle Reimbursement Program - 🇺🇸 Ride your bike to work and pay for eligible bike-related expenses, and then get reimbursed for those expenses.
• Waze Carpool - 🌎 Choose to drive or ride, and match with people based on route and time of day.
• Pod Point - 🇬🇧 UK leaders in electric vehicle charging with innovative solutions for homes, workplaces and commercial organisations.

Zero Waste

• App: Litterati - Empowering people to clean the planet. Photograph a piece of litter, tag it, and discard properly. Participate in a challenge and hold wasteful brands accountable.
• App: Too Good To Go - Sell your surplus food, easily and sustainably! Save delicious food and fight food waste. Find your favorite food and go rescue it.
• City Harvest - 🇺🇸 City Harvest is New York City’s largest food rescue organization. They rescue food and deliver it to hundreds of food pantries, soup kitchens and other community partners.
• Donate Toys - 🇺🇸 Donate toys that your children have grown out of instead of throwing them away.
• Dabchy - 🇹🇳 Tunisian second hand clothes marketplace.
• threadUP - 🇺🇸 Second hand clothes, upcycled to avoid the electricity, carbon, etc waste of making new clothes, and keeping them from a landfill. Women and kids but nothing for men.
• Go "Swaggless" - Nobody needs another corporate logo stressball or other pointless swag. Convince your company to skip the nonsense and donate to something worthwhile - like their Offset Earth business account!
• Olio - 🇬🇧 We connect neighbours to share food, and other things, rather than chuck them away.
• Openstreetmap: Zero Waste (Overpass) - Openstreetmap has the tag zero_waste=* for shops who sell items without packaging.
• Original Unverpackt - 🇩🇪 Zero packaging supermarket in Berlin. Original Unverpackt hat sich als erster Supermarkt weltweit dem Zero-Waste-Lifestyle gewidmet.
• Rethink Food NYC - 🇺🇸 They pick up unused, excess food from restaurants, farms, and other food purveyors, and repurpose it into delicious and nutritious meals for under-served New Yorkers.
• Kaiyo - Buy and sell used furniture to keep it out of landfill. They'll even come and pick it up! I've used this to get rid of a giant sofa which nobody wanted to buy, it was about to go on the street and they got me a cheque.

Home Appliances

• Hamwells Showers - Shower systems that utilize heat exchangers to recapture heat and filtered pumps to recycle water up to 7 times before it is drained, thus significantly reducing water usage and energy consumption.