On April 22nd we will be celebrating Earth Day, and this year’s message to ‘invest in our planet’. Outlining the need for a green and prosperous future, we embrace this call to action and hope we are all able to focus on the differences we can make for the environment.
First held in 1970, Earth Day helped champion early environmental movements and put these concerns at the front of public debate. Earthday.org says ‘now is the time for the unstoppable courage to preserve and protect our health, our families, our livelihoods’ and we take heed of this message to invest in change together.
Stormwater Shepherds strongly support the protection of our environment for future generations and acknowledge the increasing vulnerability of our green spaces to threats that include big-picture topics like plastic pollution and climate change. Stormwater Shepherds supplies eco-friendly alternatives in our shop builds community awareness around important environmental issues, and we would love you to become a friend.
Let’s End Plastic Pollution
Plastic pollution affects our environment across the globe, and Earth Day calls us to address this key issue. Stormwater Shepherds believes strongly in this cause and asks all of us to start thinking about plastic use – let’s reduce and refuse.
Collective action is important. We can all reduce the number of plastics we use, refuse to accept plastic options, and lower our reliance on this perilous resource.
Plastics are often disposed of incorrectly or left behind as litter. This makes its way into our waterways, and a contributing vehicle for this is untreated stormwater – which picks up these plastics from hard surfaces and transports them straight into the environment. Better stormwater systems can help us capture this rubbish before it ends up downstream in our waterways and oceans.
Plastic pollution has countless effects on our ecosystems – it harms animals, is open to ingestion and bioaccumulation in our food chains, emits carbon emissions, and leaches toxic chemicals.
While phasing out single-use plastics from our supply chain is a great start, and we applaud the efforts of the global community in tackling this issue, the reduction of our plastic footprint and movement into sustainable alternatives is the future. We need to leave plastic behind and embrace eco-friendly materials – and make sure the plastic we do use doesn’t make it into the environment.
Investing in Water: Learn About Stormwater Management
In line with Earth Day’s call for action, Stormwater Shepherds advocates investing in stormwater systems to stop plastic and urban pollution at the source – and prevent contamination of our waterways. Our goal is to support correctly engineered stormwater networks that create clean water, free of plastic litter and urban pollution.
There are many ways that we can ensure better stormwater outcomes, and you can learn more about Stormwater Shepherds approach in our two webinars. Presented by Stormwater Shepherd’s Mary Rayner, these are a great introduction to the work we do and the positive changes we advocate for – let’s invest in our planet and ensure clean water into the future.
