Spring clean
April 11, 2022
Birds are chirping, wind is blowing in your face, the sky is blue as it can be, spring is almost here. There are many things you can do this spring, to create a fresh start for yourself and the environment. You can thrift instead of buying fast fashion, you can eat locally and support small businesses. There are plenty of things to do to make a better you in 2022. Things you can do to better yourself and the environment
Spring is the first step before summer and spring is all about coming back to life and growing. The grass is turning back to its beautiful green and seeds are being planted to grow new plants. The leaves from trees are coming back and the environment itself is becoming better and healthy. That’s the beauty of nature. “My favorite thing about spring is as the snow melts and the greens come back to life, as you walk out the door you feel the warm breeze,” junior Keven Martinez said. Spring can be an opportunity for you to have a fresh start. Winter can be a yucky season for many people and sometimes you feel depressed or overwhelmed, having unpleasant weather can affect people’s mood when it is cold and snowy.
You can start new things like donating your old clothes or clothes you don’t wear anymore. You can thrift and reuse clothing to make new clothes and keep up with trends without adding more damage to the environment. Recycling is always good to do, you can save paper up and DIY your own paper, having a recycling bin is good too instead of throwing paper, water bottle, cans, plastic bags and much more.
“I have been recently trying to donate my clothes that I don’t wear anymore, I also go thrifting a lot, mostly of the clothes I wear now are thrifted,” Martinez said. Composting is good for the environment. Composting is where you take dead organisms, mostly plants and those dead organisms decompose naturally and take those nutrients and re-add those nutrients into the soil.
“It stabilizes it, so once those organisms die the nutrients need to be reintroduced to the environment and that’s exactly what composting does, it keeps the food cycle alive,” teacher Jefferey Minnehan said.
You can compost leaves, dead grass, yard trimmings fruit and vegetables scraps and peelings, coffee grounds or filters, any organic matter and put them in the soil, or your own compost bucket.
“You stay away from the plastics, that’s what you do not compost,” Minnehan said.
Composting is good for the environment because we are reducing chemicals like fertilizers, pesticides. You are also reducing greenhouse gas emissions; this is an extreme problem since gases go into the atmosphere and create air pollution which affects our climate.
“The more we compost the less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which helps with our global warming,” Minnehan said. Fast fashion is cheap and low-quality clothing that is rapidly produced at low cost, this is extremely a big problem to the environment as clothing cycles in and out. People buy fast fashion because it’s cheap and most clothing is up to date with trends. The problem with fast fashion is that the clothing is not made to last long and soon the clothes will end up in landfills. The fast fashion industry searches for low labor standards so they can exploit workers, workers are underpaid and work in terrible conditions. Fast fashion harms the environment and pollutes it.
There are alternatives instead of buying fast fashion or supporting fast fashion, as though it might be hard to find affordable durable clothing there is a solution to a problem. Thrifting is an excellent alternative. These past few years more and more people are thrifting or donating their clothes. This is good for the environment as you can reuse and recycle your clothing.
“It is better for the environment because when we don’t donate the clothes get thrown away, they get thrown into a landfill and it takes a lot of time for clothes to decompose, so when we donate, we’re allowing for clothes to be reused,” senior Alana Chanthavong said. There are plenty of local restaurants in Des Moines. It is always good to support local businesses and eat closer to home instead of driving far and wasting gas.
“My favorite local restaurant, honestly I would say pho 888,” Chanthavong said.
Downtown Des Moines Is a place to go if you’re looking locally. You can use google maps and search up local restaurants and you will see a lot of places show up.
Thrift stores
*Goodwill
*The Salvation Army
*Worn
*Plato’s Closet
Local restaurant’s
*Pho 888
*Bubba
*The Latin King
*La Mie
Self care
*donate unused clothes
*reuse,recycle,reduce
*Try new things