LIVE (Cont.)
Make Your Holidays Zero-Waste
“Meet the needs of the present without compromising the future generations ability to meet their needs.” Brundtland Commission.
This is what we know as Sustainability. In Ana Leal, founder of AMLY Sustainability words Sustainability is to live a prosper, happy and healthy life without damaging natural ecosystems and allowing our children to live in plenitud. Plenitud does not mean excess, it means to live better with less. This is more relevant this year because 2020 brought turmoil and disdain limiting our ability to live in plenitud. Hopefully, the holiday season can bring us faith and cheer us up while we wait for an amazing 2021. Thinking about food, gifts, small family gatherings, and shopping can keep us in a positive mood. While you do your favorite holidays activities keep in mind how you do it. For sure no one wants more local or global issues. Can you imagine that the holidays add an extra 25% of household waste? Yes, between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day Americans create one million extra tons of waste (EPA.gov). Considering food only, the United States is the global leader in food waste, with Americans discarding nearly 40 million tons of food every year. A dichotomy after the extreme need for food in 2020.
The celebration can continue just be smart and follow simple ways to green your holidays and protect our planet. - Plan ahead for meals and parties. It’s not only economical, but it will reduce the amount of food thrown away. - Recycle wrapping paper and cardboard. Flatten boxes and paper to fit in recycling bins. - Use real plates, napkins, cutlery and cups or find compostable options. - Throw a zero-waste holiday gathering even with your small circle. - Collect plastics and clean styrofoam containers and drop them off at the supermarket. - Prefer LED lights to lower your energy bills and resource use.
- Donate unwanted items or excess food, gifts. - Recycle old electronics at designated locations. - Separate organic waste from recyclable items to minimize what goes to landfill. - Compost to reduce chemical fertilizers, it is economical and healthier for your plants and yourself.
- Recycle your Christmas tree as mulch, for compost, at the zoo, to help beach erosion or to make hearty crafts.
- Turn off lights if rooms are empty.
- Don’t buy unnecessary items.
- Encourage kids to care for their new toys and donate gently used old ones.
- Don’t let water run for long.
Make this holiday season the first of many full of positive actions and change bad habits that cost you money, increase waste, trigger global warming and damage our planet. AMLY Sustainability sincerely hopes your holidays are fabulous despite the odds and wishes everyone an amazing new year. We look forward to working with your business, establishment and organization to make this a better place and a Sustainable one for us and future generations. For more information please visit www.amlysustainability. com or email info@amlysustainability.com.
Introducing the New UCF Celeste Hotel In our very own corner of East Orlando, located on the campus of the University of Central Florida, comes the new The Celeste Hotel. The Celeste Hotel’s identity as a Tribute Portfolio hotel fits perfectly with the Orlando aesthetic, and guests of Marriott Hotels can use and gain Bonvoy points at The Celeste. Both similar to and different from other boutique hotels, The Celeste is like a human whose pulsing center, whose heart, craves not only to connect, but to belong. You seek out The Celeste, and The Celeste invites you in; two old friends meeting for the first time. And The Celeste knows you can’t spell heart without art, so this is how The Celeste proves it: colorful like a rainbow, quirky in the same ways you are, intertwined with UCF’s School of Visual Art and Design: a luxury museum you can sleep in. A hotel. A home.
Here’s a day in The Celeste: you order inroom dining for breakfast and admire the paintings as you wait, as you eat, as you put on your swimsuit, as you float in the pool and almost mistake the sky for another painting. At Aurora, the on-site restaurant, you order your favorite meal, but it’s 4 P.M., so you order a craft cocktail, and then another, because happy hour ends at 6, and then guitars, a voice, music that is both live and alive. You return upstairs, shower in your suite, or your king room, because it’s almost time for the gathering on the event lawn, and you come back downstairs, and the people greet you, and the music is alive, and so are you, so you have another cocktail, rent a cabana for tomorrow, and you feel it in the art, in your heart, in the band’s cover of Talking Heads: “This Must Be the Place.” And you are right, because The Celeste is the place, the outer space to your inner, and please, come
in, stay a while. With 179 total rooms, a restaurant, a bar, a pool, a fitness center, a private dining room, and the capacity for indoor and outdoor events all centered in the art, the heart, of Orlando, there is only one question left to ask: when will you be checking in? By: Raven Halle
