opinion
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10 SIMPLE ECO TIPS
n the occasion of successfully finishing the first part of our project in collaboration with the City of Skopje „Средношколците за почисто Скопје “, (Highschoolers for a cleaner Skopje) I will sum up some of the valuable Eco Tips we collected in the first part of the project. The projects consist of three general parts, of which the first was having workshops in 23 different schools all over Skopje, the second is cleaning up areas in every municipality of Skopje together with the schools, Za Pochista Macedonia and the City of Skopje and the last part will be a designing competition for the students, in which the winner will have their designing printed on a bus driving through Skopje.
1) Change out your next toothbrush to a bamboo toothbrush from Stokomak
In every school that we have been to, when we proposed this, the first reaction was: it’s expensive to buy bamboo toothbrushes and it’s inaccessible for most people - I get that. When you buy it at DM things can get expensive but instead of that, go and check at your local Stokomak if there are some available. After all bamboo is a lot better than plastic toothbrushes, especially when a lot of homes don’t use recycling bins to separate plastic from general waste.
2) Carry your reusable water bottle with you. They work.
Simple but effective. This goes hand in hand with drinking tab water if it’s drinkable. In general, we consume over one million plastic bottles every minute of the day. So maybe try to save the 2 bottles of water a day, the 14 bottles a week, the 400 bottles a month and 5000 bottles a year.
3) Turn off lights and boiler when you don’t need them
It saves up energy, it saves up money. Try to be more mindful, everyone tends to forget, but the lights in the corridor or in the kitchen don’t need to be
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switched on when you’re in your room watching Netflix. Sometimes it’s hard to see the relation between the energy that comes out of the socket and ecological problems related to it. It’s just a long chain where energy needs to be generated, which may cause air pollution or can be rooted in harmful extraction projects. It always depends on what type of energy you use, but even with the greenest energy possible it also comes down to how you treat resources and how we can preserve them. Just imagine what would happen if everyone decided to run the light all night and day – how much more energy would be needed, how much more energy would be generated.
4) Reuse things the Macedonian way
When I first came and saw how every single person here reuses glass jars and turns them into Ajvar glasses I was in awe. I’m sure that you can find people who do that in Germany as well but it’s by far not as popular. It’s so sustainable and a great way to reuse glass jars. The same goes with the bags you receive in grocery stores or the bakery. Instead of pointlessly throwing them away they are being reused as trash bags – amazing!
