Small Changes, Big Impact: Guide to making every day - Earth Day

In this special Earth Day episode, Aaron shares why this holiday is one of his favorites and encourages everyone to celebrate and care for our planet year-round. 

Aaron opens up about his personal journey to becoming vegetarian, motivated initially by health but quickly transitioning his focus toward the positive environmental impact of his lifestyle choices. 

He offers practical, approachable tips for reducing your carbon footprint, from recycling and composting to making eco-friendly purchases at home. 

With a friendly reminder that even small changes add up, Aaron invites listeners to find community in sustainability efforts and make a difference together. Whether you’re looking for simple ways to honor Earth Day or want to take your eco-commitment to the next level, this episode is packed with real-life advice, encouragement, and resources to help you “dodge the norm” and put Mother Earth first.

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Transcript

0:18

Welcome back to the Dodge the Norm podcast. I am your host, Aaron Dodge and I wanted to welcome you to this week's podcast, a special podcast, because today is Earth Day, one of my favorite holidays of the year. I feel like the 9 to 5 employee should get today off so that we could go frolic in the wilderness. But some of us don't have that luxury. So we will celebrate, as I say, year round. For me, Earth Day is a great way for us to put what is happening around Earth in the forefront of conversations. It allows for us to celebrate, but also it allows for us to come back to center and to understand that our day to day operations, our day to day way that we are living, all of us on this planet, mostly things that are happening here in America, but around the Earth and what those actions that we are taking every single day are really doing to mother Earth. And she's overheating. And I'm not going to get too political, I'm not going to get too climate changey in this particular podcast because there's a lot of statistics out there. And me just lining up and rifling statistics at you on a podcast or on YouTube just isn't really enjoyable for me and probably for you, the listener, is there something that I can go deeper to down the road when I have more of a structured outline on the directions that we could go? Yes. But for right now, we are going to keep it simple. We are going to celebrate Earth Day. And specifically I want to talk to you a little bit about my journey as becoming vegetarian nine years ago. And that's when I really started to see what the impact of being vegetarian and positive impacts that being a vegetarian can be on the earth from, you know, not contributing to the gas emissions that the lovely cows that are consumed are, hate to say it, farting into our atmosphere. And I went vegetarian nine years ago because my girlfriend at the time was looking to improve her gut health a little bit. And so we watched a documentary and I was basically hooked to be vegetarian from there. I was hooked for the health aspect and then I quickly changed into the environmental aspect and also making sure that that animals don't feel a certain way when they are being consumed. And we all hate to see and hear about how animals are treated as they go from farm to T. And so that was kind of another thing that really stuck out to me when I started my vegetarian journey. Now Earth Day, before I became vegetarian, really, I probably had heard of it before. It started in the 1970s. And if anybody here is listening I guess everybody here is listening. But the best way for you to understand how you can give back in your community and events that are going on in your area is to visit earthday.org those have fantastic different opportunities for you to volunteer, for you to be having communications if you wish about the way that your city recycles. It's really nice because there's, you know, it's, it's opportunities for you to talk all throughout the United States and across the entire globe. If you're listening to me globally, which would be amazing. But yeah, you can go to earthday.org and then also even just like going to eventbrite the couple of weeks like leading up to Earth Day. You will see, you know, park and trash and beach pickups one time you will see learn how to compost another time you will see the proper way to recycle might be at your like local ymca. There's a lot of great things you can be doing in your community to understand ways that you can contribute and reduce your carbon footprint. So another thing that I'm going to talk about today, now that we're off and running with the topic of Earth Day or some things that I do and my wife and I do around the house that you can do as well that are just very subtle changes that I know in the long run are making an impact. And I say this with like, I just want to say this that when you feel like there's, you're not making a difference, that's the worst way to think because one person making a small difference and you times that by a million, it really makes an impact. So if you're just like, oh, I don't want to pick up that trash or I don't really want to recycle that glass bottle because it's got a lot of gook in it, like no, let's make some decisions that you can be doing on a day to day basis that can be reducing your carbon footprint and, and really putting the earth in the driver's seat so that we can make some good changes here. So I broke these down in my newsletter from free to level one to I guess level two. But level two is like the, is like the most expensive and the deepest way. I know that there's other people out there in the sustainability movement that are doing way more than this. You know, I don't sugarcoat it. Everybody can probably see it on my social media. We drive a gas powered car when we are financially ready to make the next car purchase because we share Chelsea's car that we had before we, me and her even met. We will probably not. Probably we will be making a decision to either a hybrid or a fully electronic car because we believe in those kind of things. And by the time we're ready to buy a car, there's going to be way more EVs out there. I mean, I live out here in Los Angeles and every other car I see is electric. And I believe that there is a mandatory in the next, I would want to say 5 to 10 years. Everything sold in California has to be electronic. I am guessing that, right? I said no facts. I said I was going to be getting all my facts together in the future. But that was just something that came to my head. So I remember that. Okay, let's go down this list of the things that I do and the things that you can do to support our Mother Earth. Number one is recycle your plastic, your glass and your cardboard. I'm sure you're already doing this at your apartment complex, but take an extra step like, you know, rinse out your ketchup bottle, separate your, your glass, do all those kind of things. It's a very easy step. And if you're doing that step one, love you for it. You can recycle your cans in the state of California and one of like the five states that you can recycle cans and get money back. Now, I say that with a grain of salt and this is something that I didn't know growing up, but you pay for the 5 cents up front. So like when I go buy like a Coke, I get paid instead of like a dollar for the Coke, it's a dollar five cents. But you're at least getting some of that money back when you recycle your cans. And like I said, choosing to be vegetarian is a free and easy way for you to do that. And if you're a meat eater, reducing your daily intake. I know that there's a big movement in the vegetarian space for Meatless Mondays. So that's another opportunity that you can do as well. I call these level one. You can. We've purchased reusable paper towels. Now, don't get me wrong, we have a dog and you probably have children and you probably want to be wiping up weird bodily things with a paper towel instead of reusing it and washing it. I know that there are people out there that use reusable diapers, power to them. But reusable paper towels, it's a brand called Zero Wastely. And they were$34. And so if there's a really bad spill or our dog makes a mess, I use paper towels. But like I say a very like a weird, a weird way to say it is like I used to put my toast in the morning on a paper towel that barely got used and barely got like any peanut butter on it. And then I would just throw it into the trash. It's so simple. Now I put it on our reusable paper towel when I'm sitting at the kitchen table. If it gets a little honey and a little jam on it, I roll it up and I throw it into our laundry basket and it gets washed with the colors. Purchase shampoo and conditioner bottles, glass bottles, and then refill them at a co op. Or there's stores out here in LA called re grocery where you can, oh it's so cool. You can literally go into the store and like pump out shampoo or like bring a like a big cauldron or cauldron as a tear like a big container and put like rice or gluten free pasta or spices and you can bring your own. You, when you walk in the door, you weigh the vessel that you're putting it into it. You grab a tag and then when the amount of weight that goes into the vessel, they know at the register what it is and you get charged just for like what you put into the vessel. Super cool. If you have one of those reducing the plastic bags and plastic use of and cardboard for the way that they deliver food. So check that out. Recycle your clothes or electronics. There's a lot of people that are accepting clothes to then put it back and re spin it into other clothing. I've worked with trashy before. They took not only clothes of mine but electronics. You're looking somewhere between 15 to$60 to purchase one of those and then send that back. I work also with another clothing company called Recover back in Charlotte which is really great. They accept it and re spin your clothes back into future clothing. And then if you buy a compost pen, compost bin, drop your food scraps and you can either have a food scrap like a composting company come pick that up from you. You can drop it off at your local farmer's market or like we've done going up to level two, my mother in law bought us what's called a loamy. And so that takes our composted and it heats it up and starts the composting process takes about four hours and then like a really heavy group of like banana and vegetable scraps that I would say probably weighs like anywhere from like 4 to 10 pounds is literally turned into dirt. It's crazy. And so that's a really cool company that we love. And then you could also do an outdoor compost bin, grab some worms, and then you can get some really fantastic gardening fertilizer. Because when the worms eat your food, food scraps, and then poop it out, then that's just amazing fertilizer for your garden. And then like I said another thing, level two that's a little bit more expensive is completely buying a hybrid or electric car. My final thought moving forward out of this was just like, take, take some small steps that can help slow down how much the earth is heating up. I know that it's like, it's really daunting to think about. You know, it's a fast fashion or, you know, cutting down like the Amazon rainforest or, you know, food, agriculture and how much water we're wasting feeding cows and doing those things. I know it's very daunting, but just like anything, just like politics in general, just like your faith, just like your run club, if you find the right community that is going in the same direction that you are, you know, strength in numbers, the, the mighty, the mighty people together and pushing towards a common goal can really move mountains. And so I challenge you to take a couple of steps that continue to put Mother Earth in the forefront. And I appreciate everything that you guys do. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me. You know how to get in touch with me and I can send you any of these links of the fun products that I have used and have been using and will be continuing to use in my life to celebrate Earth Day every day. Have a great rest of your week. I appreciate you being here and as always, dodge the norm. See you later.