Day 5 - Walk around your block and pick up some trash.

I've always been a "Green World" type of person, always recycled at home, at work and anywhere I had the chance, never polluted and yelled at my friends and family when they even thought about throwing a piece of trash on the floor. That being said, although I don't pollute, I have never actually been one to walk outside and pick up trash from the floor.

I first read online to see how much trash affected this world and it's crazy to know that the streets are filled with trash everywhere and no one ever stops to pick-up one piece from the floor. Did you know that every year, the United States generates approximately 230 million tons of "trash", that is about 4.6 pounds per person, per day and less than one-quarter is recycled. When trash is not recycled it turns into pollution and that in turn equals poor air quality and major health issues for many people around the country.

This Saturday was the perfect day for this deed, the sun was shining and there was the perfect little breeze, it's usually scorching hot and humid in Florida and you'll die just walking outside for five minutes (maybe I'm being a little exaggerated but you get the point). I walked around my neighborhood with gloves and a plastic trash bag and it wasn't long before the bag was full and my street looked clean and neat, I knew it wouldn't last long but it made me feel great that I had made a tiny difference, even if it was just for an hour or maybe even a day. I started thinking to myself imagine if every day I picked up trash I saw on the floor, what if everyone in the world did that, just one piece of trash a day? That would be pretty powerful, amazing in fact but impossible more likely. So why throw trash away on the floor at all? It is so easy to walk to a trash can and throw it away, our cities provide trash cans everywhere, almost in every corner, yet people still throw things away on the street.

I believe that if just a handful of people joined in on the green movement places would be trash free in no time. I know people think to themselves that one person can't make a difference but I do, I think that if you really set your mind to it and start doing things to make a difference people will notice and want to join in, that is the reason for my blog, so that I can encourage people to do good. When writing this entry I came across an amazing, proven theory called The Butterfly Effect, the theory originated with a meaning that tiny changes within a complex system can lead to results that are impossible to predict. In example, the flapping of a butterfly's wings in South America could affect the weather in Texas, it's a proven theory by mathematician and scientist Edward Norton Lorenz.

The incentive of the theory is that tiny changes you make do in fact make a difference, and when those tiny changes are aggregated among millions of people, we can truly make a real difference in how much nature we save for our children, grandchildren, and beyond.

So next time you're walking through your neighborhood, or on the beach or anywhere for that matter, pick-up that piece of trash (little and/or big) you see near you and make a small difference that could have an immense impact. It's a simple step that will help make our home here on earth more green and clean.