Challenge Yourself to Solve Climate Change
Every year, St. Louis Earth Day rewards our Festival visitors who complete the Earth Day Challenge with special prizes. It is one of the most popular and fun parts of our festival, and people can’t wait to participate.
Visitors can take the Earth Day Challenge by:
- Using sustainable transportation like riding the Metrolink, taking the bus, riding a bike, or walking to the Festival. (Active, sustainable transportation reduces your carbon footprint while giving you a healthy workout).
- Bringing your own reusable bag (Plastic bags are not recyclable in single-stream bins, and are a notorious form of litter that often winds up in our water systems, where they can take 500 years or more to break down)
- Bringing your own refillable water bottle. ( It takes 17 million barrels of oil to produce one year’s worth of single-use plastic water bottles).
- Eating a vegan meal. (Eating a plant-based diet or reducing your meat consumption can dramatically reduce your environmental impact).
Take public transportation to complete the Earth Day Challenge and get a free return ride home!
Our challenge is designed to show guests how easy it is to live more sustainably, not just on Earth Day, but every day.
Now there’s another way for you to make Earth Day every day and fight climate change as an individual – the Project Drawdown EcoChallenge!
Project Drawdown is a collaborative effort from over 200 scientists, scholars, policymakers, business leaders, PhDs, and more to create the “most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming.” The plan is impressive, with 80 solutions, ranked in order of effectiveness, to stop climate change.
Project Drawdown’s top ten climate change solutions.
Project Drawdown made it clear what needs to be done to fix climate change, but it was not obvious what steps individuals could take to contribute to the plan. That’s where the EcoChallange, a program of the Northwest Earth Institute, comes in. They partnered with Project Drawdown to provide individuals action steps to join in the global fight against climate change! The Drawdown EcoChallenge is a fun, free, three-week long competition that provides clear action steps towards making the world a little better.
You can choose as many challenges as you want from 7 different categories, which include Food, Transportation, Materials (recycling), Land Use, Electricity Generation, Women and Girls, and Buildings and Cities. There are options to click “I already do this,” so if you are already a vegetarian or a master recycler, you can see how much CO2 you’re already keeping out of the atmosphere while racking up points on your challenge!
Choosing to focus on food, active transportation, and educating girls are meaningful ways to reduce your personal impact on climate change.
Our recommended choices for the Drawdown EcoChallenge compliment our Earth Day Challenge. We suggest choosing to eat a few plant-based meals every week, using muscle power (like walking or biking) a few times a week, taking public transportation, and avoiding toxic plastics.
Other good choices for the EcoChallenge include getting a Solar Consultation from StraightUp Solar, supporting local food systems, and learning about the need for family planning globally.
Learn about solar power to compete in the Drawdown EcoChallenge!
Sign up to join the Project Drawdown EcoChallenge as a part of Team St. Louis Earth Day, and help us rack up points to prove that the St. Louis community has what it takes to compete in this international challenge!
This EcoChallenge lasts from April 4th to April 25th – that’s three weeks, which is about as much time as it takes to make or break a habit. That means signing up for this challenge might just change your life, and help us to change the planet.
