LatinaLista — Tomorrow is Earth Day. Unlike in the past, this year’s observance is taking on special meaning.
Most of us know that our planet is in stress. We’ve seen the pictures of the chunks of glaciers cracking into the ocean. We’ve seen the piles of trash growing in our town’s trash heaps. We’ve felt our eyes sting or our lungs gasp for air on high pollution days.
Yet, the most any of us do in combatting this change to our environment is make a half-hearted attempt to put the plastic containers in the blue bin and papers in the green bin for somebody else to pick up. Our intentions are good but being just one of 6,774,834,529 inhabitants on this planet, it’s easy to feel like our small efforts aren’t amounting to much.
They are but now there’s another way way to help the environment that actually let’s us see just how valuable our efforts are at saving it.
It all has to do with orange juice and the Peruvian Rain Forest!
Tropicana, the orange juice beverage company, has teamed up with Cool Earth, an international trust that combats climate change, to create a year-long initiative called “Rescue the Rainforest Campaign.”
The world’s rainforests have been called the planet’s lungs. When they’re in trouble, we’re all in trouble.
The Rescue the Rainforest Campaign is very easy in how it works. On every specially-marked carton of Tropicana Pure Premium products, there is a code. Buy the juice, take the carton home and enter the code online at the campaign’s website.
For every code entered, 100 square feet of Peruvian rainforest will be saved — but that’s not all.
Through a partnership with Google Maps, readers can get a birds-eye look at the rainforest they are protecting and see their plots grow as they continue to enter codes. They can also enter as a team to see their plots grow even faster!
The goal of the campaign is to save 15,000 acres of high-risk rainforest — that’s practically the size of Manhattan. It’s reported that, on average, an area of rainforest the size of Los Angeles disappears every month to create farmland for crops such as soya or palm oil, or for cattle ranching.
The specific part of the rainforest targeted by the campaign is Peru’s Ashaninka Corridor, along an arc of deforestation that is being routinely cleared and burned for the reasons mentioned.
With Tropicana’s help, Cool Earth will secure threatened rainforest by putting it in a local trust, and work toward protecting it around the clock.
Destruction of the rainforest sends vast amounts of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere – about as much as all the CO2 emitted by the U.S. every year.
There’s no easier way to help the environment and, in the process, get some much-needed Vitamin C!
