5 Ways You Can Help The Environment In The Next Hour—Without Leaving Your Desk

These days, switching over to solar power and ditching plastic are just a few clicks away, and you can majorly cut down on your footprint without even leaving your desk. Here are five ways to help out the environment from the comfort of your home. Altogether, they'll take less than an hour and leave you feeling majorly accomplished.

Carbon calculators like the ones from The Nature Conservancy and Conservation International make it easy to quantify your environmental impact in a matter of minutes. Answer a few questions about your transportation habits, energy use, and consumption patterns to get a better idea of where you're acting in an eco-friendly way and where you could use a little improvement. Then, let these insights inform your habits moving forward.

Consider buying offsets for any trips you have planned on Native Energy or Cool Effect, and next time you book, do it with an airline that offers carbon credits with each ticket. Major flyers like Jet Blue, American Airlines, and Delta do!

The Lonely Whale Foundation, a nonprofit that uses clever campaigns to clean our oceans, recently launched the #StopSucking challenge. By accepting, you're committing to saying no to single-use plastic straws when drinking on the go. If everyone in the United States signed on to this seemingly small action, we would save 500 million plastic straws each day, which can end up in the ocean polluting water and harming sea life. Take the pledge, share on social, and challenge other individuals and companies in your area to do the same, all in under five minutes.

If hopping on the phone to call your representative isn't your thing, environmental groups have made it super easy to write to your congressional representative online using a pre-populated form. Just sign your name to The Sierra Club form to voice your support for public lands and to the Environmental Defense Fund one to ask your rep to commit to signing on to clean energy initiatives. Add a quick personal message at the end and you're good to go.

While you're at it, why not take a little more time to read up on how to make a difference? Here's how to help out animals around the world (without spending money) and here are three simple tweaks that will help you go trash-free.