Our friends over at 5 Gyres are always doing amazing things. Most recently they’ve embarked on The Last Straw Plastic Pollution Solutions Outreach Tour — a trip that will take 5 Gyres staff 1400 miles by bike down the East Coast in an effort to educate more than 50,000 people about what they’ve discovered in their voyages to our world’s oceans and lakes. You can follow the tour and find specific event dates and locations via the 5 Gyres Facebook page and its Blog. What’s more, you can pledge one cent per mile to support the tour and even take part in the 5 Gyres I Am The Sea Change challenge and win prizes for doing so.

Have 5 minutes? Take the challenge!:

To enter, follow the instructions on the flyer pictured above. That is: 1. Print the flyer out. 2. Spend at the very least 5 minutes cleaning up your environment (street, gutter, riverbank, beach). 3. Have someone take a picture of you holding your sign and your garbage up for all to see. 4. Like 5 Gyres on Facebook and share the contest link (encouraging friends and family to do so as well!) 5. Email your photo to betheseachange@5gyres.org with the subject ’5 for 5 Gyres’.

Do the above and you could not only win some awesome prizes, but help 5 Gyres and the cause to clean up our environment immensely. The contest runs from October 3rd through November 6th.

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Earlier this month David Suzuki published a piece calling for improving cycling infrastructure. The environmental activist highlights that investing in bicycling infrastructure is in fact a crucial investment, both in the environment and the economy:

Human-powered transportation will only get more popular as gas prices rise and as the negative consequences of our car-centric culture increase. We should be doing everything we can to discourage single-occupant automobile use while encouraging public transit and pedestrian and pedal-powered movement.

Suzuki continues:

Building bike lanes also creates jobs and other economic spin-offs, according to a study from the Political Economy Research Institute in Amherst, Massachusetts, titled “Pedestrian and Bicycle Infrastructure: A National Study of Employment Impacts”. Researchers found that “bicycling infrastructure creates the most jobs for a given level of spending.” For every $1 million spent, cycling projects created an average of 11.4 jobs in the state where the project was located, pedestrian-only projects created about 10 jobs, and multi-use trails created about 9.6 jobs. Infrastructure combining road construction with pedestrian and bicycle facilities created slightly fewer jobs for the same amount of spending, and road-only projects created the least, with a total of 7.8 jobs per $1 million.

Full article.

Every Wednesday on Ditch Your Car we’ll be bringing you just another reason to spend more time on two wheels. Be it a photo, a statistic or an inspirational video, we want to keep reminding you about why riding is great!

Image: Aurimas Rimsa

Ditch Your Car David Suzuki, environment, infrastructure, investment

Every Wednesday on Ditch Your Car we’ll be bringing you just another reason to spend more time on two wheels. Be it a photo, a statistic or an inspirational video, we want to keep reminding you about why riding is great!

Five excellent statistics from Bikes Belong:

1. On a round-trip commute of 10 miles, bicyclists save roughly $10 daily and spare the air 10 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions.
2. Fifteen percent of all trips are made for commuting to work.
3. Bicycling for transportation can reduce mortality by 35 to 40%
4. If the number of kids who walk and bike to school returned to 1969 levels, it would save 3.2 billion vehicle miles, 1.5 million tons of CO2 and 89,000 tons of other pollutants annually. This is the equivalent of keeping more than 250,000 cars off the road for a year.
5. Only 8% of U.S. households don’t have a vehicle available for regular use.

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