Since its humble beginning in 1970, Earth Day became a global event in 1990, with some 200 million people getting involved. And now Earth Day 2009 is expected to attract between 500 million and 1 billion! Will you be one of them and what will you be doing?

Here are a few suggestions:

You could walk to work instead of driving. You could make Earth Day a recycling day. You could use less water or less power. Don't throw away or lock away your old mobile or PC, recycle it! You might even be able to make some cash in the process. If everyone in the UK had a meatless meal once a week it could save more carbon than 5 million cars. Imagine the potential of becoming vegetarian or vegan!

Follow the jump for more

Whether or not you go in for new year's resolutions, making changes to help slow the pace of climate change is now a matter of urgency, and one we all need to take more seriously by the year. And however good your green intentions may be, everyone has areas of weakness, so the season of self-denial is a good time to take a look at where you could improve your lifestyle and make it greener.

Between now and the end of January, I'll be compiling a list of ways to be greener, giving tips on how to make the transition as painless as possible in each case. They're all changes that even the laziest among us can make with a bit of practice, and that can make momentous changes to our collective plight when made by enough responsible individuals.

Read on after the jump for resolutions 1 to 5

I've already said my piece for bigging up of the bog, but what can you do to actually improve the status of toilets everywhere? Here are a few suggestions.

• Buy an eco-friendly toilet cleaner

Ecover is one company doing its bit for toilets, and is providing financial support to the World Toilet Organisation for the next three years. They are supporting work in 11 villages in Ethiopia, providing sustainable and ongoing access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene education. You can show your support in return by checking out their latest product: a plant and mineral based toilet cleaner called Ocean Waves.

• Play silly pee and poo related games online

WaterAid has brought you two special treats today: You can play Turdlywinks or Take a Tinkle Test. It's all in a good cause...

We throw away so many things without a second's thought that we often miss great possibilities for re-using them, often in really inventive ways. Here's a handy list of ideas that give a new lease of life to all manner of things that are normally seen as 'junk'. After reading these suggestions you'll probably feel guilty about having to throw anything away ever again. Feel free to tell us your own!

1. Dry Cleaning Bags: Use to pack suits, dresses and other glad-rags when travelling; this will help protect it from wrinkles when packing. When storing the bags make sure to keep them safely out of reach of children, as they really are that dangerous.

2. Butter Wrappers: Once you've removed a block of butter from its wrapping, place the wrapping in a plastic container or bag and refrigerate. Use it to grease baking pans - very useful when you run out of foil!

3. Business Cards: Use the other side to label storage boxes and tubs and tape to the outside of the lid or side so you can see at a glance what the container is holding.

Follow the jump for more tips!

[Via Tipnut]

To celebrate Earth Day, our chic-lit loving sister site Trashionista is giving away a copy of Green Chic: Saving the Earth In Style by Christie Matheson. It's a great guide to greener living that extends beyond fashion alone, with heaps of useful advice you can incorporate into your busy life. It would also make a great gift for those just starting out on making the green switch.

To be in with a chance of winning, email the editor with "Green Chic" in the subject line. Don't forget to include your name and address and the competition closes at 12 noon GMT tomorrow.

The Mail Preference Service is a fantastically simple and efficient way to reduce the amount of junk that comes through your door, and takes less than a minute to register online.

Today, I found out about Choose Your Mail, another free service that helps you manage junk mail, but this one gives you more control over what you do and do not allow through your door. Say you're a big fitness freak and want to know about all the latest deals being offered by gyms in your area, but aren't so fussed about being sold new credit cards: you can specify these areas of interest on the site

[Via Greenjellybean]

Want to do something positive to show your concern about global warming? This weekend it could be as easy as turning off a light, as a worldwide demonstration for more action against climate change is taking place, with those wishing to show support staging a one hour 'lights out'.

The hour between 8 and 9pm GMT on Saturday 29th March has been designated Earth Hour by the World Wildlife Fund and anyone can participate by switching off lights, TVs, computers (sorry folks!) and other electrical appliances.

Want to know the best way to spend your time in a blackout? Check our suggestions out here.

The Rt Rev James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool, has a suggestion for his congregation as they prepare to make the usual chocolate and alcohol sacrifices for Lent: give up carbon. The Christian thing to do is to help those in need, and by living a greener lifestyle we begin to stem the tide of suffering inflicted on some of the world's poorest people.

Bishop Jones has teamed up with Christian humanitarian group Tearfund as a response to what he heard from youth groups in Liverpool, which was that helping save the Earth - or at least the people on it - was their top priority. Together they suggest the usual small but useful measures: change to energy saving lightbulbs, recycle, use fewer plastic bags, give the dishwasher a day off and do whatever else you can to generally reduce your carbon footprint. After 40 days, it might even become a lifelong habit; you never know.

Oh, and a word to the Greek Orthodox community: if you're going for the full 40 days of semi-vegan goodness, the Lent fast for us starts on March 10th.

I've got to admit defeat at some point soon and come to terms with the fact that I will never be able to keep tabs on every single recycled or 'eco' bag that comes into existence. So I am more than glad to defer to the expertise of the aptly-named 'Recycled Cindy' on this matter, who runs the blog My Recycled Bags.

In the blog, she regularly features her own recycled bag creations along with step-by-step instructions on how to make them. She takes all sorts of raw materials to make the bags, including old denim jeans, crocheted polythene and even video tape ribbon (pictured). Ever wanted to know how to crochet a granny square out of old bags? Cindy will show you how. As well as the familiar tote-style shoppers, you'll find patterns for bags of all sorts here: clutch bags, lunch sacks, make-up bags and just loads more really inventive recycling ideas.

If that all sounds a bit too crafty for you, you can also buy Cindy's products here.

If you can't afford a posh bird feeder (or just like the idea of using recycled materials to make something really handy for our feathered friends) Beansprouts blog featured a really cute idea today: it's a bird feeder made out of an old Pringles tube.

If, like most households in Britain you've got one or more of these Pringles (or even Stackers - anyone else remember Stackers?) tubes lying around, you're halfway to making your birdhouse. Oh, and you'll also need a sardine can, so if you don't want to eat the contents yourself, I'm sure you won't have to wait long for a local cat to come along and help you out.

As you stock up on shiny new gifts and gadgets over Christmas, you’re bound to generate a fair amount of waste that your council won’t pick up and recycle. Recycle-more.co.uk has come up with a text-based scheme to ensure you don’t end up contributing to a landfill.

Simply taste ‘waste’ or ‘elec’ and your postcode to 60060 from anywhere in the UK. You’ll get a text back with details of the place closest to you that will provide the facilities you need. Not everyone is lucky enough to live in a council that recycles plastic bottles, for example (thank you Ealing!), but that needn’t be a problem anymore. And, as New Consumer points out, if you’re visiting around the country and want to take your good habits with you, it’s easily done. Texts cost 50p plus standard network charges, but you won’t be charged extra for replies that take more than one text. Any profit will be ploughed back into recycling schemes and campaigns.

Christmas seems a good time to remind people to use charity search engines. But remembering to always visit the same page just doesn't happen and frequently people are put off by the idea of changing settings on their browser. Fear not! Shiny Shiny is here to make it really, really easy and take away any excuses for failing in your good intentions.

Some sites, like LetThemKnowItsChristmas.com and ClickNow.org offer quick links to help you set them as a homepage, but many let you add them directly to your browser's search bar. Below are some quick tips for adding charity search engines to your search bar, and adjusting the settings so that you use them automatically, all year round.

Ever wondered if those mountains of recycling really make you that much of a saint compared with that mysterious thing called the norm? If so, you should try a new online carbon calculator which compares your greenness with the national average in more than 50 countries, so you can feel as guilty (or smug!) as you deserve when your habits are compared with those of your neighbours.

Set up by Standard Chartered and developed by the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management (ECCM), the Greatest Race on Earth site hosts the first calculator of its kind, and is just as useful for people in the UK as it is for those in India, Kenya, China, Taiwan and the UAE as well as many other African, Asian and Middle Eastern cities. It's a nicely designed site too, so why not go and give it a whirl?

Charitable donations don't get any easier than this. We all use search engines several times a day, so why not get into the giving spirit and set Let Them Know It's Christmas as your homepage. It's basically a google search within a site that's donating all its advertising revenue to World Vision projects to help end poverty.

'Advertising?', I hear you cry. Well yes, but there are no annoying flash banners or pop-ups here. The site uses google ads relevant to your search. An interesting feature as a running total on donations here, along with what it amounts to in real terms. At the moment, this is £72, 2 goats, and educational support for 5 children. I think they could be doing a lot better than that, so please do bookmark it, and use it for your searches. I promise it works just as well as plain old google...

A year ago, I volunteered at two of the centres run by Crisis that feed, clothe and provide shelter for homeless people over Christmas. It was an incredibly rewarding experience, and the charity do a fantastic job of giving hope to some of society's most vulnerable people at a time when the rest of us are having fun. I would definitely recommend it, so if you're interested in giving it a go, you can find out how, here.

This year, I've failed to get my act together on the volunteering front due to other commitments, and know that many others are in the same situation of wanting to help, but not having the time to go down to the centres themselves. So I was pleased to find out about a scheme run by Workplace Giving that allows you to donate to Crisis (and many other charities) as you earn.