Saving money and saving the environment often go hand in hand. In honor of Earth Day, here are four activity ideas to help you incorporate eco-friendly ideas with your personal finance lessons.

Financially Inclined: Going Green With Your Money

Financially Inclined is a video podcast about money designed specifically with teachers and teens in mind. It's produced by Marketplace and hosted by Yanely Espinal, NGPF’s Director of Educational Outreach.

Season 3, Episode 4 covers how to align your money with your environmental (and other) values in just under 10 minutes.

Find the episode and accompanying classroom resources in this blog post.

MOVE: Making Transportation Decisions

From our Budgeting unit, this activity gets students out of their seats and discussing the pros and cons of various methods of getting from place to place.

It has participants consider options like walking, biking, taking the bus or train, and other alternatives to cars.

Go to the activity.

RESEARCH: How Ethical are the Products You Use?

From our Consumer Skills unit, students can find out how the companies they buy products from score on an ethical rating of 1-100.

Environmental efforts and impact is one of four categories taken into consideration by The Good Shopping Guide.

View the activity.

Discuss Ways to Reduce Expenses

You can incorporate sustainability into many Budgeting lessons and activities. Get students thinking about how habits like shopping secondhand, reusing items, reducing utility use, buying durable products, cooking at home, and other cost-saving methods also help the environment.

For example, in PROJECT: Rein in Your Wants, you could have students use a sustainable lens to come up with interventions to reduce spending.

BONUS: Learn more about how thrifting is becoming increasingly popular with Gen Z in our Secondhand Savvy On-Demand module.

About the Author

Hannah Rael

As NGPF's Marketing Communications Manager, Hannah (she/her) helps spread the word about NGPF's mission to improve the financial lives of the next generation of Americans.