10 Delicious Bean Recipes
The Egregious Life Cycle of Single-Use Plastics
The Egregious Life Cycle of Single-Use Plastics
It’s a hot summer day in the middle of July, and you just finished taking your dog for a walk around the park. You are dying of thirst but, unfortunately, in your haste to get out the door, you forget to bring your reusable water bottle with you. And then you spot it: a vending machine filled with ice-cold bottles of water. Without hesitation, you walk over to the machine, insert a couple dollars, and out pops a refreshing beverage packaged in single-use plastic. Within minutes, the water is gone, and all that remains is the plastic bottle. You throw the bottle in the nearest trash can, then head home. Thank goodness that water was available in that convenient, disposable packaging.
Or maybe you find yourself at the grocery store. After locating all of the items on your list, you head to the checkout. Unfortunately, you forgot to bring your reusable shopping bags that your mom got you for your birthday. So, instead of making dozens of trips to carry all the groceries out to your car, you decide to use the plastic bags provided at the checkout. The groceries are carried to your car, into your home, and then the plastic bags are thrown away. Single-use plastics save the day once again.
A final likely scenario is ordering take-out. It’s a Friday night, and you don’t feel like going out, let alone cooking yourself something. Naturally, you use your favorite food delivery app to order some dumplings from that new Chinese place that all your friends have been raving about. Without ever leaving the comfort of your own home, the food shows up on your doorstep. And what’s even better is that it is all conveniently packaged in single-use plastic. Just eat the food, throw the container away, and then back to binging reruns of Storage Wars. Even the silverware was plastic, so there’s no dishes to clean!
After reading this, you may be thinking to yourself, “Gee, single-use plastics are the best thing since sliced bread!” After all, they’re convenient, versatile, cheap, and you can get rid of them as soon as you’re finished with them. What more could you ask for? Unfortunately, the life of single-use plastics does not end as soon as you throw them away. In fact, their life is just beginning.
It’s astonishing to think that something created to be used for a matter of minutes can end up lasting for decades, and maybe even centuries. According to the World Wildlife Fund, a plastic bag can take up to 20 years to decompose, plastic straws take around 200 years, and plastic water bottles can take a staggering 450 years to decompose (The lifecycle of plastics)! What’s more, a large majority of single-use plastics don’t even end up in landfills. They make their way into our forests, our city streets, and our oceans, where they wreak even more havoc.
It is estimated that there is already 165 million tons of plastic in the ocean, and some studies suggest that plastic could even outweigh fish in the ocean by 2050 (McCallum, 2020). Couple this with the fact that, of the seven billion tons of plastic waste generated globally so far, less than 10% has been recycled (Visual feature: Beat plastic pollution). Unless we change our habits quickly and drastically, the repercussions will be severe.
So I encourage you to think about the big picture the next time you reach for your favorite single-use plastic. Think about what a small convenience that item is providing you and what a massive detriment it is to marine life, those in developing countries who have to live with our waste, and the planet as a whole. I realize that carrying a reusable water bottle and plastic bags and cooking your own meals may not be the easiest option and will probably take some getting used to, but the future of our planet is at stake. Sea turtles everywhere will thank you, and I promise you that Storage Wars will still be there when you get back from preparing your meal.
By Joey Kurincak
Rock and Recycle
Rock and Recycle!
By: Emma Montemurro, September 22nd, 2022
Concerts and music festivals are my favorite place to be at. I love the rush and excitement of seeing live music! Like any other type of entertainment, single use waste is always a negative factor of these types of events. It is easy to forget about all the waste that gets left on the ground for other people to clean up. Festivals and concerts that take place outside, make it more likely for that waste to get littered around the venue and it can be harder to control. It is also usually forced upon to buy your own plastic water bottle because of various restrictions of bringing in your own. In summary festivals and concerts generate a lot of single use waste.
This past weekend I saw sustainability in action at a concert like I had never seen it before. I was attending a music festival on the beach in Asbury Park, New Jersey. To help reduce cleanup and keep the beaches clean, a vendor called Rock and Recycle from the Surfrider Foundation, offered an incentive to reduce cleanup and waste. They were giving each attendee that wanted to participate a large green plastic bag. If the participant filled up the bag all the way with empty cans/plastic cups and bottles, then the participant would be given a free festival t-shirt with rock and recycling logo on the front and the list of performers on the back. I decided that I wanted to do it immediately and I was not alone. Throughout the entire festival, a large amount of people participated. I was able to collect mostly empty cans from people along the beach and after a performance to fill up my bag within an hour. The water and most alcohol they sold was in cans, although some people had plastic from being able to bring in your own bottle if it was empty. It was eye opening to see a relatively clean beach at the end of the night compared to a usually trashed venue! Along with seeing other people participating and seeing that other people thought it was an awesome idea. As I went around everyone was more than happy to give me their cans and pleaded about how awesome it was. It was also an opportunity to explain that I was an attendee not a volunteer doing it because some people were confused about it.
Another great incentive of the festival was the ability to bring in your own reusable/plastic water bottle if it was empty. Therefore, you could refill it at the water station. A lot of venues I have been to do not allow of this so it was awesome to see a lot of people including myself with their reusable water bottles to prevent waste and having to purchase water repeatedly.
It felt so good to participate and it felt like I was making a difference. I hope other festivals can do the same thing in the future because it was a huge success in getting cans recycled when normally they would have just been littered or thrown out.
Sustainable Architecture: Mass Timber Buildings
Sustainable Architecture: Mass Timber Buildings
By: Benjamin Hsieh
Everyone wants to be safe. I too want to be able to feel at ease wherever I live. This idea of comfort encompasses financial comfort, mental health, and of course physical safety. One way that I think I could achieve this said comfort is if I lived in a building that was built sustainably. I am not just saying that because I am a part of EcoReps, but because I truly believe I would love every aspect of it.
First, covering financial comfort, living in sustainably built houses often means that they minimize the energy input going into the building itself, whether it be heating or cooling the house. This coincides with money saving since energy = money. In fact, some buildings are built so eco-friendly that they end up providing energy for other people in the community, and you can get reimbursed by the electric companies.
The second reason I would love to live in a sustainable house is they just look cool. One way to help be more sustainable is to use material such as wood, or mass timber, to be more environmentally friendly. Some examples of this could look like the following.
These pictures are just some of the examples of what the building can look like. Studies have shown that someone can benefit from the outdoors and natural scenery. It can help boost a person’s mood, supporting their mental health. I think that the rustic aesthetic of these mass timber buildings would definitely boost my mood because I love how it has a natural feel to it, which can easily intertwine with an aesthetic that includes natural greenery.
You might be wondering how these wooden structures are safe. I can assure you that they are extremely safe. This summer, I worked as a seismic design intern for these mass timber buildings. I have seen what goes into designing and building these wooden buildings, making sure they are up to standards, especially in the event of earthquakes. In fact, they may be safer in some ways than steel buildings. Mass timber buildings can have greater strength than steel ones, and are less rigid, which is better in the cases of earthquakes. I would be just as safe, if not safer in one of these mass timber buildings.
I highly suggest looking into sustainable architecture and sustainable houses when looking for a place to live. It can save you a lot of money, benefit your health, and they are just as safe. I encourage you to try to spot one of these sustainable buildings. Hopefully they will be everywhere sometime in the near future.
North Atlantic Garbage Patch
North Atlantic Garbage Patch
By: Kayla Sucro September 30th, 2022
Have you ever heard of the North Atlantic Garbage Patch? Well if you haven’t, you should, because it is where about 10% of your plastic waste ends up. Every year we collectively consume 200 billion pounds of plastic and some of it ends up in the ocean. The plastic and other waste items make their way to the oceans where the currents sweep it up and swirl it into 5 major gyres. Today I am going to tell you about the not-so-pretty life cycle of your Starbucks cup.
All plastic comes from fossil fuels and is produced into small pellets called “Nurdles”. These Nurdles are the raw material for all things plastic so your Starbucks cup started off as a bunch of pea-sized pellets of plastic. These Nurdles are very small and hard to contain so when they get shipped across countries and oceans they spill onto highways where they get washed away into rivers that lead to oceans or they fall off shipping containers directly into the ocean. Since they are so small, they are extremely difficult to capture and recollect so they end up on beaches and in marine animals’ stomachs. Yes, the poor fishes and turtles are eating your plastic waste and it is not good for them. The plastic “fills” them up so they think they are satiated but really it’s just a bunch of plastic that has no nutritional value and they end up starved and most likely dead.
Once you are finished with your Starbucks cup you throw it into the recycling bin but someone else accidentally threw their trash in there so the entire bin is useless to the recycling center. So even though you did your part your Starbucks cup is still headed to the landfill. While the trash truck transports your cup, the wind blows your cup right into the river along the highway and a month later the cup has made its way into the ocean. When it’s there a current picks it up until it makes it into one of the 5 oceanic gyres and it gets stuck in a whirlpool of hundreds of thousands of other pieces of trash.
One of the 5 is the North Atlantic Garbage Patch which is right off the east coast of the US. Now, you can’t see it from satellites because it isn’t a dense “island” like many people think. The misconception that this is a floating island gives a false sense of how to attack the situation. It would be really hard just to scoop up all of the trash because it is a very large area, hundreds of kilometers, and only as dense as about 200,000 pieces of trash per square kilometer. These patches also act as marine animal “hubs” for breeding, socializing, and safety from predators so trying to scoop it all up in massive nets could harm wildlife more than it would help. Picking up piece by piece would take ages so the best way to fix the problem is at the source, stop using single-use plastics.
The plastic that ends up in the oceans slowly breaks down from the sunlight and gets very brittle and can break off into very small pieces called microplastics. Microplastics are much smaller than Nurdles at about 5mm or less in size which means they can reach a lot more places than Nurdles. Research has found that microplastics are in almost every human and you probably consume more than you think. 70,000 microplastic particles every year on average. 70,000 is a VERY large number, it comes from the food and drinks you consume and even the air you breathe. Depending on the amount of fish, sugar, salt, water, alcohol, and honey you eat/drink and if you are breathing urban air or not can change the amount of microplastics you consume but it is still a significant amount. The health effects of these microplastics are still widely unknown but they could be extremely toxic.
Single-use plastics are scary and all of the implications to them are even scarier and that is why you should limit the amount you use and consume. Any little change you make is a positive change and sometimes doing the best you can is all that matters. Single-use plastics are plaguing the environment and it is your responsibility to make a difference. Just one less Starbucks cup a year means 7 billion cups across the world that won’t end up in landfills and oceans.