Reduction of Plastic Bags
It is important for the world to know that plastic bags have a detrimental affect on the environment. For a class I'm taking at the State University of New York at Fredonia, my professor assigned us a "Be the Change" project in which we had to change something about our lifestyles to help protect the environment. I chose to record how many plastic bags I used over a period of two weeks, then I purchased a re-usable bag and avoided using plastic bags as much as possible. I went from using about 17 bags per week to about 2 bags per week and found that this had a huge impact on the environment.
In reducing the amount of plastic bags you use each day, you can save things such as
- Money
- Oil
- Refined gasoline within the oil
- The amount of meters or miles you can drive using that gasoline
- Marine animals such as seabirds
I found that by reducing my use of plastic bags, on a personal level, I helped to save many of these things. Just think if we all reduced our use!
This is a poem I wrote in my creative writing class called "Luminous Plastic"
This poem is to bring awareness to people of the dangerous effects of plastics on marine life. A turtle doesn't know the difference between a piece of plastic and a jelly-fish because in the water it is very hard for them to tell. A lot of fish mistake plastic pellets for eggs and they eat them without thinking twice. Animals don't deserve to die because of our mistakes. One of my favorite quotes says...
"Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves as the central nervous system or the brain of nature. We're not the brain, we are a cancer on nature."
-David Foreman
In other words, people think they can control nature but instead we just destroy it more than anything.
"Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves as the central nervous system or the brain of nature. We're not the brain, we are a cancer on nature."
-David Foreman
In other words, people think they can control nature but instead we just destroy it more than anything.
Below is a slide show of pictures taken of the bags I've used and been collecting over two weeks...
These pictures were taken over the coarse of the 5 weeks in which I did my project..
Below is a video of me recycling the bags my suite-mates and I have been collecting over the semester along with the 42 bags I collected overall for my Be the Change Project. This video is located at the University Commons where there is a bin that says "Plastic Bags Only." I understand that plastic is down-cycled rather than re-cycled, however this was the most efficient place I could think of to recycle the bags.
This took place on Sunday, April 22, 2012 - Earth Day.
This took place on Sunday, April 22, 2012 - Earth Day.
Thank you for looking at my Website and I hope everyone can make the change to switch to re-usable bags.
-Ashley Wheeler