Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 03:21PMWhy We're Here
On a Saturday morning a few Augusts back, Baron sat in his regular bagel shop with his regular sesame bagel with cream cheese and looked down at his tray. He needed one napkin to finish his breakfast—two at most—but counted 13.
As Alli was leaving a banquet hall at the end of a conference—an environmental conference, no less—she was shocked at the number of plastic bottles littered around the overflowing trash can. And she decided that someone, somewhere, was clearly missing the point.
Baron was moved by a napkin. Alli was moved by a bottle. Together, we’ve both been moved by single-use-disposables in American life. Or, as we like to call it, the most overlooked and underestimated environmental hazard of the modern era.
What is a single-use-disposable? It’s any object designed to be used once and thrown away. Plastic bags and bottles and paper napkins and cups are among the most common single-use-disposable items around, but we also like to include within this category things like razors and lighters that have been manufactured from cheap materials so that their useful lifespans are short.
Of all the environmental issues out there, from climate change to species endangerment to our dependence on dirty fuels, why might we decide to focus our attention on single-use-disposables? After all, how much damage can a few extra pieces of plastic do when we have (so-called) real problems to worry about? Answer: a lot.
Over the last year, we’ve learned that the concentration of plastic particles to zooplankton in some parts of the ocean is 28:1, a nearly fivefold increase from 20 years ago. We learned that the aluminum can, useful for no more than an hour, can take 6 months to produce and use up more than just a little bit of energy in the process. And perhaps most surprisingly, we learned that fibers for extra soft toilet paper came from trees in irreplaceable, thousand year old Canadian boreal forests.
With all of our big, real problems, we over look single use disposables, a widespread environmental hazard with which we interact on a daily basis. It is a problem both overlooked and underestimated. Few people know that much of the 14 billion pounds of trash that ends up in the ocean every year is single-use plastic. Fewer still know that, while trees may be renewable resources, the ancient forest ecosystems from which we remove them are not.
Because we use them every day, because they make our lives more convenient, and because we’ve never known another way to live, we accept single-use-disposables as part of modern living. But when we buy that water bottle or toss that unused napkin in the trash, we don’t think about the long-term inconvenience of that decision because so few of understand what it is.
We’re going to change that here. Single use disposable items haven’t been exposed, and we want to expose them. Before motivation, there must be education, and we will use this blog to teach readers about the hazards of the environmental hazard that no one else is talking about. And one day, we hope that we’ll encourage smarter consumption habits.