I chose to collect plastic around campus in order to determine which form of plastic is more commonly consumed and what we can do to prevent it. After speaking with a few friends and collecting plastic items, I discovered that the majority of our plastic consumption on campus is in the form of packaging, from Starbucks cups to bottled water and plastic snack wrappers. This did not surprise me, as I am guilty of the same thing. We are using plastic that we would most likely discard within seconds.
Plastic packaging is incredibly wasteful and has a detrimental effect on the earth’s ecosystems, which we rely on. The majority of plastic garbage is disposed of in landfills or into the environment as a result of poor product design and a lack of political infrastructure. There have been 9.2 billion tons of plastic created, of which only 9% has been recycled efficiently.
Given the fact that plastic is not biodegradable, every piece of plastic ever manufactured remains on the globe. Whether or not it degrades into microplastics, plastic discarded or washed into the waters is devoured by marine life. Due to the short life of plastic packaging, it is one of the largest contributors to plastic pollution.
Hi Ari, did you find enough trash for your project?
Hello!!
Yes I did. I have a lot of those Starbucks cups and a lot of the bottles. They are a recurring theme here on campus because students do save their bottles but sadly they don’t fill them up again they go and buy new ones although they can still use the ones they have because their bottles are in good shape. I’m working with Kevin as well he picked up a lot from the beach so I’m excited to merge the two. Both Abu Dhabi trash and the on campus plastic trash which is mainly Starbucks cups as well as water bottles. We did our search for plastic separately. He will be posting the beach trash shortly.
I’ve just added a picture to quantify the amount of trash in the bag shown here.
when I saw the photos I thought you only found those two items 😛