Sarah Dietz is a recent graduate of the Steinhardt Food Studies program, where she earned her M.A. in May of 2019. She has nearly a decade of professional experience investigating food related issues, focusing on health, food quality, garden education, and sustainability.  She was born and raised in New England, moved to NYC while pursuing her master’s, and now lives in Portland, Maine. Sarah’s current research addresses sustainable entrepreneurship and the food system’s connection to ocean health. She is active with her local Surfrider chapter and is dedicated to teaching others how to take better care of the environment through food choices and other daily habits. 

Our oceans have become the world’s biggest landfill. Every year, it is estimated that 8 million metric tons of plastic enters the ocean – a trend that shows no signs of slowing. Plastic cutlery has been deemed one of the “most deadly” items of single use plastic to marine animals, and single-use plastics make up a majority of the top ten list of items most collected during beach clean ups around the world. In addition to those sobering stats, The UN estimates that if we continue down this path of plastic consumption, there will be more plastic than fish in the sea by 2050. There’s no one perfect solution to this problem. The Carry Your Own! Challenge focuses on one layer of the issue; personal plastic waste.

To address the problem of personal plastic waste, Yvonne and I decided that designing an educational event to create community about daily personal habits of plastic waste would be a good place to start. The Carry Your Own! Challenge is a fun, competitive way to educate students, and build community, around plastic waste mitigation at NYU. The Carry Your Own! Challenge will consist of two events. The first event, scheduled for Thursday September, 26th, will introduce participants to the plastic problem through expert speakers, a description of the challenge piece of this project, Q&A session, community building, and a screening of the documentary ‘A Plastic Ocean.’ We both found this film so powerful, that we wanted to share it with other students. At the first event, we will be handing out reusable bamboo utensils and coffee mugs for participants to carry around with them as much as possible for the three weeks between the events. Participants will log their progress each day, and at the end of the three weeks we will give out three prizes to the top plastic waste mitigators, with the grand prize being a generous gift basket of reusable items.

In order to collect data on this event, we will be using a QR code survey that participants will complete at the start of the first event. During the follow up event (see schedule below), we will ask participants to complete a similar survey in order to measure changes in beliefs, attitudes, habits, and plastic usage. The larger goal of this project is to help contribute to a culture of low waste at NYU. The school has already committed to eliminating plastic water bottles, and we are hoping that we can encourage students to do the same with their own plastic cutlery, coffee mugs, plastic bags, etc.

The first date of these two events was chosen intentionally to coincide with Climate Week here in NYC. The United Nations General Assembly will meet in NYC to discuss Climate Change with 100 world leaders, in addition to 100+ climate events throughout the city.

Carry Your Own! Challenge

1st event: Thursday, 9/26 @6pm in Kimmel Center, Room 903 (RSVP required)

2nd event: Thursday, 10/17 @6pm in Kimmel Center (details TBD)