Over the past week, there has been ongoing construction in front of NYIT. Sidewalks have been dug up and replaced. While walking to work last Wednesday, I spotted a plastic gatorade bottle near the excavation. Upon inspection, it was a bottle of Gatorade Rain, a variety of Gatorade that was released in 2006. It still bore the old Gatorade logo, which was changed in 2010. That means that single plastic bottle has been buried on campus for, at most, 15 years.
This is only a fraction of the life of plastic. According to the World Wildlife Fund, plastic bags (like the kind you’d get at a store) take 20 years, while plastic bottles, cups, coffee pods and diapers take 450 to 500 years. That means that one Gatorade bottle could still be on our campus in 2456, if it doesn’t get picked up and recycled in that time. That bottle will outlive all of us.
In 2017, a study by Roland Geyer, Jenna R. Jambeck and Kara Lavender Law found that only a small percentage of all plastic produced since 1950 had been recycled, with the rest being burned or left in landfills or the ocean. The study claimed that “if current production and waste management trends continue, roughly 12,000 metric tons of plastic waste will be in landfills or in the natural environment by 2050.
You’re probably thinking, “alright, I just won’t leave my plastic bottles lying around campus for students in 2456 to find, and then everything will be fine. Right?” Not quite.
Jan Dell of The Last Beach Cleanup discussed the viability of recycling in a 2019 article. Dell pointed out that recycling is not always practical: “for example, polypropylene #5 plastic cups and lids promoted as recyclable by fast food companies are not recyclable in a growing number of places in the U.S.
As a result, about 6 times more post-consumer plastic waste is burned in the U.S. than is domestically recycled.”
This checks out – in Jonesboro, city recycling bins or recycling places such as Abilities Unlimited only accept #1 and #2 plastics. I searched for places in Arkansas that accept #5 plastic and couldn’t find any. (#5 plastics include things like Starbucks cups, yogurt containers and disposable dishware.)
Dell’s article also mentions a study called The Behavioral Economics of Recycling, which found that “consumers feel comfortable using a larger amount of a resource when recycling is an option” and therefore having recycling bins available does not completely reduce plastic pollution.
Dell’s article claimed that the most effective ways to reduce pollution would be bans on plastic bags. Bottle bills, in which a consumer pays a deposit to a retailer when buying a beverage, and receives a refund when they return the empty container to the store or to a distribution center, are also an option. These methods are promising from an environmental standpoint, though I could see pushback to either one.
Last spring, A-State started charging students for plastic bags at campus stores. You could accept paying the extra money for the bags, purchase a cloth bag from the campus store and reuse it later, bring your own reusable bag or shove everything in your backpack. I was annoyed with the idea at first, since it would mean using more Flex than before, but by the end of the semester I really didn’t notice a difference, and it wasn’t too hard to use my backpack or reusable bag instead. (If you’re in the market, I recommend the canvas bags from Earthbound. They’re huge.)
So what can you, as a consumer, do about your plastic waste if recycling isn’t the perfect option? You should still recycle as much as you can. The distribution of recycling bins on campus is decent (unless you’re in Pack Place or want to recycle glass), so make sure you know where the bins are for your most used type of recyclable. For example, I know I can put used cans in the bin in the band annex of the Fine Arts building or in the Humanities and Social Sciences Building.
However, you should also put focus on using less plastic to begin with. Make an effort to use recyclable cups at Starbucks (they’ve started allowing you to bring your own cups again after restricting the option last year due to COVID-19 concerns). Get a reusable bag from somewhere and make a habit of carrying it around. Small steps like this may not make a huge impact, but it’s better to do something, right?
Categories: Opinion
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