Four Steps Towards a Greener Year

[Music]

now

i became an environmental activist while

i was a student here at asm

although i did come to asm when i was

only four years old

so i don’t really know how i could have

been an activist before then

i’d say it all started around third

grade

and there’s a picture of me from around

that time

in third grade we had a project called

the endangered animals project

the endangered animals project was a

project in which we each got assigned

an endangered animal and had to learn

about why

that animal was endangered and the

habitat where it lived

now i gotta sign the polar bear and i

had

thousands of pictures of polar bears all

over my room

because another part of the endangered

animals project

was that you had to draw your endangered

animal on a pin

and then sell those pins from the money

you got

from the pins you sold you were able to

support ngos

that helped that animal and the habitat

where it lived

and helped prevent it from being

endangered

so i would stare at pictures of polar

bears for hours and hours and hours at a

time

because it’s actually really hard to

draw polar bear

from then until now i still talk about

environmental issues with my friends

and a common question that comes up is

what now

as in what can we do now in our

day-to-day lives

in order to be more environmentally

friendly

i have come up with a list of four steps

in order for you to have a greener year

these are four easily implementable

steps for people of all ages

and the four steps that i use in my

day-to-day life

2020 was a year that most of us spent

inside four walls the four walls of your

quarantine home

and if you were lucky those four walls

contain four separate rooms

an office or study area a bathroom

a bedroom and a kitchen so these four

steps

are going to be one step in each of

these rooms

let’s begin with your office or study

area

when most of us have a question we’ll go

to the internet to look it up

and the search engine most commonly used

is google

i recommend that you switch this to

ecosia

ecosia is a search engine that from its

ad revenue

for an average of every 45 searches it

will plant one tree

that means that if you’re searching

something up

seven times a day or using the

application

seven times at the end of the week you’d

reach those 45 searches

and at the end of the year you’d be able

to plant

52 trees all from behind your desk

the second room that i want to talk to

you about today

is your bathroom and specifically the

plastic waste produced

in the bathroom a common example of

plastic waste

is for example in the form of your

shampoo bottles

or your soap dispensers now instead of

using

the plastic shampoo bottles or plastic

soap dispensers

you could use bar soap or bar shampoo

a web page where you could find more

information about how to live

a zero waste lifestyle is trashes for

tossers found up there on the slide

i want to focus on your toothbrushes

the american dental association

recommends that you change your

toothbrush

on average every three to four months

that means that you’d be going through

300 toothbrushes

in your lifespan now when i told my dad

these numbers

he thought that it was all a ploy from

the american dental association

in order to get us to buy more

toothbrushes but

if we take this data as actually

accurate you’d be going

through three to four toothbrushes a

year

national geographic came out with a

series of articles on the history of

plastic

and they estimated that each plastic

toothbrush

takes around 1 000 years to break down

once it’s been thrown out if you’re

going through four

a year that means you’re generating 4

000

years worth of waste just in the form of

toothbrushes

luckily there are alternatives to this

you could buy for example

a toothbrush with a metal handle where

the only

plastic part is the bristols at the top

and that’s the only part you have to

replace or

you could buy a bamboo toothbrush now a

bamboo toothbrush will break down

in a compost in six months that means

that for every plastic toothbrush you

are replacing with a bamboo toothbrush

you’re reducing your waste by 999 years

and six months

the third room that i want to talk to

you about today is

your bedroom most people i know spent

quarantine doing a closet clean out and

they discovered

there are a lot of clothes you either

don’t wear or don’t use

elizabeth klein wrote a book called

overdress

and she states that the average piece of

clothing is only worn

seven times before being thrown out

in the documentary the true cost all

about the true cost of fast fashion

they state that the average american

consumer will throw out

37 kilos of clothes per

year 37 kilos is a

huge amount that’s maybe half

my body weight which is insane

there are alternatives to throwing out

these clothes

for example you could donate them to a

second-hand shop like umana

or to ngos or charities or you can even

make a profit

and sell them online on applications

like walapup

or even vintage you could always come up

with creative options for what to do

with these textiles and clothes

like for example you could sew the

textiles into the inner lining of a

pencil case or cut up

a big towel into small dish rags

the u the bbc article the bbc future

article from 2020

estimated that of the clothes thrown out

84 of it ends up in an incinerator

meaning that 25 kilos of clothes and

textiles

get burned per person per year

even though the overwhelming majority of

these textiles

could be recycled so our goal should be

to reduce

those 25 kilos of waste from ending up

in the incinerator the fourth room

that i want to talk to you about today

is the kitchen and specifically

food waste deliciously ella’s podcast

states that on an individual level one

of the biggest impacts we could make on

the environment

is by reducing the amount of food that

we waste

the number one waste found in u.s

landfills

is actually food and one-third of the

food made for human consumption

is thrown out the most common food

thrown out or one of the most common

foods thrown out

is actually bread and the typical

example is that you’d buy a loaf of

sliced bread

and leave it out and eat maybe a few

slices every day

but at the end of the week you would

throw out the last few slices

the guardian estimated that in the uk

one in every one slice of bread is

thrown out

in every household per week

if we were able to solve this problem

we’d save

52 slices of bread at the end of the

year

and a simple solution to this is for

example if you can freeze your bread

and toast it the next day that way you

could have a freshly

toasted slice of bread instead of an old

rotten spoiled slice of bread that you’d

have to throw

out now if you want to go the extra mile

you could download the application

called too good to go

too good to go is an application that

connects consumers

with food producers and restaurants

and food producers and restaurants that

are going to throw out the food

at the end of the day will sell it at a

discounted price

for consumers so you as a consumer will

benefit

because you get to get the food at a

discounted price

and you have a positive impact on the

environment

i personally use this app if i want to

get take out

before checking deliveroo or uber eats

i will check too good to go to see what

they have to offer

now the four steps that i’ve talked to

you about today

are one use ecosia as a search engine

two replace your plastic toothbrushes

with bamboo toothbrushes three

recycle your textiles and clothes

and four freeze your bread and prevent

food waste

now i want to tell you a story about a

little boy

this story is adapted from lauren

eisley’s

essay written in 1969 called the

starfish thrower

this little boy goes out on the beach

one day and finds that it is

covered in starfish washed up from the

tide

and he runs around picking up each

individual starfish

and throwing it back in the water and an

old man comes up to him

and he says son what are you doing do

you see how many starfish there are

out on this beach you’re never going to

be able to make a difference

and the boy picks up a starfish and he

thinks about this

and then he throws it back in the water

and he says well

i sure made a difference to that

starfish

now whenever you read about

environmental issues

and you read about the impact of the

meat industry or the travel

industry or governments you can get very

overwhelmed

and a lot of times you can think that on

an individual

impact you can never make a difference

and i want you to remember

that small changes really do add up

and when you implement these four steps

in your life in just one year

you would be able to plant 52 trees

save four plastic toothbrushes from

ending up in the trash

save 25 kilos of waste in the form of

clothes

and textiles from being burned and

save 52 slices of bread

i can make an impact and you can make an

impact

even if it’s just in the four walls of

your own home

thank you very much

you