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