Photo Credit: “What Goes Around, Come Around” by Bonnie Monteleone
Last year, my 6th and 7th grade students collected a series of articles and videos that focus on New Energy Technologies That Reduce Climate Change. This year, I teach only 6th grade and this year’s students are tackling the problem of plastic. It is floating in the world’s ocean and filling landfills across many continents. This human-made waste is harming the environment, and especially the world’s wildlife (including nearly 700 species in our oceans). The following articles and videos (shown with a red link) provide some ideas on how we can mitigate, or reduce, this problem.
New Products to Replace Plastic Products
- Spoons you can eat
- Water bottle pods
- Recycled paper, water bottle; decomposes in 3 weeks
- Reusable stainless steel water bottles (offered by many different companies, as well)
- Reusable straws
- Benjamin Stern (age 14) makes shampoo pods; Benjamin on Shark Tank
- Cloth diapers
- Biodegradable garbage bags
- Biodegradable dog waste bags
- Plastic free protective phone cases
- Wool/sugar cane shoes
- Laundry detergent w/o packaging (At the Beaverton Farmer’s Market, they sell their soap in cloth bags)
- Bamboo toothbrushes
- Compostable plates
- Wooden watches
- Wooden sunglasses
- Bamboo iPhone speakers
Plastic/Other Films Made From Other Materials Than Oil (less pollution; biodegradable)
- Elif Bilgin (16 years old) makes bio-plastic from bananas
- Biodegradable film & packaging made from milk proteins; 500 times stronger than plastic
Using Microorganisms to Break Down Plastic
- Enzymes from bacteria
- Biodegradable materials do not break down well in the landfill
Reduce
- My plastic free life (a blog with tips and tricks that focus on living life without purchasing plastic, especially single-use plastic)
Reuse
- Plastic waste used to make houses out of bricks like Legos
- Roads made of plastic waste
- Turning flip-flops into art
- Reusable sandwich wraps
- Reusable baby food pouch
- TerraCycle products
- Reusable produce bags
- Reusable grocery bags (many brands to choose from)
- Reusable bread bag
Recycle
- Current recycling efforts
- Coke-Cola wants to recycle one can/bottle for each one that it sells, by 2030
- Recycled plastic rugs
- Pens made from recycled water bottles
- Honest Kids uses recyclable box for beverages, instead of plastic/aluminum pouch that cannot be recycled (like Caprisun)
- TerraCycle
- Toys made from recycled plastic
- Umbrellas made from recycled plastic
- Sea2See recycled plastic sunglasses
Repair
Bans or Removal of Plastic Products
- Portland, Oregon bans plastic bags
- California banned single use plastic bags in most stores in 2016, and in 2019 the state banned straws in sit-down restaurants, unless a customer asks for one, or they take their order to go
- Washington D.C. bans plastic foam products used in businesses & restaurants (ex: polystyrene/Styrofoam); Plastic foam bands around the nation
- National Parks ban sale of plastic bottles; reduces waste by 112,000lbs/year
- McDonald’s uses alternatives to plastic straws in select restaurants
- Coffee shops offer reusable silicone cups (as a replacement for disposable paper cup with plastic lid)
- National ban on microbeads
Clean-up
- Boyan Slat (age 18) at 2012 TEDx Talks, Boyan Slat discusses progress in cleaning garbage patch in 2017
- Trash clean up in Chile
- SOLVE beach clean up
- 4Ocean sells products, which fund cleanups of plastic. An estimated 16 billion pounds of plastic enters the ocean each year, and 4Ocean has helped to pull nearly 1 1/2 million pounds of it, back out.
- Australia uses drain-nets to collect 815lbs. of trash & debris, including lots of plastic
Support Organizations That are Tackling the Problem
- Ocean Conservancy
- SOLVE
- Upstream
- Jr. Ocean Guardians (started by Shelby O’Neil, age 16) (started letter writing campaign to companies that use disposable plastic, to educate them)