Section 1, Topic 1
Hello, Save our Beautiful Planet club members!
As discussed around 2 weeks ago, to bring up activity rate as well as cheer for the planet we all love, Save our Beautiful Planet is going to have weekly discussions, also known as topics. The topics might have a certain theme. That theme is called a section.
For our first topic, in my previous news post, some club members wrote in the comments on what they wanted our first topic to be. Most of the members had written the same thing 'preventing littering and promoting recycling and composting.' Other ideas were: adapting to a plant based diet and preventing poaching, which will appear in later topics.
Preventing waste and adapting to a plant-based diet both have to do with at home things you can do to help the environment. Thus, the first section is born: At Home ways to Reduce your Environmental Impact.
Now, onto our weekly discussion!
While walking around cities, you'll find cigarettes, plastic bags, as well as other trash well, trashing up the street. Not only does it look ugly, but it poses a threat to animals, for they might eat the trash and choke.
Now, why would people dump their trash in the street? Some of it is accidental, such as if the wind blows away a receipt or a Ziploc bag. However, some things, such as cans, aren't accidental. Wind can't blow away something that heavy. Normally, it's just laziness. If there is no trash nearby, then some people think that the alternate option is throwing trash into the streets. Which is never an 'alternate' option.
The unfortunate thing is: a huge portion of the trash that you find on the street CAN be recycled!
What's frustrating is that many public places don't have recycling. For example, restaurants, hotels, and motels. Not finding a recycling bin nearby, people throw recyclable materials into the trash.
Maybe that's only 1 recyclable material in the trash, but those materials can ad up to 10 paper bags. 100. 1,000. The numbers get big quickly.
To prevent that, you can always walk around and find a recycling bin. Though that might spare your recyclable materials, it might not spare others, which will just get thrown into the trash. Therefore, you can always suggest to the public place you're at to add recycling bins, and explain the benefits.
Go to: https://www.epa.gov/recycle/how-do-I-recycle-common-recyclables if you have any doubts about what can be recycled.
Another alternative to recycling is composting, which is where all your food waste goes. For example, banana peels and apple cores belong in the composting. If you walk around the streets, you'll notice that there isn't many apple cores around the street. Why? They degrade and turn into fertilizer. Fertilizer that's 10x better than regular dirt around it. The dirt gives way to new plants. Cool, right?
However, compost bins are even rarer then recycling bins, meaning that the apple cores and banana peels get thrown in the trash. Even though they can degrade into the trash, when they degrade next to all that Styrofoam and plastic, it creates a greenhouse gas worse than Co2 called methane. In fact, most methane comes from landfills.
Since methane has a global warming potential of 72x times carbon dioxide, throwing your compost in the trash it extremely harmful to the environment.
Instead, you can get compost bins, where you can throw your compost, which is put in places where it can degrade without creating methane and disrupting the environment. Another alternative is to compost yourself, which means you can have all of the fertilizer. It's even better for the environment, because there isn't a truck that emits greenhouse gases driving around with your compost. Go to: https://www.simpleecology.com/blog/composting-101 to learn how to compost by yourself.
Thank-you for reading this week's Discussion Topic!
Be back on chess.com next week for an article about the benefits of the plant based diets. Have any ideas on future Discussion Topics? Put your ideas in the comments down below.
-@earthmelon12345
