Coming into this semester I didn’t know a whole lot on the topic of sustainability. I wondered what kinds of things I would learn, and be able to implement into my daily life, and even teach to my friends and family. By far the most interactive and beneficial lesson I could have gotten was my experience from this year’s R3 project. Last year when, I lived in the dorms, I noticed problems with recycling and trash being left all over the place. Moving forward to this year when I moved into my first off campus apartment, those problems were immediately brought to my awareness and I knew some things needed to change. Garbage bins were overflown with trash, plastic bottles could be seen scattered around the building, and a recycling area wasn’t
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The plastic bottles were easy to collect because a few of my roommates routinely drink pop, and bottled water. I jumped on the opportunity to inform them of my project and got them involved by having them put the bottles in a trash bag for the week that I kept in our kitchen. Sometimes I would add to my tally each week by walking around the outskirts of our apartment complex and pick up any bottles or trash that people were too lazy to dispose of. As far as my collection of cardboard boxes went, I placed a blue recycling bin near the main door to our apartment where we could put the boxes. Since boxes from online shopping purchases and care packages from parents were in abundance throughout the semester, there were plenty of boxes to collect. Around week number 6, about midway through the semester, my apartment complex opened up a recycling area in response to many students wanting a place where they could dispose of their trash in a green way. I was excited when this happened not only because change for the better was happening around me, but also because I didn’t have to go all the way to the MSU recycling center anymore! Beginning in week 1, I started out kind of slow with smaller totals in the amount of plastic bottles I got, but once I became accustomed to the new routine of my habit, I got rolling, and progress started to …show more content…
This question was sort of answered during my behavior change this semester when I saw that no matter what I did personally, people were still going to make bad choices in regards to recycling, and practicing green habits. We cannot sustain our consumerist lifestyle without getting engulfed by garbage and exhausting the earth’s resources. The impacts of me recycling alone can still make a difference however. Individually, there are a lot of things lying around the house that we no longer want or need that might just end up in a dumpsite somewhere, that we can recycle and earn money from. If I were to throw away a single aluminum can, versus recycling it, that would be like pouring out six ounces of gasoline, so individual efforts seem to make a difference after all. On the community level, there is also a financial benefit of recycling in that there will be reduced costs of waste disposal or recycling. If every single undergraduate student here at Michigan State recycled everything that they could instead of ditching it into a waste bin, the impact would be huge to both the natural environment and us humans. The overall energy consumption on our campus would decrease greatly, essentially saving our school lots of money, and keeping our production level at an all-time high. Green-house gas emissions and landfill waste would surely go down if everyone on campus
The plastic bottles were easy to collect because a few of my roommates routinely drink pop, and bottled water. I jumped on the opportunity to inform them of my project and got them involved by having them put the bottles in a trash bag for the week that I kept in our kitchen. Sometimes I would add to my tally each week by walking around the outskirts of our apartment complex and pick up any bottles or trash that people were too lazy to dispose of. As far as my collection of cardboard boxes went, I placed a blue recycling bin near the main door to our apartment where we could put the boxes. Since boxes from online shopping purchases and care packages from parents were in abundance throughout the semester, there were plenty of boxes to collect. Around week number 6, about midway through the semester, my apartment complex opened up a recycling area in response to many students wanting a place where they could dispose of their trash in a green way. I was excited when this happened not only because change for the better was happening around me, but also because I didn’t have to go all the way to the MSU recycling center anymore! Beginning in week 1, I started out kind of slow with smaller totals in the amount of plastic bottles I got, but once I became accustomed to the new routine of my habit, I got rolling, and progress started to …show more content…
This question was sort of answered during my behavior change this semester when I saw that no matter what I did personally, people were still going to make bad choices in regards to recycling, and practicing green habits. We cannot sustain our consumerist lifestyle without getting engulfed by garbage and exhausting the earth’s resources. The impacts of me recycling alone can still make a difference however. Individually, there are a lot of things lying around the house that we no longer want or need that might just end up in a dumpsite somewhere, that we can recycle and earn money from. If I were to throw away a single aluminum can, versus recycling it, that would be like pouring out six ounces of gasoline, so individual efforts seem to make a difference after all. On the community level, there is also a financial benefit of recycling in that there will be reduced costs of waste disposal or recycling. If every single undergraduate student here at Michigan State recycled everything that they could instead of ditching it into a waste bin, the impact would be huge to both the natural environment and us humans. The overall energy consumption on our campus would decrease greatly, essentially saving our school lots of money, and keeping our production level at an all-time high. Green-house gas emissions and landfill waste would surely go down if everyone on campus