Disposable Plastics - Noah Koskiniemi

During my 4 years at Michigan Tech I have lived off campus either at my house in Calumet, and in an apartment in Hancock for a brief period of time, and disposable plastics have been very important for the transportation of foods and snacks to campus. Over these four years I would estimate that they number of disposable Gatorade/ water bottles that I've brought to school or purchased at school and thrown away to be somewhere in the thousands. This is a lot of plastic waste that ends up being generated from the need to transport food, as well as the snack food that is always wrapped in some form of disposable plastic. I had no idea that there was a large amount of these plastics that were harming the environment negatively, such as the micro-plastics.

The majority of the plastics that I ended up using for a period of 2 days over break ended up being mostly shopping bags from buying Christmas gifts for my family members with the occasional Gatorade bottle or snack wrappers, overall the amount that I generated was nowhere near as high as I thought it was going to be, this is due to the fact that we were not in school and it was not an average school/work week. There was some plastic waste generated from various forks/spoons/plates used at the Thanksgiving dinner at my grandparents house. Keeping track of the used plastics proved to be very difficult because it is usually something that very little thought is put into the amount of waste products that we actually use or are part of throwing away. Some alternatives to the plastics used could be to use paper or woven grocery bags for items, silverware and glass plates instead of throwaway ones. Drinks that come in glass containers rather than throw away plastic or recycle the materials that are used.
During this class I have learned the extent at which disposable plastics are harming the environment, from the various micro-plastics to the average ones that are piling up in landfills, the amount of harm they are doing is evident. I agree that there needs to be safer alternatives and I will attempt to slow my use of these plastics in the future, We all need to take the environment seriously and it is evident that changes need to be made to preserve the earth.