Back to Plastic

Author’s Note

As summer draws to a close in the United States of America, nature undergoes many changes. The lush green leaves change into a spectacular array of reds, oranges, and browns. The once humid air becomes refreshingly crisp and cool, signaling the arrival of autumn. It’s also a time when the once-empty hallways are now filled with children returning to school.

Today, I want to focus on the last point about children returning to school. Many people call this time “Back to School.” However, due to the dramatic plastic increase in the school year I have titled this post, “Back to Plastic.”

Plastic Usage Increase in School Year

Let me start with an extremely shocking and concerning statistic, “Public schools in the United States produce over 14,500 tons of waste every day. Each student using a disposable lunch produces roughly 67 pounds of waste during a nine-month school year. (earthday.org) This shows that although there are some other factors in the waste, the main factor is single-use plastic items. The 67 pounds of waste “mostly consisting of plastic utensils, straws, and bags.” (earthday.org)

School Lunches

From personal experience, my school used to give out Styrofoam trays at lunch. Putting hot food directly onto these trays are very bad for human health, if you want to read more about that check out my upcoming post. While Styrofoam (which contains Styrene) can lead to irritation, depression, headaches, and fatigue, it also has more severe effects including disrupting kidney functions, respiratory risks (from the airborne particles it releases), and “Styrene is considered a possible human carcinogen (agents that promote Cancer development) by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer.” This year my school switched to reusable trays. Hopefully in the future they can switch to a different reusable material than plastic like metal.

Furthermore, if you wanted to get utensils, you had to get a whole pack! It was a plastic spork (spoon and fork) and a plastic knife with a napkin inside a plastic bag. I think they should change these to more environmentally friendly materials and also because these microplastics are getting into the human bodies!

Back to School Shopping

Also, as many parents and children head back to school shopping, a lot more plastic is used in packaging. Almost everything is wrapped in plastic or made of plastic (or both!) In some stores they still provide plastic bags as well!

What Can We Do?

In many stores it is unavoidable to purchase plastic items. However, you can still do things like bring your own reusable bag to stores. When you are bringing/packing a snack to school, do so in metal/glass containers instead of plastic to reduce the microplastics that go inside your body. Also, bring a metal utensil instead of plastic. Overall, there are many small ways to prevent plastic usage and microplastics going inside your body as the microplastic problem increases as the school year begins.