By now that you have completed several of our monthly challenges, here is some motivation to let your now how much you are helping out our environment in terms of ocean features. Do you remember the first time you went to a beach? The soft sand, the slimy seaweed that tickles your legs? Sadly, plastic is finding its way into the ocean and is building up in a massive amount. The ocean that we all love is turning into a dump and we need to stop it. Marine life is taking the hardest hit. Our trash is invading animal’s homes forcing them elsewhere, and often resulting into death. Unfortunately, the animal’s digestive system can’t handle the trash, and it will often kill them. The deaths and migrations of too many animals in a particular area can hurt the food chain. Trash has to go somewhere, and once our oceans are full our cities and homes will be next. There are a lot of possibilities to help stop the plastic problem like recycling. If we continue to be wasteful and use plastic and other non-biodegradable materials, the result will be horrific We need to help stop this problem, one step at a time.
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To improve our school, we want to focus on how to recycle our hot lunch waste. It is important for students to know that they are helping the environment when they recycle. Our goal is to make everyone puts their hot lunch waste to the right place, as too much garbage piles up in our landfills every year. To do this, we will be showing students where to put the garbage and why. We want to teach fellow students about how each one of us and make an impact of reduction and recycling. We are also introducing you to ways to use less products that are not eco-friendly. These tips can save a lot of garbage in the landfill. We made a powerpoint to show where to put the garbage after hot lunch. Our challenge to you is to make sure everything we use on hot lunch days gets put in possible. There are many reasons why we should eliminate plastic from our daily use. Every day, animals are getting harmed from plastic in British Columbia. It is like if you put a plastic bag over your head, you can’t breathe. Animals go through this because plastic gets caught on their bodies and no animal should have to go through this. It takes 1000 years for plastic to dissolve. Polystyrene is the foam used to make cups that we use to drink and eat hot lunch ends up in landfills. Another example is if a fish eats plastic, then we eat the fish and we ingest the plastic. Humans eat at the top of the trophic level which means they can eat concentrated amounts of this toxic material. Some of the plastic that goes toward the landfills and environment is the plastic from the hot lunch program. The average elementary school produces 4.5kg per Child, In conclusion, plastic and foam are not good for us or the environment, and we need to find a way to create better ways of packaging and eating hot lunch. We see hot lunch garbage all the time in Canyon Heights where it is not supposed to be. For example, overflowing piles of plastic sushi containers are found in the garbage bins of the school. Those clear plastic sushi containers, which are recyclable and can be reused, have being dumped into landfills and are damaging the environment instead.
In hot lunch days, a lot of garbage is made. In our school we have hot lunch every Wednesday and we have 450 people in our school. That is a lot of garbage we make from hot lunch to go in landfills. As a student in Canyon Heights, we should all start to do something about this situation. First, we should be taking this waste home. Once at home, we need to reuse or recycle.Every piece of recycled hot lunch waste can reduce the amount of garbage thrown in landfills. Aside from recycling, some hot lunch garbage are not accepted in most recycling programs, Such as chip and snack bags. There are also complicated rules as to what material in the item can and can’t be recycled for where. Some may not want to do all these research for a piece of plastic, luckily, we are here to teach you! Alternatively, reusing is an excellent way to repurpose plastic. For example, we can:
Encourage people around you to do the challenges. Your friends and family members might be from another place, it’s good to tell others to reduce the amount of plastic wasted in their life. In conclusion, we are encouraging students and parents in the canyon heights community to learn more about where hot lunch garbage can be put to help the environment. Every Wednesday, students worth of lunch waste ends up in the garbage. Hundreds of foam packages, plastic bags and wraps are ending up in landfills instead of being recycled into other useful materials. Hundreds and thousands of plastic waste that canyon heights consumes end up in landfills for up to 1000 years or it can even end up in oceans for an even longer time. When plastics end up in oceans, sea animals can ingest or get stuck in plastics which can cause them to get sick or even die! When you choose to throw away plastics instead of recycle, the plastic will remain under the ground for hundreds of years instead of being used to make other useful materials. If we don’t recycle plastic, that means more plastic will be produced and that is the last thing our earth needs! To solve this problem, we need to know why our school isn’t recycling. After checking our bins, we have found that a lot of students are not only throwing their hot lunch waste into our school bins, when they are told to bring it home, but students are throwing their garbage in the wrong bins. Which led us to question, why wasn’t our school recycling properly? After asking our classmates, we have come to the conclusion that our school does not know how to recycle our hot lunch waste properly. We do not know how to recycle our hot lunch waste correctly because we have never been taught, which is why our goal is to teach the students of Canyon Heights how to recycle properly. |