The last straw

The new year crinkles. Sounds of a new semester are those of bubble wrap popping, nylon scratching, tape unsticking, cardboard tearing. Before the evidence of move-in day is trucked away to a landfill or facility, our campus is wrapped with the paper and plastic shells of dorm and apartment innards. Whether it’s because we actually believe we need it all or because it’s an experiment in the physical limitations of the college dorm room, there’s no doubt: we have a lot of stuff.

It’s not surprising how ready we are to consume the unnecessary. These products are spoon-fed to us, laden with the sweetness of convenience. The next new, plastic thing is marketed with such saccharine efficiency that we crave it before we even think we are hungry.

We have a consumption problem: an addiction to convenience that justifies our gross misuse and overuse of materials. A la The Graduate, I want to say one word to you: plastics. According to EcoWatch, we have produced more plastic over the past decade than during the last century; we throw away a full half of the plastic we produce after just one use.

The instances of excessive plastic waste for the sake of convenience run the gamut. One that gained popular media attention in recent years is the Keurig K-cup and other single-use coffee pods. With Keurig selling upwards of 9 billion K-cups per year, estimates say that these discarded pods could circle the Earth more than 10 times. While parts of these pods are technically recyclable (in some cities), most get sent to a landfill.

Another example of gratuitous plastic waste perhaps even more culturally ingrained is the drinking straw. Of all the disposable products whose waste is cringe-worthy, straws top my list. More than 500 million straws are thrown away in the U.S. each day, tubes that do not biodegrade and are not made of recyclable plastic in most cities.

These K-cups, straws, and other products we enjoy but unequivocally do not need litter the mass of other plastic products discarded each day. In 2013, the U.S. generated 33 million tons of plastic waste generated in the U.S. annually, only nine percent of which was recovered for recycling. While we may consider these items to be out of sight and out of mind after their single use, plastics never really disappear from the environment. Instead, plastic only breaks down into ever smaller components and continually accumulates.

Our gluttonous tendency toward the artificial has consequences that are all too real. Many plastics contain compounds that are known carcinogens and endocrine disruptors. For example, one study found that just one year working in the plastic industry increased a woman’s risk of breast cancer by 9 percent. Found in commonplace items like water bottles, plastic bags, food packaging, toys and household products, these toxic chemicals in plastic poison the food chain, threatening both wildlife and humans. Plastic is a relatively new material, and without fully knowing the effects of its toxicity, we are unloading it into the environment at an alarming rate — and making ourselves sick in the process.

Back on campus, our to-go life is encouraged, facilitated and seemingly necessitated. Many of us eat on the run and toss away the packaging, sometimes multiple times a day. Question your presumed right to convenience. We are all familiar with the mantra of “reduce, reuse, and recycle”— and many of us have embedded these practices into our daily routines. But the first “R” too often forgotten is refuse. Refuse products that you do not need like drinking straws; decline those you never requested like disposable cutlery; say no to single use plastics and harmful products. This is the last straw.