For my Grade 12 social justice class, we were tasked with an action project. The purpose of this was to make a change in our community and do something small to change the world around us.
It took me an extremely long time to find an issue that I was passionate about and that I could help solve. In the end, I decided that I wanted to find a solution from an issue that affects us all equal and desperately needed fixing.
Climate change is one thing that doesn’t care who you are or where you come from. It affects us all and will poison our Earth if we don’t act now and do something about it. A large part of the climate crisis is the amount of single-use plastic that is currently floating around our oceans and how many more end up there every day.
It estimated that there is about 7,000 to 35,000 tons of garbage in the oceans of the world and most of that trash is plastic. Canadians alone use between 9 and 15 billion plastic bags a year, that’s enough to circle the globe 55 times.
Now, I know that it’s hard to imagine a life without plastics in any shape or form and that isn’t what I am suggesting we do. Numerous things in our day to day life are made of plastic but what if instead of like traditional plastics we used plastics that were made from biodegradable materials that were better for the environment. Although you don’t hear a lot about them, there are plastic materials being produced from renewable biomass sources, such as vegetable fats and oils. These products are often referred to as bioplastics.
The benefits of making these bioplastics is that we can reduce the amount of non-biodegradable material we produce and reduce our carbon footprint. Currently, these products are still being developed and tested, but a major of people don’t even know that they exist. If we spread the word and make this a much more known piece of information, it might help us save our planet. Our Earth needs saving and this maybe a good step in the right direction.
Reagan Doucette Kucheravy
Prince George
