10 Steps to Going Green

Katy Deardorff is a Peninsula Pulse intern entering her sophomore year at Indiana University. This summer she was assigned the task of collecting information for the Green Page, but there was one problem – she didn’t know much about going green. Here, she details her ongoing education.

I depend on plastic. Plastic bags to hold my sandwich, bottles to hold my water, even as I type this article my fingers hit my plastic keys. Plastic is an omnipresent object in my life. I don’t even notice it’s there.

But now I’m hearing how bad it is for the environment, so step five in my green education is how reducing my plastic use can reduce my environmental impact.

Naturally, when I heard that plastic was bad for the environment I decided to check into it. According to National Geographic’s “Green Guide for Daily Life,” http://www.thegreenguide.com, “nothing in nature, not even sunlight and oxygen, can break apart the bonds that hold plastic together, so it lingers on our planet indefinitely.”

Plastic lingers everywhere. It’s in the trash on the side of the road, the bottles floating in the water, and in the cell phone you hold in your hand. So those plastic bottles go from a factory, to a grocery store, to a child, to the ground, to an animal. But even after the animal dies the bottle won’t decompose. It will always be here.

About 25 billion plastic bottles are sold in the U.S. each year, 80 percent of which aren’t recycled. It takes over 1.5 million barrels of oil to make all those single use bottles.

Are you thinking about giving up your plastic bottles yet? I have. I have replaced my sandwich bag with wax paper and my plastic water bottle and coffee mug with metal ones.

So now that I’m at step five of my green journey, it is time to do a midway check up. I’ve started driving slower and more carefully to save gas, given up my plastic water bottles (mostly, I still keep a few BPA-free Nalgene bottles for camping), and I have definitely learned a lot along the way.