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Posts tagged as “recycling”

(Archive February 2019) Recycling: The Drastic Plastic Issue

By editorialteam on April 3, 2025

By Cassie Roy | Observer Contributor

Two projects, Larry the plastic bag sea turtle (above) and the giant plastic water bottle (below) can be found on campus. Each promotes awareness of the growing problems with plastic pollution.
Photos by Thomas Hill Jr.
The sign explaining Larry the plastic turtle
Photo by Thomas Hill Jr.

Plastic- we all know it, we all use it, we all buy it, but that’s the problem.

According to plastic-pollution.org, over 8.3 billion tons of plastic resides on our Earth. A study conducted in 2013 showed that an average of approximately 299 million tons of plastic gets produced and added onto the growing pile of waste each year. That same study estimated that by 2025 we would be able to line one hundred plastic bags per foot along every coastline on Earth. That’s about 372,000 miles of land covered in waste that will take over five hundred years to be broken down and recycled back into the Earth. read more

(Archives November 2018) The Final Straw: A Message About Recycling

By editorialteam on April 1, 2025

By Sophia Schlegelmilch | Observer Contributor

As communities across the U.S. propose measures to limit or ban plastic straws, Christine Nelson, President of the Green Society, discussed their environmental impact and offered some greener alternatives. 

“We use 390 million straws in one day [in the United States],” said Nelson, “you just use it for a few minutes, and then it’s gone and we don’t think about it.”

According to Nelson, plastic straws are particularly detrimental to the environment because they are in category #5, polypropylene, on the plastics grading scale and most curbside pickup recycling programs won’t recycle them.  read more