Monika Leininger
Mleinin1@uwyo.edu
One notable characteristic about our generation is our reliance on convenience. If a product is not ready to grab and run out the door with, chances are we aren’t going to waste our valuable time and money on it. We live in a world where almost everything we buy has a disposable component to it, from wrappers, to coffee cups, bottled water, paper plates, pizza boxes, grocery bags, beer bottles to plastic cups. We have become the generation of instant gratification.
Think about your usual day and all of the products you consume within the first couple hours of your morning. You get out of bed; maybe you have some yogurt that comes in a plastic tub. You then hop in the shower where you use shampoo and conditioner that is dispensed from a rigid plastic, bottle. Next, you make your way to class, possibly on foot, your bike, or maybe even in a giant metal machine that uses valuable, air polluting resources at the turn of a key.
Allow me to take a second to rant about motor vehicles. We have constructed a giant metal machine to transport one single person. These machines use irreplaceable resources; they have disconnected us from our local landscapes by allowing any products to be imported to us through the use of colossal, unsustainable and unsafe, semi-trucks. Motor vehicles are constructed to travel faster than any animal alive, how absurd is that? Yet we sit at stop lights and yell “Come on! Go Faster.”
Now, continuing on your day, you notice it’s around noon and you start to get a little hungry. Of course you didn’t pack your lunch in a reusable plastic, Tupperware container, because let’s face it, that actually involves thinking and forethought. As such, you make your way to Panda Express and get some sort of concoction that comes in a Styrofoam box. I bet at the time of devouring your overpriced, corporate lump of refuse, you didn’t think about how this Styrofoam box will live in a land field for decades to come. That’s right folks, this Styrofoam box will actually out-live you.
It’s that time, it’s 2:30 in the afternoon and you are starting to lose your mojo, to perk up, you’ll make a stop at your nearby coffee shop for an afternoon pick-me-up. You are handed your hot, delicious, caffeinated beverage in a to-go cup that will never ever degrade. This coffee cup is literally like kryptonite to mother earth. The generation of ponytail-wearing, Starbucks-loving, Frappuccino-drinking consumerists are enough to drive me insane.
One of my favorite things is when I go to some occasion or event and someone offers me a capsule of bottled water. Like are you kidding me? You actually paid money for a free, clean and available resource? You can get water anywhere, and yet you drove in your car, to a commercial store, to buy water, and to transport this product back to this establishment that just transformed to my living nightmare. When you buy bottled water, you are essentially paying money to pollute your planet and propagate the toxic waste that will eventually lead to the downfall of all mankind.
Where do you think this bottle of water is going after I dispose of it? Is there some massive black hole that eats up all the stupid trash that we create? Do you think the bottle of water is going to disappear into thin air? I’ll tell you where it’s going. This bottle of water is going to end up in the ocean to both deteriorate and pollute vulnerable ecosystems, or it’s going to join its friends at the giant plastic island party. We need to wake up people, we have a giant plastic island is the Pacific Ocean, and yet we use plastic grocery bags like they are going out of style.
Now I know what you’re thinking, you probably recycle and as a result you are not filthy, greedy consumerist. Wrong! I will agree that recycling is a much better option that sending everything to a landfill, and relying on new materials to make products. However, recycling processes can be equally unsustainable. The process of transporting, melting down plastic and reforming the plastic into a new product produces a large amount of emissions.
The problem that we are facing is much larger than recycling. The bare truth is we need to make the transformation from, a lazy, instantly gratified society, where we create waste at a faster rate than our own consumption to a society that thinks about the repercussions of their actions, makes efforts to reduce and reuse, and believes in sustainability for future generations to come.
