November/December 2019
THIS ISSUE
Getting Ready for Winter
Alvernia Theater
The World is Not Your Trash Can Chelsea Dziamba Contributing Writer Trash is the Earth’s biggest enemy right now. How many times are you driving on a busy road in a town or on a highway and you just see plastic bags, empty cups, water bottles, cigarette butts, you name it, on the side of the road? All the little things that people do on a day to day basis is hurting the Earth in which we live. How can we make the world a cleaner place? A big headline on the news today is how using plastic straws are killing the sea turtles in the ocean. Many restaurants or dining places either do not give customers a straw or they are using paper straws instead. This
is a great start to help save our planet. Starbucks, for example, started creating a dome-like lid to put on beverages, which eliminates the need for a straw. Another option is to buy a metal straw. This allows for reuse and less trash. There are metal straws that are collapsible which are perfect for traveling. They can be bought on Amazon for as cheap as $8. This may seem a little pricey for one straw, but this straw can be used over and over again. But straws aren’t the only issue. Restaurants often use plastic or styrofoam containers to give customers when they want to take their food home. This is great because people are not wasting their food. But often times, the containers
are not disposed of properly. The plastic containers that are used can be recycled. But most waste facilities do not accept styrofoam as something that can be recycled. Something restaurants can think about is replacing the plastic and styrofoam containers with cardboard. After the leftover
food is eaten, the cardboard can be recycled. Plastic bottles are a big issue as well. More than six million water bottles end up in landfills each year. It is a great idea to buy a reusable water bottle that is bisphenol, otherwise known as BPA, free. BPA is harmful to one’s body because it messes with
Music of 2019
One of the easiest ways to save the Earth is to dipose of trash! Learn what is and isn’t recyclable and spread the word!
Photo Courtesy of Chelsea Dziamba
The Veterans Center
The beautiful landscape at Alvernia University. Keep our campus clean, pick up your trash!
hormones. Using a reusable water bottle eliminates the use of regular water bottles that are purely plastic. Water filter pitchers are also great to use. This also means you do not have to purchase water bottles when going to the store. “I use a reusable one everyday. I use them to save the environment and to cut down my plastic bottle use,” Leah Kemper, marketing major, said. Companies like Britta, Zerowater, and Aquagear sell water filter pitchers. Highway trash is too common and disgusting to look at. Whether it is garbage bags, empty bottles, empty food bags, cigarette butts, or even clothes, they should not be on the ground. One way to avoid polluting the roads is to keep an old plastic or a paper grocery bag in your car. When you are driving and create trash, just throw it in the bag. Once the bag is full, dispose of the bag properly. A popular trend that is circulating social media is called #trashtag. This hashtag has sparked a movement to take a picture of a polluted area, like a beach, forest or road, before and then after you have cleaned it of debris. Some people had upwards of ten bags of trash that they cleaned up from such a small area.
Photo Courtesy of Chelsea Dziamba
what’s in
Volume 58 Issue 6
“I have never heard of this before. It is a clever name, and I like the idea. It kind of reminds me of what we did with NSO when I was a peer mentor last year and we took the freshman to an elementary school in Reading and cleaned up the grounds like that,” David Pierce, biochem major, said. Awareness of pollution and trash are so important. If someone is more aware of what they are throwing away or how they are disposing of it, it is more likely to be done in a proper manner. Learning all the things that can be recycled can move things in the right direction for the Earth. If changes start to happen on an individual scale, there can be great progress of recycling and reuse.
Newspapers are printed with recycled paper! Write for the Alvernian and save the planet!