FEATURE

Girl Gone Green

Throughout her childhood, Senior Kat Riggs was taught how to care for the environment. Now, as president of Green Team, she works with students to educate others about the importance living a sustainable lifestyle.

BY LIV ZENDER WEB EDITOR IN CHIEF

Senior Kat Riggs took a deep breath and cleared her throat. She ran through her mental list of points to make and things to say, stood up, and addressed her club. Riggs joined Green Team her freshman year as the only underclassmen. Little did she know that a year later she would be standing in front of the same club, but with more members and as the president. As Riggs transitioned from a shy participant to a strong leader with goals for the club and the school, her leadership skills were put to the test. Being president of the Green Team club was Rigg’s first real taste of leadership, but not of her passion towards environmental advocacy.

“I took a risk with taking on that role,” Riggs said. “I’d never done anything like that before…[the club] has gotten a lot bigger which is really exciting. And this year my sister Ellie and Lauren Shaw are co-vice presidents.”

Riggs was raised in a home focused on the importance of preserving and appreciating nature while working to reduce one’s environmental footprint. From her parents encouraging her to spend time outside, Riggs quickly gained a passion for the outdoors and followed her parents footsteps as environmentalists. Another influence on Riggs’s passion for the environment was watching her dad’s performances as Eco-Elvis. Eco-Elvis is a version of Elvis Presley who performs environmentally-focused versions of Elvis Presley’s top hits. Listening to her dad’s aka Eco-Elvis’s songs as a child inspired her to maintain her advocacy for the good of the environment.

“I feel like when I doubt the importance of my work [with Green

photo submitted by Kat Riggs

Sophomores Lily Dillon and Violet Gowin, left, designed posters to hang up around the school with intention of spreading awareness about the environmental effects of fast fashion. photo submitted | Kat Riggs BRAINSTORMING BUDDIES middle

Senior Kat Riggs, middle, presents during the second club meeting of the year. Students used this time to brainstorm environment-focused event ideas for the year

REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE? left

Senior Bridgette Conner designs a handmade recycling bin to place somewhere around the school. The winning team recieved a prize for best-designed bin.

Team], I’ll hear his songs and it keeps me on track,” Riggs said. “It reminds me of why I care.”

A little bit of help can go a long way. Riggs volunteered several strategies for anybody and everybody wishing to reduce their impact on the Earth. Simple tasks such as carpooling instead of driving alone or using reusable bags at the grocery store instead of single use plastic bags. Washcloths instead of makeup wipes. Thrifting instead of shopping fast fashion. The list goes on. As a family, the Riggs’s have a couple more strategies that they implement in their everyday lives. While not always the most convenient, these strategies have proven worthy of their time due to the lesser environmental impact. Instead of buying regular shampoo, conditioner, body wash, and dish soap that use single-use plastics from the store, the Riggs’s use Soap Refill Station KC in Waldo to refill large quantities of these soaps into large containers, to later be divvied up at home

“We go to Soap Refill Station KC in Waldo,” Riggs said. “They have laundry detergent, hand soap, and other low waste options. We refill these big containers… then we empty them into little containers.”

As with any leadership position, Riggs has led her group through both wins and losses over the past three years. One of their more successful ventures was a fundraiser during the Australian megafires that took place from June 2019 to May 2020. In efforts to help both the burning forest, dying animals, and hardworking firefighters, Green Team held a fundraiser breakfast that raised over $200. These funds were later split and equally distributed to an animal refuge organization and to an organization dedicated to helping the firefighters risking their lives to put out the wildfires. Additionally, in the spring of 2021 Green Team helped organize an interfaith Earth Day celebration centered around spreading tips and tricks for helping the environment in one’s everyday life combined with the concept that different faiths emphasize the importance of sustainability in different ways. For the celebration, Green Team partnered with students from Hyman Brand, the nearby Jewish day school, to learn about how Judaism teaches about sustainability.

“I talked a bit about how the Catholic Faith teaches about sustainability and care for the Earth,” Riggs said. “And then he (Tyler Johnson, Hyman Brand student) talked about how the Jewish faith also teaches about sustainability.”

A previous venture that Green Team had been very hopeful about was creating a compost pile for the waste created by student’s lunches, an effort that would help increase Sion’s sustainability. Unfortunately, creating a compost pile is easier said than done. There are necessary steps to follow very precisely during the composting process, including turning or stirring the compost for a significant amount of time every week. If done incorrectly, the compost will start to rot, which is a health concern. Once these facts were established, Green Team explored the idea of exporting Sion’s waste to a nearby compost plant, but this service costs an additional monthly sum of money. According to co-vice president senior Lauren Shaw, another roadblock Green Team deals with is related to time constraints.

“The amount of time that we have [causes difficulties],” Shaw said. “[We meet] once every two weeks for 30 minutes so we can only do little activities and small discussions.

As a senior, Riggs has spent the last several months exploring colleges and figuring out where her home next fall will be. While she has yet to decide where she will be attending college next semester, she is planning on majoring in environmental studies which combines her love for conservation and environmentalism with social justice, two topics she is very passionate about. Riggs plans to pass the role of Green Team president on to her younger sister sophomore Ellie Riggs. When asked about her sisters involvement in Green Team over the past four years, Ellie expresses what a joy it has been to watch her sister gain confidence in her leadership for something she is passionate about.

“Its been really fun to watch her because she’s really passionate about it,” Ellie Riggs said. “She gets excited doing it, it makes her happy, and she wants to continue doing it in the future. Its been really cool to watch.”

news. COP 26 CONFRONTS CLIMATE CRISIS

COP 26, a meeting of world leaders, produced the Glasgow Climate Pact, an agreement to help confront climate change.

BY LAUREN SMITH COPY EDITOR

COP 26 is the 26th meeting of members representing almost 200 countries organized by the United Nations to create agreements on climate change. COP26, abbreviation for the Conference of Parties, kicked off October 31, 2021 lasting two weeks and was hosted by the United Kingdom held in Glasgow, Scotland. Many topics discussed were initiated during the wellknown Paris Climate Agreement; the result of the COP that took place in 2015, which initiated many countries to come to COP26 with plans and actions ready to propose and enact. Though like many assignments, not everyone completed their homework to the best of their abilities with many submitting pledges that didn’t go farther than their previous ones.

The number that seemed to be the center of the conference was 1.5° C. Keeping global warming at 1.5° C, above pre-industrial levels, which as research has shown anything higher will be catastrophic. The United Nations calculates that these plans put the world on track for 2.5° C of warming by the end of the century. That is better than the 4° C trajectory the world was on before the Paris Agreement was struck, but is still extremely dangerous.

COP26 Commitments @COP26 (2021, November 13). This tweet from from the COP26 twitter celebrates the finalization of the Glasgow Climate Pact. Reminding us that the work done at the conference will be succesfull only if action is taken immediatly.

Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Motley spoke on this: “Two degrees is a death sentence for the people of Dominica, and Fiji, for the people of Kenya, and Mozambique…We do not want that dreaded death sentence and we’ve come here today to say ‘try harder.’” This emphasized to leaders around the world the importance of achieving 1.5° C and the deadly consequences that would result if this does not happen. 151 countries agreed to achieve 1.5° C with climate plans formally known as nationally determined contributions, or NDC’s for short. Many countries that did not recognize the severity have pledged to come to the COP next year with legitimate NDC’s to set stronger 2030 emission reduction targets.

An obstacle during the COP’s is that rich developed countries such as the United States, China, India, and parts of the EU that contribute the most to the severity of climate change call the shots. Even though the negative repercussions we are already seeing from climate change primarily impact poor developing countries who don’t get an equal say at the COP. Rich countries failed to show up with a 100 billion annual climate funding they had promised to vulnerable countries to transition to renewable energy and adapt to climate change. Questioning their reliability after a pattern of failing to commit to meet the goals.

The UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, welcomed the attendees to Glasgow by comparing climate change to fictional Scotland native James Bond: “Who generally comes to the climax of his highly lucrative film strapped to a doomsday device…. And we are roughly in the same position…Except that the tragedy is, this is not a movie, and the doomsday device is real.” Johnson’s quote has strong rhetoric about the severity of the climate crisis, but this is not reflected in the actions of major countries like the EU. Their words are not enough and the eagerness of his speech is not accompanied by the eagerness of direct action.

The decisions made at the summit were compiled into the Glasgow Climate Pact. The difficulty is everyone has to agree on every word of it and that comes down to singular words. The COP was extended another day to reach final agreements. In the final hours on the last day before a final agreement a representative from India rejected the phrase “phasing out coal.” This was changed to “phasing down coal,” and shortly after the pact was signed. The tackling of fossil fuel is a solution to ensuring 1.5° C and needs to be more enforced. This is a step in the right direction with this being the first document from a COP since the 1990s to include the words fossil fuels.

The outcomes of the Glasgow Climate Pact include a significant headway on a wide range of agreements surrounding climate change, but it is not enough. Many developing countries were not pleased with the agreement hoping more would have come out of the COP, but acknowledge it is better than not reaching an agreement. Ultimately though these are important decisions, taking action will be what brings us one step closer to confronting the climate crisis. Let’s hope next year’s agreements improve and include financial commitments to keep 1.5° C alive by all.

Sir David Attenborough’s speech reminds us of the power we have to change: “We are, after all, the greatest problem solvers to have ever existed on Earth. If working apart, we are a force powerful enough to destabilize our planet. Surely working together, we are powerful enough to save it.”

SPEND GREEN

DESIGNED BY KATE MCCARTHY PRINT EDITOR-IN-CHIEF WRITTEN BY LAUREN SMITH COPY EDITOR Electric Cars seem to be the way of a more sustainable future, but just like gas-powered cars they have their ups and downs.

The year is 2035, and car dealers such as General Motors and Volvo have stopped selling gasoline-powered cars, and swapped them out with electric cars. On your way home from work, you stop at the grocery store and plug in your electric vehicle while you go and shop, then you come back to a fully charged car. Having to wait in line to fill up your tank at a gas station is a thing of the past. Electric cars seem to be the wave of the future, but how green are electric cars?

In the United States, the transportation sector is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, most of which come from cars and trucks. With the increase in advertisement in recent years of electric vehicles from a range of dealerships, you question is it worth the switch from your traditional combustion engine to a battery-powered car? In broad terms, most electric cars sold today are generally more climate-friendly with lower emissions than gas-powered vehicles, but there are implications on natural resources used to create these vehicles and the resources and energy needed to keep them charged.

The creation of the batteries that power most electric cars contain raw materials such as cobalt and lithium, whose mining has been linked to their own environmental harm and human rights concerns. Cobalt, in particular, produces hazardous chemicals, which, according to the National Library of Medicine, exposure to cobalt has been detected in communities near mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The DRC is where 70% of the world’s cobalt is mined, a large sum of which is under inhumane conditions where many children are working with improper tools and are being exposed to toxic chemicals. On the other hand, the extraction of lithium from salt flats in Australia and areas surrounding the Andes Mountains uses large amounts of groundwater. According to a Congressional Research Service report, the water required for batteries to manufacture electric cars is approximately 50% more water-intensive than the creation of a combustion engine.

Though the creation of the electric vehicle is less environmentally friendly than that of a conventional car, there are new ways being discovered to reduce this. With the increase of electric vehicles comes new methods in producing them, such as attempting to recycle the batteries from electric vehicles. Though the creation is more impactful on the earth the toll on the environment throughout the lifetime of the car will ultimately be less harmful than that of a gas-powered car. To ensure you are buying the most environmentally friendly car, you can try to buy a used electric car to avoid the production of another battery.

How green your electric car is also depends on how the electricity is made. It all depends on the amount of coal burned to charge the electric field that is powering the charge of your vehicle. If the goal of electric cars is to be emission-free, they need to start with electric grids. It also depends on your location. For instance, in Pittsburgh and many parts of the midwest, plugging your car into a coalheavy grid could emit more air pollution. The other issue with charging your electric vehicle is the accessibility of charging stations. The more accessible these charging stations are, the more persuaded people become to purchase electric cars. The good thing is that over the last decade across the United States hundreds of coal plants have closed and shifted to more sustainable options.

With electric cars costing more upfront, meaning they are only available to those who can afford them, it is difficult for them to be accessible to those of all incomes. With the upfront cost higher you generally have a lower overall cost compared to a gas car which requires more maintenance. The future of electric cars is here, and though the process to create these alternatives and to charge them is difficult, with an increase of them comes more solutions to make them even more affordable and environmentally friendly. So, you may spend more green to drive green, but it is a smart investment over time.

TO GO GREEN

PROS

Environmentally Friendly

Electric cars produce zero tailpipes emissions and run quieter than conventional vehicles, which means reduced noise pollution. Low Maintenance

Though the initial price of an electric car is costly there are fewer moving parts than a gas-powered car requiring less maintenance like no more oil changes. Cost-Effective

An analysis from the Union of Concerned Scientists found that charging a vehicle was more cost-effective than filling up at the pump across 50 major American cities. With the price of gas fluctuating, it’s costly to fill up often, and avoiding it will save you money over time. Good performance

Electric vehicles get the best performance right from the start; acceleration may be different from a petrol or diesel car, but they are still fast and offer an exciting performance right from the start. Electric motors allow for faster acceleration and better mileage.

CONS

Higher Cost

Electric vehicles are more expensive to buy than gas cars since they cost more to produce.

Limiting Charging Network

Few fast-charging stations are available especially outside of urban areas.

Range Limitations

Electric cars offer a 125-185 mile range that can recover in the city with a regenerative drive, but it drains if only on the highway. Making it difficult to plan a road trip with limited charging stations (Which are easy to find with a quick google search.)

Battery Life

Over time the battery loses its power capacity and after ten years, it usually goes down to just 40% of the total capacity. So, you will have to end up purchasing a new battery which is costly.