Lili Lomas

Staff Writer

In our fast paced lives it has become all too convenient to buy disposable items, destined to be thrown in the trash after only one use.

Having the responsibilities that we do and being as busy with school or sports as we are, the last thing high school students think about in a day is whether or not the Ziploc bag we throw away at lunch will have an impact on the environment.

Since we are always on the go, we grab whatever seems easiest to dispose of once we are done using it so that we can focus on whatever is more important to us. However, it is the future of the Earth’s health that should be our concern.

A major factor of our wastefulness is plastic water bottles. Rather than taking the time to fill up a reusable water bottle every morning to take to school, many people have resorted to buying 24-pack cases of disposable plastic water bottles.

While they immediately prove convenience, using so many of these plastic bottles has drastic long term effects as they are made of chemicals that are highly toxic, such as petroleum. Plastic water bottles take about 450 years to biodegrade – meaning, the bottle you drank from this morning could be hanging out in our soil for nearly the next half a century.

Producing and disposing of these bottles is harmful to the environment so I encourage you to take 30 seconds of your life every morning to fill up a water bottle instead of continuing to buy plastic water bottles.

Some smaller items that make up a significant part of our trash are Ziploc bags. Packing a lunch takes only a few minutes thanks to our little plastic friends as we easily gather a portion of whatever we wish to eat for lunch, put it in a bag and go.

Sometimes it is even easier than that since so many snacks sold in stores are prepackaged. This nice, neat packaging makes these foods all the more desirable, but if you think about how many plastic bags were sitting on your lunch table yesterday, and multiply that by all 177 days of school, you may be surprised by the extremely high number.

Because of this, I have began using reusable snack bags found at grocery stores or snack containers to hold my treats. These alternatives are more durable than ziplocs allowing you to wash and reuse them over and over. You get a neatly packaged meal, and you help the environment without having to go too much out of your way for it.

Besides these two plastic items, I have noticed that in our small community we are extremely wasteful of the resources we have. With the money that Coppell has, we never really have to worry about running out of supplies to get us through a school day, so we take a lot of them for granted.

I encourage you to stop throwing away every little piece of paper, plastic or any other material, and think about how you can reuse it and save the earth a little every day.

Try printing off assignments on both sides of a sheet of paper, using only one napkin next time you go out to eat at your favorite restaurant, and check the label on every piece of plastic to see if it is recyclable.

Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as it takes to burn it. Recycling one ton of paper saves 17 trees, 7,000 gallons of water and 60 pounds of air pollution. By using a reusable water bottle instead of a plastic one, you save enough energy to power a 60 watt lightbulb for six hours.

Although you may not immediately see it, these small changes in your lifestyle will prove to be beneficial to the world as you decrease the amount of trash thrown out, and ultimately provide a cleaner version of our planet for the future.