IMC Hawks Blog

Tag: earth

  • Filter Your Way To A Greener Earth


    “What do you want for dinner honey, how about plastic?” This may seem like a ridiculous statement, but it’s one that needs to be taken seriously. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a large island in the Pacific Ocean that is full of tires, plastic, nets, and lots and lots of trash. To be clear, the largest landfill isn’t on land, it’s in the ocean. An estimated 80% of the garbage in the ocean comes from land sources and plastic composes 90% of the trash floating in the oceans around the world. The size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not verified, but some say that it is twice the size of the state of Texas while others say the garbage island is 3.8 million square miles. The trash leaves human hands, goes into the ocean, and kills sea animals. Sea turtles become entangled by fishing nets, eating plastic bags mistaking them as jelly fish, and dying because of it. Birds are also scooping up the trash and feeding it to their young mistaking it for food and dying from starvation or ruptured organs. How does this process come to a full circle? The trash leaves humans hands, goes into the ocean, animals then eat the trash, bigger animals eat the smaller animals that have ingested the trash, the animals are then caught by fisherman, and then the fish, which have ingested trash and plastic, ends up on your dinner plate. Sounds delicious right? No, I didn’t think so.

    Mostly everyone can agree with the statement that we live in the “Age of Plastic”. However, it has been a growing issue within the world that plastic is harmful to the environment. But has anyone stopped to think of what it is doing to the human body? Werner Boote has and that is why he created the documentary called Plastic Planet. Boote traveled all over the world to understand how plastic is made and used throughout the countries. During the video he speaks to the world’s foremost experts in biology, pharmacology, and genetics to receive some answers about the effects of plastics. A shocking revolution of this video is that plastic is actually in our blood. He created this video to educate those about the risks of plastic and how long the material really lasts on earth. This video is encouraging those to limit the use of plastic and to educate the next generations of children so that they understand what kind of a plant they are being introduced to. Last year, the Green Team on UNCW’s campus collaborated with another sustainability group to play this movie for the students to see. People should be educated on the effects of plastic and understand how harmful it really is.http://firstrunfeatures.com/plasticplanetdvd.html

    Many companies are now producing products to help save the environment and cut down on the amount of plastic bottles the world uses every year. Brita water filters has made technology so that customers can make tap water from their home safe from harmful bacteria and pure while using their own glasses. Brita has a new campaign, Brita For Good, which asks customers to use their bottle and pitcher filters to save about 300 plastic bottles from being used and thrown away. The average filter needs to be thrown away every two months, so you don’t have to constantly be worrying about changing the filter. Camelbak is another company striving to save the environment from being consumed by waste. They have recently designed a product to solve water purification problems with a system that uses UV light. The bottle takes 60 seconds to purify the water inside, which is not too long to wait for pure and fresh water.

    -Kelsey Bendig, Brooke Keller, Andrea Blanton, Brian Burch

  • Switching To Green Is Much Easier Than You Think

    Happy Earth Day! I hope you all are out there doing your part to cut back on wastefulness and give back to the environment. However, we shouldn’t just return to our old ways of unneccasary consumerism tomorrow. We should make a collective effort to turn ourselves completely green. As Lynn Jurich explains in her article “The Rise of the Pocketbook Environmentalist”, that may be a lot easier than it onced seemed.

    As you may have noticed in previous posts, a good amount of companies all across the board are switching to environmentally conscious ways of production and service. However, an interesting shift has taken place where buying the green products no longer costs an arm and a leg. Instead, Lynn Jurich explains that bargain purchases and green purchases have become one in the same. With the growing expanse of environmentally sound products, the competition has finally driven the price down to a level we can all handle. Companies are longer looking to market their ‘green’ products to the more affluent community, but instead expanding their reach to the entire public. Josh Dorfman, the author of “The Lazy Environmentalist” has actually invented an app that will allow you to scan any product and see the environmental impact it has. While the already green products would be obvious, Dorfman says this app will help you decided from the less discernible products like Dove and Ivory soap, perhaps. These improvements in technology and intelligence put the power in the hands of the consumer. Now the producers will have no choice but to jump on the green train and lower their impact. For companies, it’s either go green or get out of the way.

    -Will Cosden, Micaela Fouhy, Brie Golden, Lindsey Baggett, Drew Mayer