Service Learning. Trashy Tuesday at Edmonds CC
For my service learning, I decided to participate in Trashy Tuesday. I did this on June 6, and helped pick up trash around campus and learned about the results of pollution and trash for 2 hours. The name of the instructor was Sam Lebrun (Sam.lebrun@email.edcc.edu). This event was sponsored by Edmonds Community College, and it occurs every Tuesday. The goals of this service learning are to identify why trash is littered in the way that it is, and fix that problem on campus, and hopefully that word will spread to other campuses. My job was to go around campus and pick up trash, then record how many pieces of trash me and my partner picked up, and record the different pieces on paper. For example, if we found a candy wrapper, or a cigarette butt, that is what we would label on the paper.
This actually made me think about how much trash people throw on the ground and in public places without giving the environment much thought at all. This actually ties perfectly into what our class has been talking about recently about pollution and garbage in the earth's sea's and ocean's. With all of the trash people dump into the environment, it could deeply effect the marine animals living in the area. If a bird is diving for food, they may mistake a piece of white or grey plastic for a fish sitting on the surface of the water. After they ingest that piece of plastic, chances are that it is going to have negative impacts on the bird overall. After watching videos before we picked up garbage, I was shocked to learn how much garbage really is floating around in our oceans. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a section of garbage the size of Texas floating around with the currents of the ocean, disrupting marine life in the area. Multiply that by two, which is how many of these things exist in the Pacific, and you can see why it causes so much harm to marine life in the ocean. I don't really think people know how destructive throwing garbage and waste into the world's oceans can be. Since we are not out there, we just shrug it off as none of our business. However, if people truly find out how disgusting our ocean's really are, maybe we can begin the cleanup process. Even a little dent in the environment makes a difference. I think if everyone in the world actually started caring, even just a little bit, that the world would be a much cleaner place overall. Humans cannot totally stop the Earth from becoming polluted and toxic with waste and trash, but we can certainly slow the process down.
1. How many birds and other marine life on average suffer from ocean pollution, based on garbage and waste?
2. Are there any immediate solutions that could be made to help improve recycling and trash pickup, to make sure that people do not litter?
3. How many of these so called garbage patches are there in the ocean's, besides the Pacific?
4. How fast will our ocean's and land environments be destroyed if we keep up the current pace of littering and polluting the earth?
This picture is the amount of trash that everyone who participated in Trashy Tuesday on June 6 collected.
This actually made me think about how much trash people throw on the ground and in public places without giving the environment much thought at all. This actually ties perfectly into what our class has been talking about recently about pollution and garbage in the earth's sea's and ocean's. With all of the trash people dump into the environment, it could deeply effect the marine animals living in the area. If a bird is diving for food, they may mistake a piece of white or grey plastic for a fish sitting on the surface of the water. After they ingest that piece of plastic, chances are that it is going to have negative impacts on the bird overall. After watching videos before we picked up garbage, I was shocked to learn how much garbage really is floating around in our oceans. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a section of garbage the size of Texas floating around with the currents of the ocean, disrupting marine life in the area. Multiply that by two, which is how many of these things exist in the Pacific, and you can see why it causes so much harm to marine life in the ocean. I don't really think people know how destructive throwing garbage and waste into the world's oceans can be. Since we are not out there, we just shrug it off as none of our business. However, if people truly find out how disgusting our ocean's really are, maybe we can begin the cleanup process. Even a little dent in the environment makes a difference. I think if everyone in the world actually started caring, even just a little bit, that the world would be a much cleaner place overall. Humans cannot totally stop the Earth from becoming polluted and toxic with waste and trash, but we can certainly slow the process down.
1. How many birds and other marine life on average suffer from ocean pollution, based on garbage and waste?
2. Are there any immediate solutions that could be made to help improve recycling and trash pickup, to make sure that people do not litter?
3. How many of these so called garbage patches are there in the ocean's, besides the Pacific?
4. How fast will our ocean's and land environments be destroyed if we keep up the current pace of littering and polluting the earth?
I was there with you on that day! It's a shame to see pollution almost everywhere you go. For a while, I considered our campus to be pretty clean, but it turns out there was plenty of litter for us to pick up. I like the questions that you came up with, as I was wondering similar things myself.
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