Let's talk trash.
As a high school student, I see a great deal of trash every day. (I mean that in more ways than one.) To prevent the spread of germs and viruses, my school hands out individually-wrapped utensils at lunchtime. That's right, every spoon comes in its own cute little plastic wrapper. So does each fork and knife. Those utensils are made of disposable, one-time-use plastic. My institutionalized food is served on a non-biodegradable styrofoam plate. My 4 ounces of grape juice come in a tiny paper carton. So, if I want to neatly eat my mock-Thanksgiving meal of mashed potatoes, turkey, and peas, I need to generate quite a bit of paper and plastic waste. Those wrappers and plates will be taking up space in landfills long after I've gotten the taste of Turkey Surprise out of my mouth. But, I haven't been contaminated with other people's icky germs, have I?
Then, I'm off to Chemisty class. We don't use reusable glass eyedroppers anymore, because their rubber ends need to be replaced every few years when they dry out. Now, we have nice plastic pipettes, which can't be washed or dried out, so we can't use them more than once or risk cross-contamination of experiments. Sometimes, I use five pipettes in one day. So does every one of the 60 Honors Chemistry lab groups. That's a lot of trash.
In hospitals, it is necessary to use plastic products only once because one sick person could potentially spread their illness to another individual through a needle or IV. Patients each use at least one or two paper gowns during each examination by a doctor, in an effort to maintain a sterile and clean environment in a medical setting. This does, however, cause our landfills to brim with waste.
My school could use washable plastic plates to cut down on trash, but they don't. Maybe they don't trust high schoolers with real utensils, but I personally think that I am mature enough to eat with washable metal or plastic utensils. (What do they think I use at home?!) I am surprised to hear commercials on TV that tell me not to use plastic bags (which my family reused generations before it was hip to do so) to carry my groceries home when so many other establishments in modern society generate so much more garbage than I do.
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Washable plastic plates...now that's an idea.
Maybe they should just revert back to regular plates/forks/knives/spoons? And in your Chem class, they should go back to the regular rubber versions of the pipettes. It's a college campus. Isn't anyone concerned with the amount of waste coming out of there?
Actually, I'm in high school, but I still don't see why we can't have real flatware. And the pipettes are ridiculous...
~Violinstef