Pollution Update

Look around when you attend a music festival, 4th of July celebration, or state fair this summer. Recycling bins, found in schools and at the exits of Target and other stores, have moved outside.

     Paul Abramson, who founded Paolo Verde Consulting, observed that keeping an area clean, especially at potential littering hot spots, during an event eliminates the need for picking up the mess at the end, when everyone is exhausted. He recommends having people (I would suggest cute, smiling teenagers) at bins "making gentle suggestions," such as "You know, that paper plate is recyclable, and we're collecting compost (food scraps) here."

     Abramson also notes that keeping an event site neat appeals to everyone who likes to see immediate results rather than the invisible good their contributions are doing, when they give to the Sierra Club, World Wildlife Fund, or Greenpeace.

     On a larger scale, TIME magazine (June 16, 2014), in an article entitled, "Green Revolution," shows the United States's amazing shift to clean energy in the 21st century. Renewable (water, wind, and solar) power plants went from 682 in 2002 to 1,956 in 2012. While coal plants still provided 39% of U.S. electricity and 75% of emissions from electricity in 2013, cleaner natural gas generated 51% of the electricity added by new plants opened in 2013. Estimates suggest one-fifth of all coal-fired plants have been closed or are scheduled to retire. Although solar and wind power produced only a little more than 5% of U.S. electricity in 2013, they produced 30% of new power added that year and 90% of new power capacity installed in the first quarter of 2014. What is impressive about this added power from wind is the amount by which it decreased carbon emissions, the same effect as taking 20 million cars off the road.

     Even children 6 to 8 years old can learn about the fossil fuel energy cycle from sun to transportation use in Buried Sunlight: How Fossil Fuels Have Changed the Earth by Molly Bang and Penny Chisholm.

     Solar panels, once an exotic that cost $75 per watt generated in 1975, are now available to produce a watt of electricity on home and business rooftops for less than 75 cents. Technology also is meeting the conservation challenge. Products now keep track of individual energy usage and suggest ways to reduce it. Energy efficient LED lightbulbs, compared to incandescent ones, last longer and reduce consumer cost over their lifetimes. It is interesting to note that combined jobs in the solar industry (150,000) and wind industry (50,000) now match the 200,000 in the coal industry.

     Unfortunately, new items, such as plastic bottles and drones, keep multiplying and requiring additional ideas for recycling. According to trendwatching,com, plastic Coca-Cola bottles in Vietnam, and later in Thailand and Indonesia, come with 16 different caps that convert empties into new uses, such as squirt guns, pencil sharpeners, and soap dispensers. Drones also are a new pollution problem. Some have biodegradable wings, but when they crash, their metal pieces and batteries litter the land and oceans.

     Students looking for ways to eliminate pollution and stem climate change can also find a wide variety of suggestions, including the development of bladeless wind turbines, in the earlier blog post, "A Healthy Environment."