Waste

I think recycling is very important, when done correctly. I think the best choice is to get rid of disposables once and for all, but until that happens, recycling is a small step in the right direction. I didn't know that plastics when recycled weren't magically restored into new plastics, and in fact little of it is saved, which we learned from the first video. I think that if more people knew that they wouldn't be so placid and think that by recycling they save the world. We should recycle things like water bottle and plastic bags, but also e-waste items like computers or cell phones. I am not sure the best (safest, least destructive, most return per item) way is, and I would leave that up to scientists to predict, but there has got to be some way to do it.

Personally, I think that of the three R's (reduce, reuse, recycle) reduce and reuse are the best ones. This is why I make choices to use reusable shopping bags, re-use poly's to hold hair ties or leftovers, shop at thrift stores, choose items with less packaging, fill (and re-fill) my camelback water bottle instead of buying a new one every day, limit my use of paper towels in the bathrooms, and basically cut down on my consumption. It is hard, don't get me wrong, but there are little daily choices everyone can make to be more sustainable.

I liked the first video best; I thought it was funny and tried to get the message out to a large audience. The second video was mostly pictures, which didn't have the same effect to me as actual statistics. Neither speaker seemed to really have a clear solution, which I understand because it is a hard and complicated problem that doesn't really have a quick, clear, easy solution. And that's okay. I think that people should make changes in their daily life (and Davis should ban plastic bags, which is actually a campaign I am working on with CALPIRG), but a whole overreaching solution has yet to be found.