MHS' Contribution to Garbage Island: Part 2-Change is Possible!

Garbage and the enormity of it is piling up throughout the world, including the small park Montclair High School is located on. Adolescents blatantly throw their trash into Rand park, instead of the trash cans located throughout the area.

The immediate solution to help reduce the garbage amount would be to educate and inform the high school students, especially the incoming freshman, on the impact trash has on the environment and on the small scale, the beauty of Rand Park. By freely littering the high school campus, it not only reflects poorly of the students, but prevents any improvement of the park from happening. Local government believe that putting in money and time into Rand Park would be pointless and ineffective because of the continuous stream of trash being dumped into the park by the MHS students. And while this is partly true, perhaps the upkeep of the park would motivate and inspire others to stop littering.

Getting students involved in the maintenance of the park is a first easy step to help the "Garbage Island" of Montclair. With countless community service clubs, students could get service hours in exchange for time spent cleaning the park. For example, Key Club, a community service club where every member must have a minimum of 50 hours of volunteer work a year, that has over 100 members could easily transform Rand Park into the beautiful breath of nature it is meant to be. After school, students could congregate and comb the area for litter, help maintain the landscape, and oversee something with meaning. Additionally, Peer Leadership, a mentor group of seniors that help freshman orient into high school life, could inform incoming students about how the responsibility they have in keeping Rand Park clean and litter-free.

After digging into this problem we brainstormed alternative solutions; of course there’s always the possibility of the town providing additional trash and recycling cans, in hopes that the majority will actually use them. But the reality is to end any problem one must go to the source, if the student body and administration would support a movement to keep campus litter free with security guards doubling as waste monitors we could eliminate much of the litter. However, one of our biggest issues facing this epidemic is out of our control, using plastic- specifically styrofoam. Food trucks are part of the natural order at Montclair High, but with their continuous usage of non-environmentally friendly products to serve their products it’s not difficult to hypothesize where the majority or trash originates from. One way this town could rewrite that construct is introducing vendors to companies creating products targeting sustainability rather than saving money.

Then we stumbled up Eco Products: "a green company who happens to operate in disposables”, the company creates kitchenware, such as utensils, targeted as "sustainable disposable products"- oxymoron much? But the company's values and goals intend to follow through on their claim, calling worker "greengeeks" as well to aid promoting this go green philosophy. The company claims every product uses materials made from renewable resources and recycled content.

A few of Eco Products top used materials, provided by ecoproducts.com

You can check out their website here:

http://www.ecoproducts.com/index.php

Or find your nearest location to buy their biodegradable products here:

http://www.ecoproducts.com/where-to-buy

MHS’ Contribution to Garbage Island: Part 1 Look into the Litter Epidemic

By Genevieve Basso 

Monday-it’s only first period- students already sit in their classes, under slept and overwhelmed like another other first day back to school; the May weather calls from window to outside. Today we’ve begun examining the litter at Rand Park. A quick glance at the first trashcan by the west facing descending, entrance gives us a good indication of the exact scale we’re dealing with here- and it’s greater than what was originally hypothesized. We count more than 5 pieces of trash happily sitting on the ground- directly next to that trashcan- a further examination of the park leads us to the realization: most individuals passing through prefer to throw their waste on the ground rather than in trashcans. Since it’s the morning every trash bin is relatively empty, yet that’s not the same for the rest of the land paralleling the Freshman building. Below is a series of pictures compiled during the search for litter displayed in a collage, all photos we’re taken within 5 minutes of entering the park to give you an idea of just how much we’re dealing with. 

Now imagine how long all the garbage would collectively take to completely decompose. When estimating long term rates of decomposition scientists can use respirometry tests to measure the rate or carbon dioxide production of oxygen consumption of organic matter or an organism. This is done by placing the object being sampled in a container containing soil and microorganisms, followed by ensuring there is an oxygen supply and allowing for circulation. In the days to follow the microorganisms slowly digest the sample while producing carbon dioxide which levels serve as a indicator of degradation rate.

If you'd like to calculate how long your garbage would take to decompose check out this handy chart: 

(Special thanks to http://sciencelearn.org.nz/ for the data)

That’s all for now, check back for an update on a “Look into the Litter Epidemic "