Light pollution is readily within our ability to solve, using new lighting technologies and shielding existing lights. Already, many cities and towns across North America and Europe are changing to LED streetlights, which offer dramatic possibilities for controlling wasted light. Write an essay in which you explain how Paul Bogard builds an Pollution, addition of any substance or form of energy to the environment at a rate faster than it can be dispersed or stored in a harmless form. The major kinds of pollution are usually classified by environment and include air, water, and land pollution. Learn more about the history of pollution What subject to choose when it comes to cause and effect essay writing. We have collected some good ideas to get you started with your essay. Choosing the essay topic for cause and effect essay type is not difficult, here are some good sample essay topics: Effects of Pollution; The Changes in the Ocean; The Civil Rights Movement and the Effects
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The lie is that blame for the plastic problem is wasteful consumers and that changing our individual habits will fix it. Recycling plastic is to saving the Earth what hammering a nail is to halting a falling skyscraper. You struggle to find a place to do it and feel pleased when you succeed. But your effort is wholly essay about pollution and distracts from the real problem of why the building is collapsing in the first place.
The real problem is that single-use plastic—the very idea of producing plastic items like grocery bags, which we use for an average of 12 minutes but can persist in the environment for half a millennium—is an incredibly reckless abuse of technology. Encouraging individuals to recycle more will never solve the problem of a massive production of single-use plastic that should have been avoided in the first place, essay about pollution.
As an ecologist and evolutionary biologist, I have had a disturbing window essay about pollution the accumulating literature on the hazards of plastic pollution. Scientists have long recognized that plastics biodegrade slowly, if at all, and pose multiple essay about pollution to wildlife through entanglement and consumption. Plastics also accumulate up the food chain, and studies now show that we are likely ingesting it ourselves in seafood.
If we consumers are to blame, how is it possible that we fail to react when a study reports that there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans by ? I would argue the simple answer is that it is hard. And the reason why it is hard has an interesting history. Beginning in the s, big beverage companies like Coca-Cola and Anheuser-Busch, along with Phillip Essay about pollution and others, formed a non-profit called Keep America Beautiful, essay about pollution.
environmental movement. In the ad, a Native American man canoes essay about pollution to a highway, where a motorist tosses a bag of trash. By tapping into a shared national guilt for the history of mistreatment of Native Americans and the sins of a throwaway society, the PSA became a powerful symbol to motivate behavioral change. At face value, these efforts seem benevolent, but they obscure the real problem, which is the role that corporate polluters play in the plastic problem.
Essay about pollution clever misdirection has led essay about pollution and author Heather Rogers to describe Keep America Beautiful as the first corporate greenwashing frontas it has helped shift the public focus to consumer recycling behavior and actively thwarted legislation that would increase extended producer responsibility for waste management.
For example, back inVermont passed a piece of legislation called the Beverage Container Lawwhich outlawed the sale of beverages in non-refillable containers. Single-use packaging was just being developed, and manufacturers were excited about the much higher profit margins associated with selling containers along with their products, rather than having to be in charge of recycling or cleaning and reusing them.
Keep America Beautiful was founded that year and began working to thwart such legislation. Vermont lawmakers allowed the measure to lapse after four years, essay about pollution, and the single-use container essay about pollution expanded, unfettered, for almost 20 years. In Oregon reacted to a growing trash problem by becoming the first U. Bottle bills provide a strong incentive for container reuse and recycling, and the 10 states with bottle deposit laws have around 60 percent container recovery rates compared to 24 percent in states without them.
Yet Keep America Beautiful and other industrial essay about pollution groups have publicly opposed or marketed essay about pollution bottle deposit legislation for decades, as it threatens their bottom line.
In fact, the greatest success of Keep America Beautiful has been to shift the onus of environmental responsibility onto the public while simultaneously becoming a trusted name in the environmental movement.
This psychological misdirect has built public support for a legal framework that punishes individual litterers with hefty fines or jail time, while imposing almost no responsibility on plastic manufacturers for the numerous environmental, essay about pollution, economic and health hazards imposed by their products.
Because of a legal system that favors corporate generation of plastic, plus public acceptance of single-use items as part of the modern economy, consumers who want to reduce their plastic footprint are faced with a host of challenges. We should carry around reusable beverage and takeout containers.
We should avoid bottled water or sodas at all costs. When we have to accept a single-use plastic container, we should inform ourselves about the complex nuances of which types of plastic are acceptable No. and where they can be deposited curbside or at a special location?
In the case of most restaurants and gas stations, which almost never have customer-facing recycling facilities even where required by lawwe should transport recyclables to another location that does recycle. Even then, we must live with the knowledge that plastics generally degrade with recycling, such that plastic bottles are more often turned into non-recyclable carpets and synthetic clothes than more bottles.
Effectively, we have accepted individual responsibility for a problem we have little control over. We can swim against this plastic stream with all our might and fail to make much headway.
At some point we need to address the source. Legislators could make laws that incentivize and facilitate recycling, like the national bottle deposit and bag tax bills that were proposed in These bills would have created a nationwide five-cent deposit on plastic bottles and other containers, and a nonrefundable five-cent charge on plastic bags at checkout.
The U. launched a similar charge on all single-use grocery bags in and announced a nationwide bottle deposit requirement in March of this year. Within six months of the plastic bag charge being in place, usage dropped over 80 percent. Similarly, in Germany, essay about pollution, where a nationwide bottle bill was put in place inrecycling rates have exceeded 98 percent.
In the U. That is, single-use plastic items would not be available or only upon request. A small tweak like this can lead to huge changes in consumer behavior, by making essay about pollution an active choice rather than the status quo. Such measures were recently adopted by several U. citiesand are under consideration in California and the U. And yet, some plastic producers continue to oppose legislation that would eat into their profit margins. Though California and Hawaii have banned the free distribution of essay about pollution bags at checkout, a result of lobbying is that 10 U.
states now have preemption laws preventing municipalities from regulating plastic at the local level, essay about pollution. So what can we do to make responsible use of plastic a reality? First: reject the lie.
Litterbugs are not responsible for the global ecological disaster of plastic. Humans can essay about pollution function to the best of their abilities, given time, mental bandwidth and systemic constraints. Recycling is also too hard in most parts of the U. and lacks the proper incentives to make it work well. Second: talk about our plastic problem loudly and often.
Start conversations with your family members and friends. Call your local and federal representatives to support bottle bills, plastic bag taxes and increased producer responsibility for reuse and recycling.
Stand up against preemptive bans on local plastic regulation. There are signs that corporations are listening to consumer opinions, too. Third: think bigger. There is now serious essay about pollution of zero waste, essay about pollution.
Instead of trying to reduce waste by a small fraction, some individuals and communities are shifting their lifestyles to ensure that nearly everything is reused, essay about pollution, recycled essay about pollution composted.
Non-recyclable straws and to-go cup lids do not fit into this system. Though inspiring, essay about pollution, a zero waste lifestyle will be impractical or impossible for most of us within current economic systems. This could be our future—a future of clean cities, rivers and beaches but also simpler, more responsible choices for consumers. There are now too many humans and too much plastic on this pale blue dot to continue planning our industrial expansions on a quarterly basis.
The views expressed are those of the author s and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. Matt Wilkins is a postdoctoral researcher at Vanderbilt University's Center for Science Outreach. He currently works with Nashville Metro STEM teachers to infuse current research into classroom activities, essay about pollution.
His previous and ongoing research focuses on the evolution of complex sexual communication systems, with a focus on how visual and acoustic signals evolve in response to selection from mate choice and essay about pollution in birds.
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How to Write an Essay about Pollution
, time: 0:53More Recycling Won't Solve Plastic Pollution - Scientific American Blog Network
Feb 11, · Pollution is a big problem to our health and the environment. Pollution is created by individuals, communities or industries that collect and dispose of pollutants improperly. Pollution can be classified into two sections, visible air pollution and invisible air pollution. Here are the causes and effects on pollution Pollution, addition of any substance or form of energy to the environment at a rate faster than it can be dispersed or stored in a harmless form. The major kinds of pollution are usually classified by environment and include air, water, and land pollution. Learn more about the history of pollution + Words Essay on Water Pollution. Water is the most important resource for survival on a planet. It is the essence of life on our planet – Earth. Yet if you ever see a river or lake around your city, it would be evident to you that we are facing a very serious problem of Water pollution. Let us educate ourselves about water and water
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