If you are just on this site because of the money you can make by scrapping, you might want to skip to the next message.
For those who care about the environment in addition to our own pocket books, I'd like to throw something out there for all beverage drinkers to consider. I'm talking about TYPES of beverage containers. I would like to have you consider using aluminum cans first, then glass bottles and finally plastic bottles as a last resort. In addition, I am requesting that when possible you avoid using plastic straws. More on the straws later.
Aluminum, of course, is easily recycled and many of us have make decent to good money by doing so for ourselves and countless strangers. Glass, while recyclable in certain areas, can pose a hazard when it breaks. I don't have any data to prove this, but I'd imagine that glass beer bottles are more likely to break than glass Coke bottles as an underage drunk person doesn't care too much about the environment- they just want to get rid of the evidence. Either way, broken glass can be difficult to see, especially in the dark or in grass. I'm sure that many of us have cut ourselves on broken glass, yet we continue to drink from glass containers. Please, if you can, wean yourself off of glass containers and substitute aluminum.
The worst is plastic. Go to Youtube and type words like "plastic in oceans" or "Great Pacific Garbage Patch". I absolutely LOVE to eat seafood. Yet the huge quantities of plastic going into the oceans are broken down by sunlight into micro-particles and ingested by marine life. They mistake the plastic for food and don't have the ability to pass this stuff through their systems. Many die each year as a result.
For those who aren't too squeamish and can stand the site of blood, I invite you to watch a Youtube video titled "Sea Turtle with Straw up its Nostril- "NO" TO PLASTIC STRAWS." The video is by Sea Turtle Biologist, is 8:07 long, and has a whopping 32+ million views. If someone knows how to post the link here, thanks in advance for doing so.
I wonder how much plastic is inside some of the seafood that I eat. What happens to humans that consume quantities of plastic in their food for many years? I don't know and I'd rather not be concerned about it.
Athletic footwear company Adidas is partnering with a company called Parley to make shoes from recycled ocean plastic. Starbucks is changing the types of straws that they use. People are finally (slowly) getting on board with the change that needs to occur.
I hate to be preachy, but I remember being in Hong Kong many years ago and seeing what they called "junk boats". People would openly take cans of trash onto a junk boat and dispose of it in the local harbor. It was amazing that you could just see it in the open. There was NO WAY that I would ever swim in that filth!
I'm not expecting anyone to become some kind of radical activist, but if you can think of some small gesture you can make in your life to try and do something about the environmental situation, that would be appreciated. One of my little gestures is this post. Another is refusing straws (when I can) when people give them to me and educating them about the issues with plastic straws. My goal with this post is that maybe a few people will think a bit differently about the habits they've had for years and make some change for the good.
Even those of us who do scrapping just for money are inadvertently helping the environment. For those who would like to take it to another level, please consider the words in this post.
I hope this doesn't come across like I'm some kind of environmental freak- rather a polite request to reconsider some bad and easily changed habits. Does anyone else have anything to add?
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