Molly Paine

            This week’s eco-challenge was a little more challenging for me than last week. In the first week of the challenge I chose to take on eating less animal products. This wasn’t extremely hard as I am a vegetarian and already don’t eat a ton of eggs or dairy products. I also chose to purchase mostly organic foods which was also something that I am pretty good about doing in my regular life, so this wasn’t a huge change. Last week I focused on using a reusable water bottle and limiting my use of plastic bags when at the grocery store or shopping. This wasn’t a huge challenge besides the simple fact of remembering to bring along my water bottle or reusable bags. This week I focused more on reducing my driving time. I don’t drive a ton at school because everywhere that I want to go regularly is within a couple minutes from my house on 7th street. I remember filling up my gas tank when I arrived in Lewisburg at the beginning of the semester and I don’t think I have even used half a tank since then which really shows just how little I drive. I do drive somewhere almost every day but since it is such a short distance it doesn’t feel like a lot. This week I really wanted to try and not drive even more and was committed to not going to buy coffee and walking to every class that I had. Unfortunately, I am an extremely clumsy person and slipped while walking down the stairs on Tuesday afternoon and injured my back, so this has made it pretty painful to walk most of the week. Because of this I was forced to drive a bit more than I wanted to, but still I was able to cut back on my driving time compared to what I normally would drive in a typical week at school. I am nervous about keeping up with this challenge week to week because of the change in weather that I am sure we are about to experience. Lewisburg gets so cold and snowy and it is always an adjustment for me to get used to. I know that once things get colder, I will want to drive to my class in academic west rather than make the 15-minute walk. In order to stay committed to reducing my driving time I think it would be beneficial to try and carpool as much as I can especially when the weather turns colder. There is almost always someone who I live with (we are a large group of 10) who is driving up to campus or going to get groceries at some point in the day, so it isn’t that hard to get a ride somewhere rather than driving yourself. Hopefully I can keep this up and walk as much as possible once my back is feeling better. 

            I read one of the articles under the resources for the drive less daily challenge because it was about Mansfield, OH which is a town that I have driven through on my way from my home in Cleveland, OH to Columbus, OH. The article was about walkability and how there is a bike trail in Mansfield, that seems very similar to the rail trail in Lewisburg, and how the town has used public art murals to try and encourage more walking around town. I have never driven through the actual town of Mansfield because I usually just pass signs for it on the highway, but reading the article reminded me a lot of some of the parts of Cleveland that have implemented a similar strategy. The article mentioned how if one broken window in an abandoned building goes unfixed and another window gets broken, that it just invites more and more damage and the problem gets progressively worse. This continues around town until it appears to be the accepted norm. This is absolutely something I have witnessed in Cleveland, but I have also witnessed the cleanup of Cleveland and have seen how much it has turned around in the 19 years that I have lived there. Murals and public works of art have been a huge part of that, so it was really interesting to read this article about Mansfield and compare it to the progress that I have seen growing up in an area with a similar problem. 

            This week, in addition to my daily challenges from the first week of eating less animal products and eating more organic meals, I choose to reduce my plastic water bottle usage and plastic bag usage. I think that adding these two daily challenges was a good fit because it was something that I have been mindful of for some time now and I wanted to really commit to. For most of college I tried really hard to use reusable water bottles, but I can be a very forgetful person and I tend to lose them and then end up ordering another one off of amazon which is a waste of money and also not very good for the environment. To remedy this, I started buying a plastic water bottle at the Bison or somewhere else on campus and carrying it around with me and refilling it at water stations until I lost it. I would then just go to the bison and buy another.  This year, I decided to really commit to using and keeping a water bottle. I bought a large water bottle that I really like and have successfully kept it with me all semester and I am really enjoying having it around because it forces me to drink more water throughout the day. I feel better and I am doing something that is better for the environment, so it is a win-win situation. In addition to this, I have tried to cut down on plastic bag usage. The main place I find myself using plastic bags is at the grocery store. I only go to the store to buy groceries about once every 10 days and I often forget to bring reusable bag’s because I haven’t gotten into the habit of it yet. I did bring some this week and was able to fit most of my groceries in them. Also, throughout the week anytime I ordered food I tried to ask for them not to put it in a plastic bag or paper bag. This was something I definitely had to be proactive about because it is something I typically find myself forgetting to do. It is such an easy thing to bring your own bags to the grocery and it is definitely something I would like to continue doing in the future of the eco-challenge and afterwards.

            This week’s two additional challenges were difficult for me not necessarily in the actual act of doing them, but more so remembering and committing to do them. Last week’s two daily challenges were about my eating habits and there were definitely times where I wanted to eat meat or just have a takeout meal without thinking about it at all. But this week, making these changes is of no annoyance and really isn’t difficult, it’s just about remembering to do so for me. I think that I could absolutely make these changes permanent and want to try to make this change in my life.  

            For this week’s resources the one that I found most interesting was my water footprint. This resource was a part of the daily challenge to reduce plastic waste. I did the quiz based off of my currently living situation which is in a house in downtown Lewisburg with 3 roommates. I found that I use roughly 1,468 gallons per day and my household uses 5,871 gallons per day. The US average per person is 1,802 gallons per day so I was very happy to see that I was under the average for water usage, but I definitely want to work on this in the coming weeks by incorporating shorter showers and being super careful about turning the water off when I brush my teeth. I also want to encourage my roommates to do the same as I think that collective action from all 4 of us could really bring down our household number for water usage. Overall, I think this week’s Ecochallenge went great and I am looking forward to incorporating more daily and one-time challenges next week. 

Molly Paine

Journal #4

 

            I started off the first week of the eco-challenge trying to build on something that I have already implemented during my senior year of college. I decided to go vegetarian this year because of my access to a kitchen and the fact that I live off campus and am not required to purchase a meal plan. Therefore, I am able to purchase my food at the grocery store and cook for myself for every meal. I decided to do this because I didn’t eat that much meat in past years at Bucknell, and I have always been aware of the environmental impact that the meat industry has on the planet. For the eco-challenge, I chose two daily challenges which were to eat less animal products and to eat more organic foods. Since I was already not eating meat, it was easy to incorporate this into my daily routine, but I really tried to also cut back on other animal products such as dairy and eggs. This was a little harder than just cutting out meat because I do eat a lot of cheese with the various meals during the day. I didn’t find it as difficult to cut out eggs, but I am aware that some of the things I ate that were preprepared such as muffins or other baked goods probably had eggs in them. But I was able to accomplish that challenge almost every day. I also did my best to only purchase organic ingredients at the grocery store when I went on Tuesday of last week. This wasn’t that difficult for me because it is something I would do normally, but I find it more difficult when I am eating out or eating a dinner that one of my roommates has prepared. 

            One of the resources that I looked at was the at-a-glance brochure that was a part of the eat less animal products challenge. I started the year as a vegetarian because I was slightly aware of the environmental impacts, but this class and this reading in particular has made me extremely cognizant of the actual impact that cutting back on meat and other animal products can have. The graphic they included that showed what cutting out just one hamburger a week for a year can have when thinking about miles driven in a car is extremely helpful and really put things into perspective. I think that knowing things like this are going to motivate me to keep going with my vegetarianism throughout the rest of the school year, at least when I am actually at school. It is definitely more difficult when I am home and the rest of my family is eating meat. I don’t think I am completely at the point where I can cut out all animal products from my life mainly because I think I would need to ease into it instead of cutting everything out at once. I am concerned about getting some of the vital nutrients like iron that I need, but I have been using some of my free time this week to look into other ways to get iron and other vitamins that I would normally get from meat. I think doing more research like this as well as learning more recipes and substitutes to meat will make it easier and easier to be meat free and maybe one day, I will also cut out other animal products, but in a gradual and healthy way.

            My other daily challenge was to buy only organic ingredients. I found that this was very easy for me and I think it is definitely something that I could implement into my life permanently. I typically reach for the organic products anyways, but the real change that it would be making would be in my life outside the grocery store. Choosing not only organic ingredients when I am the one cooking, but also when I am out at a restaurant to eat will be much more difficult and will require some more thought and research on my part. But I am definitely willing to give it a try and will especially keep practicing it as much as I can through the rest of this challenge.