Big Red Goes Green

What’s the first thing you do in the morning? You turn off your alarm—usually a distinctive sound that’s the only Apple ringtone loud enough to wake you up. Class starts in twenty minutes, so you climb over the piles of clothing that has accumulated on the floor and head for the bathroom. You use the restroom, wash your hands, then grab two or three (or even four) paper towels. When you toss them into the trash, two of the towels are still dry.13 billion pounds of paper towels are used every year, according to Oregon activist Joe Smith. He introduced the Shake and Fold method, which showed that it’s possible to reduce your use of paper towels to dry your hands. It’s simple: all you need to do is quickly shake your hands a couple times and then fold the paper towel in half. By using up only one towel, you can drastically reduce your overall paper towel usage.  At first, this may seem superficial. How does folding the towel in half make such a huge difference? Smith tells us in his speech that the process of “interstitial suspension” can be credited. When the water is stored between the folds of the paper towel, it allows the towel to absorb more water on the outside.  However, why should you waste your time shaking your hands when you could just grab three more paper towels? Well, what you may think are just a few extra towels is actually a worldwide issue: Smith says in his TedTalk that if every person reduced their paper towel consumption to 1 per day, we would save 571,230,000 pounds of paper.Plastics at Grill are another example of campus waste that you may not notice. Without a reusable water bottle, you find yourself spending 50 cents for a small plastic cup. That cup can have big consequences, though. Within the US, 50 billion water bottles are used each year, but, only 23% are recycled. The remaining 38 billion water bottles, around $1 billion in waste, end up in landfills and are sources of pollution.After Climate Action Day, we are left to our own thoughts and habits. Climate Action Day is a single event, but its impacts are determined based on what we as a community decide to do after. Most Exonians are not focused on being environmentally conscious due to a lack of time—we are aware, but our habits are usually muddled with school work and extracurriculars. Why put in the extra effort to shake your hands before drying them? Why waste time washing a reusable bottle when you can just buy a plastic one? Why use the same, wrinkled piece paper when you can easily grab a new one? Productivity is important to Exonians, but these small acts are both manageable and impactful. Independently, a large-scale environmental program would be difficult to attain, however, these smaller contributions will accumulate over time and benefit us all.