Sustainability Blog

Throughout our lifetimes, one problem will remain the destruction of our environment. Many may not realize it is not, but in the next 20 to 30 years, environmental concerns will triumph over many of the future concerns. We are destroying our environment, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t prevent it. By swapping to alternatives (which I have done) such as reusing plastic bags or buying a metal water bottle, we decrease our outputs onto the environment, showing great change and improvement in our society. Over the last 30 days and more than that, I have learned and experienced a lot! I have learned how to effectively communicate my point, inspired people for change, and even managed to spread awareness throughout my school! However, the point of my whole campaign is that you, the readers, are the start of change and that you need to take action. Sure, maybe one person can take action, but that won’t change that much. However, if we get hundreds or even thousands of people to take action, we can really cause change. Before I start talking about what you guys should change, let’s focus on what I changed. Throughout this month (and after), I was able to change a lot, which in my eyes had an impact. First, whenever I had some loose paper, instead of just throwing it away, I added it to a binder of paper. This binder now has hundreds of almost perfectly good papers, which I would’ve just thrown away. Now I saved hundreds of papers, but if another 100 people saved 100 more pieces of paper, we would save 10,000 sheets of paper! Are you guys starting to see the effect of my project? Next, throughout February, I was doing a debate on whether SUPS (single-use plastics) should be banned or not. This at first didn’t seem significant, but then I realized their true negative impact. Single-use plastics destroy marine environments by decreasing biodiversity, but that isn’t all of it. By doing some research, single-use plastics destroy algae. Algae make up around 40% of the air that we breathe in! This enlightened me about my next source of change, plastic. We use plastic almost everywhere, which is in itself its problem, but my idea was to reuse plastic. By doing a deep dive into plastic, the majority of plastic that we use is reusable to some extent. Plastic bottles and bags don’t decompose or turn nasty after one use, let alone 100 uses. We can wash these bags too if it becomes necessary, but we can start by saving plastic bags and bottles. Many people use plastic bottles to carry water to school or use plastic bags to carry lunch to school. Although this is fine, we are ruining the environment by excessively using plastic. We can use alternatives such as using metal bottles for water or buying a more permanent form of a lunch box, such as a fabric one. In a school year, there is a 180 days. In those days, we would use 180 plastic bags and plastic water bottles. By buying alternatives, we would save that significant amount. Now imagine if the hundred people who stopped wasting paper also started using alternatives. We would be saving 18,000 plastic bags and 18,000 plastic water bottles in the span of one school year. Are you guys starting to see my point of sustainability? Sure it matters that every single person who changes to using alternatives is better for the environment, but do you now see the impact of working together.? We exponentialize the amount of things that we are saving because this truly is the essence of sustainability. It isn’t a one-man thing, rather we need to work together as a team in a sense to start advocating for change. This leads me to my sustainability project: The Green Horizon Initiative. We advocate for daily change and improving the environment as a group because as previously stated throughout this blog, when we work together we are better. The project is a sustainability advocacy project because the more people that we show change and improvement, the larger our sustainability impact will be. In addition to Sustainability, I also started working on cleaning up the roads through the project Adopt a Road, where we go to a road an clean it up because there is nobody else that is willing to do it. Although it may not seem like much, every little thing makes a difference and by doing my part, I can ensure that eventual green growth in Atlanta Georgia. We have transformed many people as they now start to use alternatives and save on something to help save the environment. In the short time that I have had to begin this great program, I was able to heavily spread awareness throughout my school, but now I realize that it wasn’t the best way to continue this passion. I started by just telling people to do this and Stuart for change, but now that this program is nearing its end, I have decided to make this one of my larger passion projects. To advocate for a larger group of people. The Green Horizon Initiative will now be on Instagram to advocate for a larger population and I am also considering opening a club inside my school. Though this program may be ending, it has inspired me to continue on my own parth of helping spread sustainability, which I believe was a secret goal of this program. What started as a little project for volunteer hours, led to an explosion and the growth of something completely new. If you guys would like to keep updated with the growth of this, check out the Instagram @greenhorizoninitiative to stay updated with how my passion project grows. Thank you so much to Ms. Smrutha and Coach Jo for allowing me to begin this project, which has bloomed into something far greater than anything I could have ever imagined.

By: Pranish Mandava