Additional Entry #1.
Collaborative Class Blog – Week 2 Response
Metacognitive Reflection
109 words
I included this blog post just for fun. Throughout the quarter, I’ve been mainly focused on the two environmental topics for the two major projects – the typhoons and the land reclamation. Both of them are environmental issues that have impacted my life. However, I can think of many more environmental problems that have a severe impact on my family, friends, and myself. Therefore, I wrote about the excessive use of plastic bags and wrappings in the blog post of Week 2. I hope this blog post could show my vision beyond the scope of environmental issues, as well as my sense to extract stories and arguments from daily life.
P.S. My response to the “Letter to Reader” task in Week 5 is also attached here. The letter was written based on this blog post.
Letter to Reader
Dear Reader,
This blog post is intended to address an environmental issue that I’m very familiar with – the excessive use of plastic bags and wrappings. Based on my personal experience, I talk about how plastic bags became an issue to the society and how the community I live in has put measures to contain the problem. I also talk about the effect of those restrictions. My real purpose is to make readers reflect on how we should responsibly use plastic bags and wrappings with the explosion of online shopping and food delivery services. I mentioned this issue in the last two paragraphs, along with the new trend observed in my home country. I hope that information would inspire readers to think more on this issue.
I chose this topic because it’s familiar to me and it’s a very important environmental issue recently. It’s something from my childhood memory, and I thought the problem had already solved by putting restriction on it. I would never expect this issue of excessive use of plastic bags and wrappings would come back in the era of online shopping. I include my personal opinion on the issue in the last paragraph, but that’s only an idea to inspire more constructive thoughts on this issue.
The blog comments by my peers are available to see on the blog. I’m glad to see that people resonate with my idea presented in the article – that’s also a point that I like the format of collaborative blog posts. We can share ideas collaboratively on a certain issue. A comment from my classmate Charlene also reminds me to consider this issue in the background of the ongoing pandemic. With the stay-at-home orders, people have to excessively use online shopping and food deliveries, which in turn largely increased the use of plastic bags and wrappings. It’s an serious issue, and I hope readers could come up with more thoughts on it.
Thanks,
Jerry Yan
The Blog Post
Starting from primary school, my teachers had told me that most plastics are non-degradable and they would bring extensive damage to the environment. It was terrible to see those pictures depicting that the plastic bags and garbages polluted and occupied the ocean and the animals had nowhere to go – they had to eat those plastics and die. I couldn’t imagine that the plastic bags we used daily could pile up to an entire mountain of plastic wastes, and I felt that should be a very wrong trend. I had always heard that the news in television saying “we will find no place to dispose those plastics in xx years and we’ll be surrounded by the plastic waste.” I was always freaked out by those news. When going out for shopping, I always told my parents to not use the one-time plastic bags provided by the supermarkets – but they always refused. In fact, there weren’t many alternatives to the plastic bags. We only had one cloth bag at the time and it was too small for any regular shopping. I remembered some of my classmates in a class activity had suggested carry a suitcase for shopping, while it sounded promising – it just looked too hilarious. No one would actually take a suitcase to the supermarket and fill it with groceries.
I felt lucky that China was one of the first countries in Asia to restrict the use of plastic bags. In 2008, a restriction was implemented nationwide that markets would not be allowed to provide plastic bags for free [1]. Alternatives started to show up after this policy: cloth bags, paper bags, paper boxes, etc. The news media started to cheer just two months later: although it had brought inconvenience to people, the use of plastic bags had decreased by 80% in my city Shenzhen [1]. My parents started to adapt this new way of shopping as well. They bought a dozen of environmental-friendly reusable cloth bags and we would bring them every time we visited the supermarket. It became a regular habit for my parents and me to bring some bags by ourselves before buying groceries.
However, this trend of not using plastic bags has been slowly reversed in recent years. China has been proud of itself in the fast development of online shopping, food delivery, and cash-less payments, but those developments also have brought the increased use of plastic bags and wrappings. Excessive wrappings (mostly plastic) are common in online shopping. Plastic bags are just necessary for food deliveries. And as companies promote cash-less payments, people start to bring nothing but a smartphone for shopping – so why would they even bother bring a reusable cloth bag? [1] All those developments pose new problems to the society: how can we control those exploding uses of plastic bags before it is too late?
The authorities has started to take some action in policy making this year. But as a citizen, I need to take some actions as well. I need to reduce or avoid the use of plastic bags and wrappings in my daily life. Inconvenience can never be the excuse for using plastic bags. I need to make specific goals, say, reduce the use of plastic bags by 10% every week. Some parts might be easy, like I still maintain the habit to bring my own reusable bags when I go for shopping. But there will be hard parts. Food deliveries rely on the use of plastic bags and containers, especially when there are liquids in the food. For me, I will probably try to get some takeout from the restaurants instead of using the food delivery service. I’ll also bring my own containers for food instead using the disposable ones. It is challenging to reduce the use of plastic bags and wrappings under those developments of new technology, but as responsible citizens, we can definitely take our own parts to reverse the trend again. Less plastics, and it will be much better for the environment we live on.
Reference:
1. A news article by oeeee.com. Chinese Version. English translation by Google.