AS Environmental Awareness Month comes to an end, I would like to share with the community some ideas on how we can help the environment.
One simple thing that you can do is changing regular light bulbs in your home to eco-friendly compact fluorescent light bulbs. This not only helps the environment, it also saves you money in the long run. Did you know that putting a brick into the tank of your toilet saves water? The brick also displaces water, but still leaves enough to flush your toilet. Another simple idea is to plant more trees, like what Beautify CNMI has been doing. Trees produce oxygen in our atmosphere and also prevent runoff from getting into the ocean and harming the fish and coral. Here in the Marianas, we throw all sorts of parties such as christenings, baby showers, birthdays, novena finakpos, and anniversaries. Many times people leave their trash on the ground. To reduce the amount of trash, we can bring our own utensils from home for small parties, make sure we tie our balloons tight so that they don’t end up in the ocean, and replace Styrofoam plates and cups to paper ones. For plastic forks and spoons, why not use chopsticks?
Did you know that in the Pacific Ocean there is a floating junkyard filled with all sorts of waste and trash, called the Pacific Garbage Patch? A lot of the trash left behind on the beaches ends up in the Pacific Garbage Patch because of the way the ocean’s currents flow. It is the size of Texas! The problem is that sea life would get tangled in trash like ropes, plastic rings, and nets. About 80 percent of debris in the Pacific Garbage Patch comes from land, much of which is plastic bags, bottles and various other consumer products. Free-floating fishing nets make up another 10 percent of all marine litter, or about 705,000 tons, according to U.N. estimates. The rest comes largely from recreational boaters, offshore oil rigs and large cargo ships, which drop about 10,000 steel containers into the sea each year full of things like hockey pads, computer monitors, resin pellets and LEGO octopuses. A majority of the trash is plastic. Even though they eventually break down, smaller organisms like sea turtles mistake them for jellyfish and choke on it. There are ways that we can prevent the Pacific Garbage Patch from increasing and that is by reducing, reusing, and recycling materials and products we use in our everyday lives.
ANGEL IGLECIAS
Sophomore
Northern Marianas Academy
