Where I have been

Man it has been a long time since I last wrote. I was on vacation in China for quite a while. Oh and also I finally graduated from high school. I want to discuss what plans I have for eco-share when I go to northwestern and also write a more traditional blog.

So one of the things that I noticed when going to china is that there are quite a few environmental friendly practices that I found quite interesting. In china, a lot more of the disposable items were labeled as “compostable” and were not made of plastic. I get that bamboo is more easily accessible in china but people are making a conscious choice to replace many of their plastic disposables with decomposable materials. Despite China being a much larger country, it only produces half of the plastic waste that the United States does in recent years.

There’s also quite a lot more greenery in the cities compared to some of the cities in the United States. Like I see trees everywhere, even in garages there’s patches of trees just lying there. This could entirely be a byproduct of city planners wanting to make everything look better, but its definitely a huge help to have large patches of greenery in cities. If you didn’t know, having a lack of greenery in certain city spaces creates what are called heat islands. Basically, the heat gets absorbed by materials like concrete or roads and gets held for an extremely long time. This combined with the heightened amount of emissions from cities traps heat and makes cities a lot hotter than surrounding areas. Adding green spaces makes it so that a lot of this heat and emissions gets dissipated and absorbed by the greenery.

I’m not saying China is an environmentally friendly country, probably far from it. But the united states is comparatively way worse. Now what’s the point of this? The point is that we ourselves have to make that difference, as I take that the majority of whoever is reading this is American. So the point is to make our lifestyles more eco-friendly, even the little things count.                        

I will likely be quite busy when I am at my university, but I will try to host events there if I can. I applied for a special housing called the “green house” which is focused around sustainability. Maybe I can find more like minded people there and figure something out with them. I’m sure there is a lot of good things in store for me at northwestern.