Sea Turtle Threat

It's truly astonishing how much waste we have here in

the United States.

I spent three years of my life living in Italy,

where I had five different recycling containers within these recycling

containers. If I mismatched or did things erroneously, they could

ultimately find me for not recycling appropriate.

Or they would just leave it at my house for

me to figure out sort appropriately in order to get

into the appropriate recycling containers.

So it's truly astonishing to think about the amount of

waste that we produce here in United States and generally

a lot of times just the general in action that

we take as citizens in the United States.

That ultimate leads to more pollution or more plastic making

its way into the ocean, impacting our sea turtle population.

So with that, today, my goal is to go over

and talk about potential ways that we can reuse are

plastic pieces within our homes on dhe what I found

here in our house to ultimately come with a new

product and that is a hammock.

As I went to develop my own mind map, as

you can see here, identified the high offenders when it

comes to plastic waste within our household, from grocery bags

to pillboxes to grocery store fruit containers and food containers.

Um, to even the more coveted recently Duke over 19,

the dying out packages that come with, um, extra waste

items. Ultimate that you have to get rid of whether

it's paper composed, combust, compostable items or different things we

have to get rid of.

But ultimately, I decided that I was going to stick

with grocery bags because these are the things every time

I go to the grocery store, they asked, paper or

plastic. I feel you know that I don't want to

inconvenience them.

So I say plastic because it'll be quicker but ultimately

creates this issue in scenario where I have these grocery

bags that I don't know what to do with.

And so within this in our household we do a

number of things.

There's an in store recycling aspect that we can do

and take back to the store.

Um, sometimes the banks just aren't recyclable, and so then

we end up storing them and finding a new use

or reuse purpose.

And so some of these could be things like a

dog. You waste bag to go out instead of using

a new bag.

We're now reusing something that hopefully eliminate some of the

waste that gets entered into, um, the down streams of

pollution as well as, um, sometimes an additional waste fake

right. We're using it to go into a trash bag

to take out future trash, and these are all great.

But the issue is there not necessarily read reducing the

impact into the environment because they are being introduced at

some point back into the pollution zone or into a

trash area or other things.

And so then I thought about what can we do

with these?

Um, grocery bags that can eliminate the aspect of them

going into a recycling plant are going into a trash

way center and ultimately potentially making their way downstream.

And so I thought, What could these be used for?

And that's where I came into kind of three concepts

within my mind map, and that's a rug, a hammock

and swing.

And so in these alternative use for these new uses,

ultimately the one I settled with was a hammock, because

who doesn't like to relax the end of the day

in a hammock.

And if I can recycle toe lead to relaxing, that's

a win win in my book.

But ultimately, how do we take something as simple as

a grocery bag and turn it into a reusable hammock?

Well, why not map it out, make a sketch, right?

Yea, we get our groceries or excited, we get home,

we unload them into the fridge.

Then ultimately, what do we do with these?

We kind of went through this and I went.

And then I did some research and found out ways

that we can turn grocery bags in tow and link

them together into rope that ultimately braid them together to

turn them into hammock.

So here's kind of ah, brief step by step instruction,

right here they are, the bags laying on our doorstep

at the house.

We don't know what to do with them.

We take them, were able to open up the bags,

turn them into two giant owes essentially, and we compress

them together.

And then from there we do a simple not on

each of them, and we're gonna turn them into into

ropes. These ropes ultimately get linked together, and you could

make him a ZX, long as you would like or

however long you'd like to make your hammock because ultimately

we're going to braid these pieces together to turn them

into little bits of rope.

Now, this was a learning pure for me, right?

I'm not that familiar with braiding or other components.

I have a young daughter, but this became the first

education piece for me.

So I'd like to you know, my braiding was not

the finest piece of work, but it did stand up

to the test of time, and it will hold a

great amount of weight.

In fact, even somebody like myself, um who You know

that 6 ft, you know, roughly £200.

That's a good amount of weight and an impressive amount

of weight for just simple grocery bags to be able

to use.

And ultimately, what I came to figure out is that

with these grocery bags and developing them into a hammock,

we would save approximately 300 bags or 300 less bags

being reintroduced into the environment as we look to turn

them into something as beautiful as you see here as

this wonderful pink and red and, um, colorful hammock because

all this bright and all this work is going to

cause it to go into something else rather than reintroducing

it to a landfill downstream.

And so why not?

Why not take this extra step?

Why not reduce the impact the environment?

Why not help these sea turtles live a little longer,

or at least not seek medical attention that they need

every year?

So that's what I asked for you is as you

go and explore your own ways to see how you

can reduce and reuse the plastics with your home is

why not do a simple braid?

Why not do us a little bit of simple research

in order to make the environment a better place?

Thank you all for listening today, and hopefully you can

relax someday on your reusable hammock.

Sea Turtle Threat

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