No, You Can’t Blame Trump On This One

You have probably seen students from Stuyvesant’s Environmental Club telling you to put different components of your trash in the right bins in the cafeteria. You’ve probably ignored them, dumped everything into one bin, and walked away. Congratulations! Not only have you contributed to global warming and climate change, but a few hours later, you are probably going to write a Facebook post on how President Trump doesn’t believe in climate change and how Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is a joke. It’s time for you to become less of a hypocrite and lessen your negative impact on the environment.

To be fair, a lot of that is true—the EPA is supposed to protect human health and the environment by writing and enforcing regulations. It cannot possibly do this when Pruitt actively denies the existence of climate change and refuses to link carbon dioxide and global warming. The EPA should be regulating how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are being released into the atmosphere. They should be creating initiatives to try to mitigate the impact of climate change and reduce global warming. However, the EPA is clearly incapacitated by the current administration. The burden of protecting the environment and combating climate change now falls on us, the people.

The larger problem, though, is that people don’t think that they can do anything about climate change. They see it as a global or political issue, something that they can't impact as mere individuals; however, the uncomfortable truth is that people are not willing to change their lifestyles significantly in order to save the environment. Everyday people can’t enforce regulations like the EPA can, but they can definitely work to reduce global warming and make their own contributions in the fight against climate change.

As a school, Stuyvesant could be doing a number of things to lessen its environmental impact. Stuyvesant teachers, students, and administrators could reduce paper waste significantly. It all depends on whether they are willing to put in the extra effort to change how they do certain things.

Paper usage at Stuyvesant is alarming. Despite living with better access to technology, Stuyvesant continues to use excessive amounts of paper for things that can be accomplished online. The New York City Department of Sanitation currently has "Grade Pending" signs at the various recycling stations at Stuyvesant. These stations will be given a letter grade on Thursday, April 19. Clearly, there is a problem with Stuyvesant's recycling and trash disposal. Aside from horror stories of teachers printing class sets of a worksheet three different times to correct typos, there are other ways to reduce paper usage.

The most obvious path to less paper usage is to use online educational resources such as Google Classroom rather than physical handouts. Instead of printing a five-page English essay, submit it via Google Docs or Turnitin. You don’t lose the edits and comments you receive on paper copies because edits and comments can be given on these sites. Teachers should be using these educational resources to give comments and edits because there is no real benefit to using paper: it only satisfies a preference. If there is a reading that students need to do for a class, teachers can give it to students online beforehand or project it onto a SmartBoard during class. If you absolutely need to print something, it better be double-sided, even if you have to go through the effort of manually putting in paper through your printer to do so.

If using paper is absolutely necessary, then it should be recycled and reused. The computer science department uses blank sheets of incorrectly printed copies from the Copy Room and the Printing Station as scrap paper. This is an example of how paper can be reused in classrooms so less paper is wasted. This can be applied to other departments, such as math or chemistry. Teachers, instead of using new paper, can simply use these bad copies for quizzes. If paper cannot be reused, it belongs in the recycling bin, not the trash or the floor.

Reducing paper usage and recycling are just a few things Stuyvesant students can do to fight climate change and other environmental issues like deforestation. They just need to make sure that they change their lifestyles a little bit and put in extra effort to take action. When we have an administration that doesn’t recognize climate change as a major issue and an EPA that is unwilling to protect the environment and enforce regulations on greenhouse gases, it becomes even more important to take these extra steps in becoming a more eco-friendly school and reducing our negative impact on the environment.