We Are Trash

Lily Nguyen

English 101

Professor Garrett

12/3/14

Community Engagement and Art Project: We Are Trash

            For my art project, I made a person out of trash that I had found during the Heal the Bay clean up at Dockweiler Beach. I used a paper plate as the face, and broke a CD to serve as a broken mirror. This represents how everyone is responsible for trash; some people might produce less trash, but they still produce it. I found a bunch of tangled hairnets, and I put that on top with little bits of trash stuck inside. The body is a plastic 7-11 Big Gulp cup filled with assorted pieces of trash. The Big Gulp cup shows how something as small as a candy wrapper can still have a “big” effect. The arms are a piece of yellow caution tape because we need to be careful and choose the right thing, since our hands are responsible for letting go of the trash. Every piece of my art represents how humans impact the environment with trash.

My art project is a person made out of trash, because humans are the only ones to blame for waste. Based on a report from Duke University, the average human produces 4.3 pounds of waste per day. If you multiply that by 365, it comes out to be 1569.5 pounds of waste produced per person in a year. That number only accounts for one person out of 7 billion. Once it all adds up, humans generate a great deal of trash and my question is: Where does it all go?

Most of the trash is found in places like Dockweiler Beach, the area I went to with Heal the Bay. I found a variety of litter on the hillside beside the beach, ranging from plastic bags to cigarette butts. The volunteers found a total of 549 plastic pieces, not including plastic bottles, wrappers, or bags. The worst part is that plastic does not decompose since it is synthetic, so it will be there until someone or something picks it up. As I was picking up trash, I noticed the amount of animals, especially birds, that took a piece of trash and left. Unfortunately, animals are most likely to eat the piece of plastic that they picked up since they mistook it for food. People on Midway Island often find dead birds on the beach with stomachs full of plastic. This proves that even the smallest piece of plastic can prove to be fatal to the island’s wildlife.

However, we hurt more than just the environment when we litter. When animals die, it can disturb the ecosystem in the area. When the ecosystem is disturbed, humans lose the resources that they can gain from that area. This could be a crippling problem if the ecosystem was not very biologically diverse. Biological diversity (biodiversity) is the amount of species in an ecosystem that work together to help create natural resources (NWF 2010). For example, the biodiversity of the Amazon forest is greater than that of a desert since there are more plant species there. Additionally, areas with less biodiversity are more susceptible to being destroyed through extinction, because it eliminates a major part of the ecosystem. In places like Dockweiler Beach, the death of seagulls could potentially threaten the entire ecosystem. A study done in Surtsey, Iceland showed that seagulls increased the nitrogen in the soil and therefore, increased the amount of vegetation produced (Sigurdsson 2010). Thus, if waste production rises, seagulls could potentially become endangered, lowering the amount of vegetation in beaches. This shows how even the smallest amount of trash has the potential to destroy complex ecosystems.

Littering has endangered many species and will continue disturbing the biodiversity of ecosystems. If the littering continues at such a rate, seagulls could become endangered, which could potentially destroy the coastal ecosystem. However, this is only an example of the coastal environment. This will eventually come back to us. We are the one’s who originally dropped the bubble gum wrapper and we will be the ones that have to face the consequences of it. By hurting the environment, we are also hurting ourselves. So next time you are about to drop that tiny piece of plastic, thinking that it has no effect, think twice.