My First Blog Post

If you think you are too small to make a difference, you have never shared a sleeping bag with a mosquito.

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As I delve into the genius of Missouri River Relief, I am impressed by the dedication of staff and crew to the mission of connecting our community the Missouri River; building the capacity of this community to appreciate this precious cultural and natural resource and act on its behalf. As an AmeriCorps member, I am here to help with this capacity building, specifically for low-income youth. A measure of our collective wealth includes our connection with nature. Connection with nature positively impacts environmentally friendly behavior, like picking up garbage and advocating for zero waste. One of the 8 millennium goals to ending poverty globally includes ensuring environmental sustainability. How are we ensuring that garbage never reaches the Missouri River? What are we doing locally, in our sub watersheds, to stop the steady stream of plastic bottles and plastic bags and single use plastic packaging? Capacity building empowers a community to organize and advocate for ending poverty or increasing wealth, in this case the strength of environmental sustainability in the area. I did a little digging (usually it’s digging tires out of mud) and found these landfill statistics for our city. Have we reduced our garbage impact in the last 8 years?

Tonnage reported and fees paid by the Columbia Sanitary Landfill:

2018 – landfilled 226,034 tons of garbage – cost of $467,393 thousand dollars

2017 – landfilled 212,374 tons of garbage- cost $439,145 thousand dollars

2011 – landfilled 162,445 tons of garbage- cost $335,901 thousand dollars

Click to access cy2018-slf-1st-4thquarter.pdf

Population of Columbia

 123,180 people (2018)

121,717 people (2017)

111,355 people (2011)

Sources include: United States Census Bureau

I divided the total annual tonnage by the population to find out how many tons of garbage each person is sending to the landfill each year:

2018- 1.83 tons of garbage landfilled per person

2017- 1.74 tons of garbage landfilled per person

2011- 1.45 tons of garbage landfilled per person

Unfortunately, we have increased our per capita garbage output. The Columbia Sanitary Landfill is landfilling far more garbage, not less. Landfilling garbage is super expensive too! About $2,000 per ton!  If more garbage is going to the landfill then more is probably getting into our river as well.

Some other sobering statistics about plastic harm:

• Recent studies have revealed marine plastic pollution in 100% of marine turtles, 59% of whales, 36% of seals and 40% of seabird species examined. (Surfers against sewage)
• 100,000 marine mammals and turtles and 1 million sea birds are killed by marine plastic pollution annually. (surfers against sewage)
• Humans have created 6.3 billion metric tons of plastic waste since we began mass-producing cheap plastics in the 1950s and ’60s, and only 9 percent of that has ever been recycled, according to a study published in Science Advances (downloaded March, 2019)
• At the global level, best estimates suggest that approximately 80 percent of ocean plastics come from land-based sources, and the remaining 20 percent from marine sources. (Plastic pollution-our world in data)
• Tips for reducing plastic use can be found here: One world ocean

Wow, so picking up garbage is definitely relevant to our moment in time, our impact on our earth, right now. I try hard not to judge the garbage or how the garbage got there; where the responsibility lies (corporations, individuals, wind, floods), but I really dislike Styrofoam. When I helped Living Land and Waters down in Memphis last March of 2019, there was so much Styrofoam in the backwaters of the Mississippi it looked like snow. It was horrifying.

In some ways what we do is absurd- picking up garbage with no end in sight, no plan to reduce the garbage output, the infinite plastic river. But something compels us to continue acting, to hope something might change. It takes gritty people to be the change. As consumers some of us have the power to make different choices about what we buy. We also have the power to advocate for change. But we need to spread awareness about the problem, to curb the plastic tide; reduce the tonnage by reducing our plastic use, recycling no matter what, reusing everything possible and donating usable items to local thrift shops.

So back to relevancy in light of capacity building with Missouri River Relief. Education and stewardship are like salt and pepper. They stand side by side, adding zip to every culinary experience. Here are a couple of my supporting dreams for this organization. I would love to bring more education about plastic consumption (and alternatives to plastic) to our river clean ups.  I would also love to bring more opportunities for stewardship activities and watershed awareness to the education programs for youth in our community centers, after school programs and schools.  This would be place-based sub-watershed enlightenment and knowledge about our bathtub blues; all the garbage in our neighborhoods drains to the Missouri River and negatively impacts the resources that we need to survive.

We cannot seem to stop the pollution madness. And I want to offer hope to myself and others. So that’s why I’m here: to hopefully empower citizens to act on their own behalf in order to ensure environmental sustainability, and to rid the world of nasty plastic bits… one bit at a time.