As editor of Maggie Joyce, a 10th grader in Brookline, Mass., wants people to use less polystyrene. Because her dad, Brian Joyce, happens to be a state senator in Massachusetts, Maggie Joyce got a chance to speak out on the topic in the state legislature yesterday, and to be featured in this story from the Quincy, Mass., Patriot Ledger.
The headline, "Senator’s daughter targeting Styrofoam," is what really caught my eye. According to the story, Maggie Joyce asked her father to propose a bill that would give towns across Massachusetts the option to ban polystyrene foam products.
Maggie, a tenth-grader at the Dexter School in Brookline, had been studying recycling with her class and became concerned after learning that polystyrene foam - known mainly by the trademarked Styrofoam - is made with petroleum.‘‘This isn't so much about banning Styrofoam in the Commonwealth as it is about educating consumers about the detrimental impact of polystyrene on the environment, and asking individuals and corporations to seek alternative options,’’ Brian Joyce said.
Does this remind you of the late 1980s, when kids protesting and picketing McDonald's restaurants eventually convinced the company to drop the PS foam clamshell, even though the recplacement package was environmentally inferior?
Comments (1)
I want people to use less polystyrene, too, and less paper and less glass and less wood and less clothing and less gasoline and less food and less of everything else. In short, we use too much of everything. We are addicted to stuff. What I don't want is for people to put the blame on the production sector, and thus weasel out of their own responsibilities for self-restraint. I'm living out in California now, in a hotbed of antiplasticism (yes, it's like a religion for many people) and often run into this mindset.
I was just shown a 20-min cartoon, cheaply and simply made, called "The Story of Stuff," showing a "linear" sequence of resource consumption to factories to retail to consumption to trash. Make it circular, close the loop, it says. It is loaded with statistical inaccuracies but it preaches to the converted, and fans the antiplastic and anticorporate anxieties in the people angry with so much around them (gasoline prices, war, health care expenses, drops in home values).
Why can't we make a cartoon called "The Glory of Stuff," showing how AND why people get addicted to stuff, and how (if possible) to break that addiction and thus really help the environment? You know my mantra by now: plant and tend a garden, get a workshop and fix old things, and get involved with other people (family, friends) in non-competitive ways.
Regards
Allan
Posted by Allan Griff | September 25, 2007 12:38 AM
Posted on September 25, 2007 00:38