According to a report by the world economic forum on plastics, “The ocean is expected to contain 1 tonne of plastic for every 3 tonnes of fish by 2025, and by 2050, more plastics than fish (by weight)” ( ). This is just one of the appalling yet interesting things I learned during NEW Core’s environmental/ecology unit. While participating in this unit I broadened and refined my knowledge of how, as humans, we are affecting the world around us by reading The Sixth Extinction, learned about the major issue of municipal waste management, and applied newfound technological skills to my work.
Reading The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert spurred my interest and exploration of environmental issues and their causes. This novel introduced me to some of the overarching themes of humans impact on Earth’s biodiversity. For example, when reading about how global warming has an impact on biodiversity in jungles I took the following sketchnotes:
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| My sketchnotes for a chapter of the novel |
I not only showed my comprehension of the chapter in sketchnotes, but showed the desire to learn more about the topic by trying to apply differential geometry to find the rate of habitat change experienced by tropical organisms due to global warming. This level of attention to detail was constant in sketchnotes for the book. This compelled me to investigate advanced mathematics’ ties to ecology. By understanding and connecting the small scale examples provided in this novel, I gained invaluable knowledge that led to an interest in the effect of plastic on the environment.
I expanded my knowledge about the failures and consequences that come with the way we recycle and prototyped a viable solution to this problem. I had always known that recycling is important and that it does not always happen, but the full extent of this issue was not revealed to me until I was asked to research and prototype a solution to an environmental issue. Threw my research I investigated the cause and effect of improper waste management. For example, when researching the amount of plastic that gets recycled, I found this alarming graph:
This particular piece of evidence was included in both my research paper, and presentation, and exhibits the problem excellently: people are not recycling what they need to. As I learned, this causes myriad problems for the environment and its inhabitants. This compelled my group to design a trash can that tells the user what bin the piece of waste belongs in. It integrated an internal electronics system. This project needs the support of a tech firm called scio to become a reality because our prototype needs the functionality of their affordable molecular scanner ($250) This solution showed a deep understanding of the problem that came from extensive research and the application of JAVA coding.
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| The prototype for "The Better Bin" minus the Molecular |
While exploring human impacts on the environment I was simultaneously developing my coding, mathematical skills, and getting the opportunity to apply them to real life problems. I have loved coding ever since I was introduced last year, but I never had actually related the coding to anything less trivial than website design for the sole purpose of website design. As the better recycling can became a project I had to start thinking of ways to incorporate electronics into the model to make it functional. Here is an excerpt of the code I wrote to develop my groups model.
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| A couple lines of code from the arduino in the prototype |
After a recommendation from a friend, I looked into the arduino as a way to start prototyping the electronics. While searching around the internet I started to realize how much coding is involved in the creation of a prototype. So, while creating our recycling can, I started to use a borrowed arduino and JAVA to code for the prototype as you can see in this short snippet of code that is actually running in the Arduino right as this is being read. This widened my view of coding and how it can be applied to real life constructions. This process also has shown me how complicated yet simplistic coding for prototyping is.
AddItionally, I am watching a series of UCI mathematical biology lectures:
A teach back made using my newfound skills and sharing my mathematical and technological skills with others.
This environmental unit has allowed me to grow my knowledge about the Earth, the issues it faces, and how mathematical sciences can be applied to these problems. This unit was vital to study in our current political climate and showed me the issues that both the Earth and all its inhabitants will face if humans don't change their ways. This realization prompted me to prototype a feasible solution to a large environmental problem, and improve my own recycling habits. Now that I now the true extent of the problem and its effects, I applied my technological and mathematical experience to educate my peers on how to leverage sheets as a possible data representation platform. This has led me to believe that to improve our environment, humans need to educate the young about the issues that they will face and cause if they do not change human practices for the best. If the already powerful do not want to recognize the impacts, then the best thing to do is to influence and educate the people that will eventually hold power. With this being said, by studying this unit, my peers and I have become fully aware of the problems that we will face, and this is, in my opinion, the most lasting chunk of information we will ever learn.
Works Cited
As You Sow. Unfinished Business: The Case for Extended Producer Responsibility. Asyousow.org/. As You Sow, 2012. Web. 16 Mar. 2017.
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