2020 Was A Crazy Year

Unless you have been living under a rock over the past 12 months or so, then you will understand what I mean by the title of this article; now I am not a very old person, in fact I am in what most people consider the prime of my life. However, I have never experienced as crazy of a year as I have in 2020. Most people were completely caught off guard when this whole COVID pandemic thing started, myself included. I was still in college at the time, and I can remember back to when I first started hearing about the virus back in early 2020. I first heard about it being an issue in China and that they were watching it slowly spread to other parts of the world. I definitely thought it was going to be another H1N1 or Ebola virus type issue, where people were way too hysteric about something that did not have a huge impact on most of the world. However, I watched as COVID slowly made its way to the United States (I think the first case was in Seattle?), and before I knew it, things were shutting down one after the other. I realized it was serious when the NCAA canceled March Madness for the year, and various Universities were shutting down left and right.

I was sent home in mid March from my University, where we were forced to finish the semester online. It was such a crazy end to the year, and honestly not what I wanted for 2020 at all. But all things considered, I had a pretty good summer in 2020. I worked for the company called Shipt, where I made really good money going grocery shopping for rich people that were too scared of the virus to be seen in a Meijer - I don’t really blame them, I just didn’t really have a choice to not work and try to make money. I also got to hangout with a lot of my old highschool friends again (socially distanced of course) which was nice because a lot of us probably would have been spread out around the midwest if it had not been for COVID. So all in all, my summer wasn’t really negatively impacted by the pandemic, but it definitely made my summer look a lot different than what I was planning. 

I spent a lot of time inside my house as well, playing video games and playing guitar. Those were basically my two main hobbies over the course of the COVID summer - those and reading. I spent a lot of time ordering products online as well. Since most stores were closed down for an extended period of time, it was hard to find some stuff in stores. Especially because people were panic-buying a lot of products, some things just could only be found online. Honestly, I really get annoyed with people that begin mass purchasing certain products, because this just creates problems for everyone else. We see it happen with gas all the time, especially a couple weeks ago. 

Anyways, since I spent so much time ordering stuff online, I began to amass a large amount of packing supplies in my garage. So I had to take several trips to the recycling center to get rid of cardboard boxes, packages, and packing supplies that had accumulated on my property. 

The Impact Paper and Plant Based Packaging Have on the World

We’ve talked plenty of times about the problems that bad packaging has, especially with the overly abundant usage of land, and the environmental effects that this has on the habitats. However, there are a lot of factors that do play a larger role, so it’s important to look at the overall state of things, to get a picture for where environmental sustainability plays a role in things. 

A lot of plant-based packaging might seem like a good alternative, especially when you’re comparing the plastic and other pollutant packaging. But keep in mind that there are some factors that you need to bear in mind when you’re looking to meet the demands people have on your packaging. 

The crops do need land to grow, and the land is definitely finite. A lot of times, people don’t realize how much crops need to grow to create hemp, corn, and bamboo, in order to meet those demands that the market has. 

There’s also demands that can be taken away from different industries that these same crops come from. If you rely on just plant-based options, it may create more problems than good.

A lot of agricultural practices like too many pesticides, fertilization and monoculture are a problem for the soil health. With the demand growing, there then needs to be more land given to each of these demands. 

The problem with industrial farms 

There’s a lot of new farmland that’s created through these natural habitats, and other forests that were once left untouched. The destruction of a habitat is the biggest threat to all animals, and the growth of the farmland isn’t helping all of this. The plants and animals do need some space to live, breed and then grow.   When the space becomes insufficient  and endangered, it results in a drastic plummet of the population, which can be irreversible in some cases. 

Even just the loss of some of the untouched soil creates a huge environmental impact. 

One example of this is corn. Corn is now used for bioplastics, rather than mere food, and increases this demand. With corn being grown exclusively in America, it’s something that we need a lot of land for. 

The prairies and grass plains help with this, but the problem is that the untouched soil gets rid of the carbon emission, and depending on your location, it stores different carbon amounts, removing a quarter of the fossil fuels that are there. 

With almost half of your land supporting that the soil loses a ton of carbon, and monoculture planting doesn’t really replace it. 

The same goes with bamboo and sugarcane.   What you need to do is make sure to monitor and ethically perform these. 

There’s a lot of monitoring that goes into this, something that not enough people know about. 

So what’s the solution? How do you fix this ongoing issue? 

Knowing the Source 

The best thing to do is to make sure that you’re aware of the environment. Talk with the suppliers, to make sure that the materials are coming from ethical locations. 

If it’s sourced from farmlands that border on endangered habitats, that’s a huge red flag. If the supplier won’t tell you where it’s coming from, definitely get a new supplier.   Definitely keep an eye out on things, and how it works across the board. 

Don't be afraid to frequent the water and energy audits to make sure that you’re using the energy well. 

Recycle as much as you can, because it eliminates a lot of this. Finally, renewable energies are easy to source.