No More Styrofoam
Essay by Tiffany Miller • December 13, 2017 • Research Paper • 423 Words (2 Pages) • 916 Views
No more styrofoam!
By Tiffany Miller
Harlem middle school shouldn't use Styrofoam lunch trays. I bet you are thinking why shouldn't we use Styrofoam? Well, there is a lot of things that make styrofoam bad for you. These things include the chemicals found in Styrofoam and Styrofoam is bad for the environment and you.
Styrofoam contains the chemical styrene, which has been linked to cancer, vision and hearing loss, impaired memory and concentration, and nervous system effects the list goes on. What happens when you eat hot foods or drink liquids from styrofoam plates and cups is the styrene leaches out of the Styrofoam and into our bodies. With these chemicals in the trays, the trays are highly poisonous. Since we use plastic sporks when we scrape the trays to pick up our food we have a high chance of picking up the Styrofoam and eating it.
The lunch trays are also not recyclable or biodegradable, so when you throw them out they will sit in the garbage, unable to decompose or be turned into anything else. Styrofoam can easily break into small bits. Small land and aquatic animals might eat these pieces and die due to toxins and blockage of their stomachs leading to starvation. So by using them we are harming the environment and causing more deaths of animals.
Now people might say that schools don't have to budget to buy anything else but by buying plastic lunch trays you don't have to buy more. The average price for 1,200 styrofoam lunch trays is 75 dollars and that's for one day. The price for one year is $19,425. The price for one plastic lunch tray is $1.65 dollars. The price for 1,200 basic plastic lunch trays is $1,980. The price for one year is still $1,980 because you don't have to buy any more. The price for a sugarcane lunch tray is 6 cents per unit. The price for one year is $18,000 dollars.It is cheaper and it is biodegradable.
So what can we do to get HMS to stop using Styrofoam trays? We can show them the facts about it and we can help Find better Alternatives! So let's help Harlem make the healthier, better and smarter choice!
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