By Carmen Hamm
Real Food BC, one of Boston College’s food justice and sustain- ability clubs, is learning how to adapt to a unique semester this fall in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Typically, Real Food hosts cooking classes, speaker series, and hosts homemade student dinners. This year, however, the club has needed to invent new ways to explore its three main focus areas of dining policy, composting, and gardening due to social distancing guidelines. Real Food shares a close part- nership with BC Dining, which has allowed for the organizations to collaborate on programming to help students who are looking for alternatives to the traditional dining hall. Both groups are promoting the community supported agriculture (CSA) program, as students are choosing to prepare food in their dorms now more than ever before. The CSA program allows students to invest in local farming and re- ceive fresh, seasonal produce in return. Students who do not want to commit to the farmshare can instead choose to attend the weekly farmer’s market outside of Corcoran Commons to purchase fresh produce with either their meal plan dollars or via regular payment options. Both groups are also hoping to host virtual cooking classes with recipes that incorpo- rate ingredients from the market. Real Food also sponsors a composting initiative, now in its second year, which allows students to close the food loop from the comfort of their own dorm. Partic- ipating rooms receive a Real Food sponsored kitchen bin to collect their food waste. Once full, students can empty their bin into one of three communal collection bins centrally located behind Rubenstein Hall, Stayer Hall, and the 2000 Reservoir Apartments. This year, 38 dorm rooms are participating, with 12 of those rooms being from the Sustainabil- ity Living & Learning Community located in 2K. Each participating room attended a virtual compost training session, learning about the benefits, do’s and don’ts, and logistics of composting. All collected compost is then outsourced to Save That Stuff, a recycling and waste services company located in Charlestown, MA. Additionally, Real Food is con- tinuing its organic garden, located across Beacon Street from McElroy. The group has already hosted two socially-distanced planting days where members planted a variety of fall vegetable staples, such as beets and carrots. Since the club cannot host large meal gatherings this semester, the garden harvest is open to all Real Food members for individual use. The newest initiative to look forward to from Real Food this year will be the development and launch of their new website. The site will not only display ongoing projects and ways that students can get involved, but will also serve as a source of cooking inspiration, food justice news, and local food events.
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by Anh Nguyen
When countries around the world implemented lockdown initiatives and pressed pause to non-essential businesses, keeping people in their homes, it seemed like the social impacts of COVID- 19 might be an environmental silver lining. With people off the streets, there has been a surge in reports emerging from across the globe of blue skies becoming visible. Air quality has seen drastic improvements all over the world, especially over quarantined regions, with levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and fine particulate matter significantly reduced since lockdowns began. But the same can’t be said about the world’s oceans. The pandemic has left an abundance of a new form of pollution in the ocean: coronavirus waste. An alarming number of discarded masks, gloves, hand sanitizer bottles, and other PPE waste are being found on sea- beds and washed up on beaches. “How would you like swimming with COVID-19 this summer?,” Laurent Lombard, a diver and founder of the nonprofit Opération Mer Propre (Operation Clean Sea), asked in a Facebook post. Lombard’s organization has found an concerning amount of coronavirus waste during their sea cleanup operations. Lombard warned on Facebook that “soon there may be more masks than jellyfish” in the Mediterranean sea. On the other side of the world, OceansAsia, a marine conservation organization, is also concerned about the growing number of masks being discovered during its plastic pollution research. Before the pandemic, some eight million tonnes of plastics entered the ocean every year, adding to the estimated 150 million tonnes already circulating in marine environments, according to the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy. The pandemic has triggered an estimated global use of 129 billion face masks and 65 billion gloves every month. One study estimates that if every person used a single-use face mask a day for a year, in the UK alone, it could create an additional 66,000 tonnes of contaminated waste and 57,000 tonnes of plastic packaging. While masks and gloves are much needed tools to fight against the virus, they also run the risk of being disposed of incorrectly, entering ocean waters and adding to the already immense and still ever-growing problem of ocean pollution. With this new environmental issue, it is important for us, as members of the global community, to be conscious of how we dispose of our masks and other coronavirus preventative tools to ensure the health and wellbeing of the environment and wildlife around us. By Alec Goos
The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically uprooted the world in which we live, leaving the global community at a crossroads. When global lockdowns initially began this past March, carbon emissions across several countries were dramatically reduced, as everything and everyone paused for a brief moment in time. “Restricted human interac- tion with nature during this crisis time has appeared as a blessing for nature and environment,” Snehal Lokhandwala and Pratibha Gautam, researchers affiliated with the Shroff S. R. Rotary Institute of Chemical Technology in India, write. “After declaration of lockdown due to COVID-19, quality of air has started to improve and all other environmen- tal parameters such as water quality in rivers have started giving a positive sign towards restoring.” Similarly, stay-at-home orders have allowed white-collar workers to work remotely since March, reducing individual emission totals due to the lack of a daily commute. The pandemic has also severely reduced air travel, both for business and personal use, which has cut carbon emissions. “The Rhodium Group, an economic consulting firm, estimates transportation accounts for slightly more than half of the 20 percent drop in American carbon dioxide emissions recorded since the United States went into lockdown,” Benjamin Storrow and Maxine Joselow, reporters for Environment & Energy Publishing, said. Unfortunately, any environmental reliefs that a decrease in travel provides will likely be outweighed by the long-term economic implications of COVID-19. According to the PEW Re- search Center, the rise in unemploy- ment due to COVID-19 is “substan- tially greater” than that due to the Great Recession. With millions of Americans newly-unemployed, it is likely that the US, among other nations, will engage in drastic measures to restore its economy in order to avoid another recession, or depression.Regarding environmental de- regulation, there has been pushback from both Republicans and Democrats alike. However, both prior to and during the pandemic, the Trump Administration has continued to de- regulate key environmental protections. “President Trump signed an executive order that calls on agencies to waive required environmental reviews of infrastructure projects to be built during the pandemic-driv- en economic crisis,” The New York Times said. “At the same time, the Environmental Protection Agency has proposed a new rule that changes the way the agency uses cost bene- fit analyses to enact Clean Air Act regulations, effectively limiting the strength of future air pollution con- trols.” Worse, government funding meant to support small businesses impacted by COVID-19 has favored oil and gas industries. For example, while the US Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) has been relatively successful in helping to ease the bur- dens of many small businesses, there have been hiccups in its rollout. In an interview with Nation- al Geographic, Luka Ross, a senior policy analyst at the environmental group Friends of the Earth, said that the oil and gas industries are receiving billions in public funds via aggressive lobbying. The industries have sub- sequently seen tax changes, breaks on the royalties usually paid to drill or mine on public lands, and access to the Federal Reserve’s $600 billion Main Street Lending program. “There’s a serious risk that polluters could emerge from this crisis bolder and potentially more profitable than ever,” Ross said. |
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