Considering Alternatives

To Polystyrene

The following is an open letter to Joe LaChance, Chartwells’ director of school food services for Newtown.

To Mr LaChance:

Polystyrene is probably one of the most commonly used materials, yet it’s terrible for the environment. Every day it piles up in landfills. In fact, there are 2.9 billion pounds of polystyrene in landfills around the world. That’s a lot, considering that polystyrene is 95 percent air. Our school alone is producing so much waste in one year. We use about 300 polystyrene lunch trays every day, sometimes even more. After 182 days of school, we use approximately 54,600 trays.

Those trays that we eat off of for eight minutes will sit on this earth for longer than a lifetime. There’s also the option of burning them, but that won’t work either. Burning polystyrene releases harmful gases and chemicals into the air. One of those chemicals is carbon dioxide, a green house gas that contributes to global warming. Why do we need to use polystyrene trays? We don’t.

There are many other options when it comes to lunch trays. Our school has an entire room in the cafeteria with dishwashing equipment. That’s why it would be so easy for us to eat off of reusable trays; it’s not like you’d have to spend money on a dishwasher too. The reusable trays could be made out of anything, plastic, steel, etcetera. We should have been using reusable trays long ago. Reed is such a high tech school; it has all these fancy computers and architecture. To me, part of being high tech is being environmentally smart.

Chartwells serves every public school here in Newtown. As the schools’ food service, I think it’s your job to care about things like this. I think that one of your main priorities should be being earth-friendly. Think about it this way; if everyone keeps using as much polystyrene as they have been for the next few hundred years, the earth won’t be healthy enough to grow those great fruits and veggies that you like to serve us. You’re kind of teaching us to pollute the earth by serving us on polystyrene trays. I know it’s not your intentions, but if you don’t take the time to think about it, who will??

My sister will be coming to Reed next year, and I want her to have the plastic trays that I didn’t have. Please don’t put this off, do something about it now. Thank you so much for your time.

Sincerely,

Jane Ellen Anderson

3 Trades Lane, Newtown                                                 May 10, 2005