As a student and staff member at UMD, I think it is safe to say that College Park has been a very big part of my life for a long time. Even before I realized that this was going to be the school for me, I came to downtown College Park in the metro bus to visit stores and just hang out. And when one walks up and down those old, familiar sidewalks of Route 1, the most common businesses are spots to pop into for a bite to eat. From Ratsie’s to Bagel Place to Jason’s Deli, there are a whole bevy of restaurants that we have all dined at innumerable times in our time spent in College Park. For most of us, downtown is a place to get a drink or a bite to eat.
But there is a bitter underside to the quick bites in College Park. As long as I have been a Terp, I have been an environmentalist. What I do in my spare time, outside of Netflix marathons and walking my dog, is environmental activism. I try to make the world a nicer, healthier, and cleaner place. And it always bugs me when a restaurant gives me a disposable piece of dishware instead of a reusable one. But nothing is more grating than going to a restaurant and being given a Styrofoam cup to drink out of, or a Styrofoam bowl to eat out of, or the inevitable Styrofoam clamshell at oh-so-many restaurants. Why is that? Styrofoam is known to be one of the most enduring materials we produce. For all its faults, a bleached white paper napkin will decompose in a month. Even a plastic-coated milk carton will decompose after a few years. But Styrofoam, made of a polystyrene-based petroleum product that does not biodegrade, will last forever.
When next you walk along Route 1, notice how many pieces of litter lay forlornly along the side of the road. Some places are worse than others; a startling number of our fellow Terps are litterbugs. Those pieces of Styrofoam along the side of the road will never, ever go away. Sure, they can be recycled, in theory, but the process is so complicated that many recycling services, such as the one on our campus, do not take part in it. Even if we take every piece from our roadways and put them in the trash, they will simply be sent to a landfill, where they will sit, leaching styrene into the local water table. No pollution can be contained forever, and when a piece of Styrofoam takes millions of years to break down, we can’t put our heads in the sand and imagine they’re not going to be someone’s problem, someday.
We can all understand why the material is already in use. It is light and insulating. We can hold a hot cup of coffee in our hand without burning ourselves. And frankly, it’s traditional. Our businesses use Styrofoam because it’s cheap, ubiquitous, and what they’ve always used. But if we’re honest with ourselves, that’s no longer a good enough reason.
But while those of us with limitless free time (are there any of us out there?) could spend each day going from business to business, beseeching each of them to curtail their use of Styrofoam and other examples of extruded polystyrene foam, it probably wouldn’t be the best use of any of our time. Instead, we should all champion the polystyrene ban (CB-5-2015) that has just been introduced by Mary Lehman and Dannielle Glaros in the Prince George’s House Delegation. This is something that other localities like Montgomery County and D.C. have enacted and, frankly, the sky hasn’t fallen. People can still get perfectly good takeout containers, in biodegradable containers that are compostable. And if it costs an extra nickel to get my order of Szechuan Chicken into a compostable container, I’m happy to do so.
All of us in College Park meet up in places where we can get a bagel, a coffee, a meal, or an order of French-Toast to go. It’s where my friends go, and it’s where I go. And sometimes, when it isn’t freezing cold and icy outside, I like to take my order out and eat it on Chapel Field. But until we ban the foam and get decent environmental standards for our takeout, those impromptu picnics will always have a bitter taste to them. Hopefully that isn’t the styrene.
- Eric Marshall-Main, member of the Student Sustainability Committee