UW-La Crosse student Rachel Lee will be blogging over the next several days about her participation in the La Crosse + Viroqua, WI No Impact Week taking place October 9-16. Below is Rachel's first blog post.
Monday I kicked off my participation in the UW-La Crosse No Impact Week. I, Rachel Lee, decided to get involved with Colin Beavan’s No Impact Project after learning about his mission and book entitled No Impact Man through Joint Committee on Environmental Sustainability. Over the last few years I have been very interested in greener and more holistic ways of living, which made participating in No Impact Week a no brainer. It has been great educating myself about the different ways I can make a difference in my own life, as well as the environment around me. Colin’s No Impact Project Manual has many different ideas of ways to eliminate or dramatically reduce your global footprint by doing things as simple as recycling and riding your bike and unique as creating your own hygiene products. By acknowledging the effect that my everyday activities have on my health and environment I am able to make better decisions and actively participate in more facets of my daily life.
Yesterday, I woke up and finished a poster that I was creating for Monday’s E-Waste Recycling event and began researching the topic of recycling and technology. Currently we are in an age of rapid technological innovation and our previous technologies are getting thrown away at an astounding rate! These machines have been created with different sorts of metals and chemicals, that when improperly dealt with, have a very negative effect on our soil and water supply. In La Crosse and Wisconsin there are many facilities that are in place to protect us from threats like lead and cadmium pollution from these discarded machines. It was great to see Dynamic Recycling involved in our project because they provide a very important service by protecting our local environment, as well as stimulating our local economy by creating jobs. I was very happy to be a part of this project because doing just this one thing benefited our community and was incredibly easy! We need to remember that doing the right thing only takes putting in a little effort and being an active participant in the community you live in. I look forward to the other projects that we are participating in this week, as well as taking part in more of No Impact Project’s mission.
