When single use plastic is everywhere in your office, how do you go about cutting it down? “Ugh. Forgot my bags again, that’s another 5p.” We’ve all had it happen, finally getting to the front of a busy checkout and realising our bags are at home, somewhere in that redundant drawer in the kitchen. And whilst some see this as a modern inconvenience, we forget that less than 60 years ago, plastic bags didn't even exist. The average plastic bag is used for around 20 minutes before it is discarded. More than 1.6 billion gallons of oil are used each year to manufacture them and they can persist in the environment for almost 500 years. And whilst biodegradable plastic bags sound like the perfect solution, they only degrade under certain conditions and are never really gone – they simply break down into smaller bits of plastic. In the first 6 months after the 5p levy on plastic bags was implemented, their use in the UK decreased by 85%. And whilst this is a victory for environmentalists, wildlife and, well, everyone in the long run, there are many more unnecessary single use plastic items we still use to excess that are under no scrutiny. For example, disposable coffee cups and single use plastic bottles. I have been lucky enough to have travelled quite a lot and have stayed in places where it’s advisable to avoid drinking tap water and bottled water is the safe alternative. So I find it bizarre that in the UK, where tap water is perfectly safe, the population drink 2.8 billion litres of bottled water each year. Having recently graduated from MSc in Conservation & Biodiversity at University of Exeter, where a lot of research is focused on plastics and their impact on the environment, I learnt more about the direct and indirect impact single use plastic has especially on marine life. I started with the easy options of cutting out plastic, like always asking for drinks without straws and boycotting products which are unnecessarily wrapped in plastic, but single use plastic is insidious and increasingly difficult to avoid. When I arrived at the BBC, I noticed there were disposable coffee cups on nearly every desk each morning which would be added to during the day by single use water bottles. At one point I remember seeing 4 at one co-workers desk and genuinely felt my heart sink a little. If this was just one person within an organisation of over 20,000, imagine the waste generated each day from coffee cups and bottles alone? Across the UK, it is estimated that 7 million coffee cups are used each day. The awful thing about them is that only 1 out of 400 is recycled, going through a very energy intensive process. The other 399 will end up in landfill and remain there for years. Moment on the lips, lifetime in the tips. I explained the many problems caused by single use plastic to my team as well as its prominence in our office and the fact it was actually making me sad. This gave me an idea to impose a “Naughty Jar”, where any time someone brings in a single use coffee cup or plastic bottle, 10p goes in to be donated to Surfers Against Sewage, a fantastic environmental charity working to protect our UK beaches. After only a week of this self-imposed office tax, nearly every member of the Terrific Scientific team had a reusable coffee cup and bottle. There is now so little money in the jar that I personally have to add a much greater amount when donating to the charity! But this behaviour change within the office is the real victory. It just goes to show that every little does help, and that behaviour and habit change in relation to plastic use is possible, we just need a bit of a nudge. P.S. Many coffee shops offer a small discount on hot drinks when you take in a reusable cup - yet another reason to get one for yourself!
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So I know I was meant to talk about plastics in my next post, but I wrote a little something for the internal work magazine and thought I would share it here too... Now, ‘Kale’ us crazy, but at Terrific Scientific we’ve been on a mission to get 9-11 year olds to eat their greens with something called an Exposure study (I promise, it’s not as sinister as it sounds). It seemed an impossible task, but we partnered with Coventry University and asked children at four schools across the UK to eat a bit of kale every day for 15 days. They recorded their reaction to kale every day, ranging from hating to loving it, and we compared their reactions on the first to last day. On the last day, I went into the schools and tested the children’s ‘Taster Status’. Everyone falls into one of three categories: Non-tasters (people less sensitive to bitterness, 25% of population), Tasters (somewhere in between, 50% of population) and Supertasters (people incredibly sensitive to bitterness, 25% of population). Imagine tasting things in pastel or neon, these are the extremes of tasting. We then compared this to their kale ratings and found their opinions had changed! Non-tasters and Tasters showed the most improvement, but Supertasters may have needed more time to get used to the kale. This was a brilliant finding and became the basis of our Live Lesson on 31 January which was broadcast live across the country to primary school children and can now be watched here. We also asked school children across the country to uncover their taster status and send in their results to build a national picture of Supertasters. We’re hoping this is the start of something great for this BBC Learning project, as it’s the first of 10 interactive investigations for 9-11 year olds to do in the classroom. It sounds a cliché, but I never thought I’d be here! I imagined a world of creatives like the BBC would have no room for a nerdy scientist like me. Having recently completed an MSc Conservation & Biodiversity, my background has always been very ‘Biology heavy’. I find this study and those to come incredibly exciting, and only the BBC could pull off something on this scale in such a short amount of time. It's been amazing working with Breakfast and seeing our results on Newsround and even a couple of newspapers! A job aiming to inspire the next generation of budding scientists seems too good to be true, and I’ll always be grateful I’ve had the opportunity to be part of it. For more information on BBC Learning’s new campaign visit the Terrific Scientific website. Teachers, parents and anyone who’s interested can join in the conversation on social media using #TerrificScientific If someone had told me years ago I would be designing experiments for children at one of the most respected organisations in the world, AND being paid for it, I would have laughed. I love my job, i feel like a kid in a candy shop most days and cannot believe my job is producing science content for children. It combines loads of things I am interested in, including science communication and education, and most importantly, it's opening the world of science to people who may have never considered it previously. I love the emails and tweets and letters we've had, thanking us for scientific content. But something is missing.
Even though I love my job and thank my lucky stars I'm here, I can't help but feel like a fish out of water. Working and living in Salford Quays, I am surrounded by water, but all I can see are the artificial lights of our building glimmer in the murky water. The industrial locks are all I have at the moment linking me to the ocean. There's very little wildlife, only the odd fleeting sight of a gull or a goose in the quays, especially at this time of year. I miss the outdoors, the wilderness. Glass and concrete structures are no place for me. The people I work with have had very different experiences to my own, and love the straight lines of the buildings and the squeakier than clean world that has been built around them. I miss nature, working in the field, getting stuck in the mud (or in the sand)... but these are things I feel no one around me can relate to. And, as lame as it sounds, I even miss collecting data. Adding numbers to a spreadsheet, as boring as it sounds, is incredibly rewarding, especially when you know that each count is filled with information of biological relevance. I've been formally studying Biology for 5 years now... 5 years of learning about the natural world, the perils it faces and the work going on to protect it. I've only been in my job for 6 months, but I already feel like the natural aspect is lacking immensely. I read somewhere that most children in the UK spend less than half an hour outdoors each week, and frankly it breaks my heart. As a child, and an adult, I was outdoors as much as I could be. I've never been one for the cold, but even in the depths of winter I would try to at least walk around a local park or go to the beach. Since moving North, this has massively depleted, mainly as the area I live in has very few green spaces and not a beach in sight. Another problem is that barely anyone I know would want to be outdoors for longer than absolutely necessary. So instead, I've tried to bring nature to them. I've shared article after article, news story after news story, pestering colleagues with popular science and new research, making them realise our connection to nature is a lot stronger than it might seem. But I still feel like a fish out of water. How do you get people so detached from the natural world to engage with it more? It's something I have been trying to work on as my own little side project. I have, once again, massively neglected this blog, but in the coming posts, I will be talking about the subtle ways in which biology can be snuck into the office, without anyone realising! First up: plastics. Stay tuned! Well, I certainly never thought I would live in the North, but here I am. 3 weeks ago I made the move from Falmouth to Manchester, and to say it has been a shock to the system is an understatement. Going from a quaint Cornish town to a big city has been quite an adjustment, despite having grown up in London!
The last few months have been completely manic. It's been all change, and my blog has definitely taken a back seat. Everything has been in flux; my Masters, my new job, my personal life... I don't really know if I'm coming or going! I've been working on a new science project BBC Learning, which is aiming to inspire primary school children to engage with science. This is something my own school lacked somewhat, so I am hugely excited to be a part of this. But that excitement is mirrored by anxiety. I have moved to a new city where I know absolutely no one, and have been trying to complete my Masters Dissertation at the same time. This has been an immense challenge; holding down a full time job and writing into the night. The past few months have been a huge source of stress, but I hope it will be worth it in the end. So that's where I'm at for now, hopefully the next few months will allow me to revive this blog and end the hiatus! Until next time... I have to admit, when I first realised I had a trip to Kew Gardens for my Terrestrial Biodiversity and Conservation module, I was only mildly interested. But over 3 days this week, my preconceptions of Kew and what they did was completely overturned, and I have left this field trip with incredible respect and admiration of the work they are doing to protect plant species across the world. The field trip took us behind the scenes at Kew Botanical Gardens to meet the scientists and learn about the different projects Kew supports globally. We also had the chance to walk around the herbarium (brimming with pressed and dried specimens, some of which were hundreds of years old) and the plant nursery (where curators care for around 33,000 species of plants, growing them for scientific study and for display in the botanical gardens). We visited one of three nurseries, which had plants on the floor, the walls and the ceilings, ranging from huge palms and cycads to tiny water lillies, carnivorous plants and orchids as far as the eye could see (these are apparently a flight risk in the main public Botanical Gardens - some collectors can't get enough). I can honestly say I have never been so excited about plants. Yes, PLANTS. Let me tell you something, there is so much more than meets the eye to those green things we see in our back gardens and countryside. They are INCREDIBLE. Some of the adaptations we learnt about are absolutely spectacular, and just by looking at the photos below, you may get a sense of how biodiverse and beautiful they are and why plants are worth protecting. (Apologies for the lack of species names - alas, I am not a botanist! If anyone reading this is, please comment the names below!) This trip was designed to teach us about the ins and outs of Conservation work, but the main thing which has stuck in my mind is that of the 40(ish) MSc Conservation & Biodiversity students on the trip, I don't think any of us had any clue that a whopping 1/5 of all plant species are threatened with extinction around the world. ONE FIFTH. This ignorance to the peril plants are facing mainly stems from the fact that plant protection isn't really talked about in comparison to Animals. I am guilty of this myself. I usually rant about how charismatic megafauna always gets the attention when we should really be focusing Conservation efforts on those species which are lesser known, but it hadn't crossed my mind that plants have it worse. How naive I and many others are, for of course, no animal can survive without plants first. We heard from experts about the problems this causes with their Conservation efforts. In particular, about a partnership with the Natural History Museum, where Kew conducted a Global Assessment of the state of the world's plants; Plants Under Pressure. It was here that the figure of 1/5 appeared, as well as the concern that over 33% of the estimated 380,000 plant species 'are so poorly understood that we still don't know if they are endangered or not'. No prizes for guessing why plants are dying out: Of course, it's us. Humans. All the effects of Agriculture, Harvesting, Logging, Disturbance, Pollution, Mining and Invasive species (to name a few) are catching up with us and account for 81% of the threats to plant species. Whilst this is incredibly disturbing, our lectures this week taught us about the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation, where the main aim is to halt the current and continuing loss of plant diversity globally. So what are Kew doing to combat this? Many things, actually. Here are a few initiatives we learnt about:
Of course, this is no where near the full extent of their work, but it was incredibly inspiring to hear that many of their projects have been successful. There is still a very long way to go to meet targets set for 2020, and this is a little disheartening, but after meeting these experts (who seemed to know everything about every plant ever) I have every faith that Kew will continue to achieve the goals they set themselves in the future. Here's some more photos of the field trip, and please do visit Kew Gardens to support their amazing work. |
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