Saving the World with Scissors

I am going to save the world with just a pair of scissors. No matter how busy I am, my lifestyle intertwines with my hobbies. My actions will create a ripple effect in the community of people I am creating about urgent environmental topics. My happiness is anything that supports the idea of being sustainable, waste-free, vegan, and minimalistic. With the small daily lifestyle choices I have, I am able to be the change I want to see in the world. Being able to help millions of people and animals around the globe brings me joy. I am saving the world with scissors in not just one way, but three! Bottle bricking, upcycling clothes, and composting are hobbies that use scissors and greatly impact the way we treat the earth.

The first hobby where I save the world with scissors is bottle bricking. This is a method of repurposing soft plastics and producing building materials from them. The best part about this hobby is that anyone can do it! With scissors, you want to cut up the soft plastics that you collected over time, cut them into small pieces, and smush them super tightly into a plastic bottle. The idea is to fill up the bottle with enough plastic that it is hard as a brick. Certain communities use these bricks to build housing and other structures. The amount of plastic that is made every year is unfathomable. People are still ignoring the very serious consequence of convenient single-use plastic. I will briefly list some reasons for not wanting to use single-use plastics, mimics different hormones in the body, takes 400+ years to decompose, produces toxic material, enters the food chain, and influences a waste culture.

It is very difficult now to live plastic-free with all the convenient plastic packaging. We have the power to vote for our environment every day with our dollar. Companies will have no choice but to think about zero waste alternatives in order to keep making money from their customers. Bottle bricking makes you take responsibility for your own consumption of plastic waste. It also allows you to be aware of how much plastic is being used everywhere around us, opening your eyes to a new world without plastic. We will never be able to fully clean up all the plastic in the world or stop all plastic packaging but it is a good time to start figuring out the root of the problem. We cannot cover this up with a bandaid, that won’t cut it.

The second way to save the world with scissors is by upcycling fast fashion into more functional clothes or reusable products. Let's say, a pair of jeans. The jeans are lightly used and have seen better days. They are perfectly wearable and it would be upsetting to see them go. Fix up any holes and maybe even add some cute embroidery or pictures to them, you can make them like new. OR, take an old rag. Some people would throw it away and think it is cheaper to buy a new one. With the old rag, you can have 12 new reusable makeup remover pads! By repurposing everything you have you can save money and the planet. There are also more and more clothes being made now than ever. Taking care of the clothes that you already have will help people across the globe that are affected by the outcomes of fast fashion and unfair labor trade.

Using scissors to fix my clothes and/or repurpose them into other clothes or products takes me out of my American lifestyle comfort zone where consumerism thrives. This dramatic demand for clothes and fast fashion in the last 10 years has created a world that is unsustainable for everyone. 70% of our clothes are made from plastic materials. These plastic materials are unknowingly polluting our oceans from our own washing machines at home! Now the smallest animal on the food chain can have plastic for lunch. Fast fashion is also putting hundreds of workers' livelihood on the line, risking their lives to go to work to provide pennies for their families. Lastly, fashion influences deforestation to grow plants that are then drenched with pesticides. After they are soaked in chemical dyes, and thousands of chemicals, we put this on the biggest organ of our body, our skin. We can support this by buying new clothes or we can use the clothes that are already produced to make new clothes or other products made of fabric.

The third way to save the world with scissors is by composting. Composing is a process that turns food scraps, paper products, and natural materials back into their original form: soil! Cut up cardboard and paper and properly dispose of them in the compost bin. This is a great way to learn more about food waste and food in landfills. There are certain laws that state restaurants cannot legally give out their food waste at the end of the day therefore it goes to waste. Just a head of lettuce can take over 20 years in a landfill to decompose. Leaking out a harmful gas called methane that is 80 times more toxic than CO2. The waste collection companies are not going to pull our heads out of the trash. They are going to send our trash overseas where we cannot see it. Therefore giving the illusion of a clean environment in America.

Composing doesn’t only use scissors but uses our brain to understand how we are challenging the modern American lifestyle (and diet) forcing us to question animal (and human) rights. We are told things like, “Take quick, cold showers” to help save the environment, when it takes more than 600 gallons of water to make a single hamburger. If we stopped raising so many animals on meat farms inhumanly we could feed the entire population. By eating meat and dairy we are willingly contributing to animal slaughter, mental health in humans and animals, environmental racism, unfair trade and so much more. By becoming vegan you can raise awareness into any aspect of the animal industries including, animal testing, animals for clothing and goods, animal captivity and more.

Many people are very unaware of what is going on with our complex system of consumerism and how it greatly affects the world. We have gravitated to a throw-away culture in the past 50 years producing more plastic and cheap products than ever before. What is so great about my hobbies is that anyone with a pair of scissors can do them too! Bottle bricking, upcycling clothes, and composting can be part of everyone's lifestyle. No matter how small, every little bit counts. We only have one world and we need to be more mindful about how we live on it together with a population of 7.6 billion and growing.

By Kendall Poland