In order to decrease the carbon footprint I have, I can spend less time on internet which holds me away from my responsibilities. Also, I can surely manage with my clothes instead of buying new clothes which harms the nature. Even the paper products leave carbon footprint despite of being available for recycling, which is sufficient reason for me to decreasing of my habit of drinking which students of AGU buy from the machine with paper cups. To be able to make bigger differences, I can spread my purposes by poster to other people who haven’t taken action about reducing carbon footprint.

Even the clothes that people buy leave carbon footprint behind. The nature has been used as a trash can for hazardous chemicals. The more the clothes are produced, the more toxic chemicals, such as lead, mercury and arsenic, are released to the nature, specifically to the water, after manufacturing process. The chemicals released are damaging to the living creatures and their habitat. If the production of chemical waste and toxic clothes are not stopped by the companies that produce them, the home and life of the all living organisms are in danger of extinction. Recently, 11 chemicals have been identified as it is used in textile industry, which is the second largest polluter, for containing toxins, carcinogens and hormone disruptors that should be banned. Even the big brands currently have 63% of harmful chemicals in their products, despite their high quality. The only responsible of pollution of the environment is not the producer factories. As the clothes are washed by the consumers, 700,000 particular microfibers are released directly into the water.

After I thought about what can ı change, I decided that I can only reduce my energy consumption. Because I always use public transportation, the only option was to reducing energy consumption in my home. For that reason, I shut down my laptop which I always prefer sleep mode and I think this saved almost a quarter of my laptop’s battery. I also did not use hot water in my daily usage which is probably reduced natural gas consumption a little bit. I tried to use the least amount of water. I also didn’t watch TV and turned off the light of my sister’s room while she wasn’t there as always.

I think the biggest problem in AGU Campus which is related to our topic is excessive usage of paper cups. Because almost 500 billion paper cups are used annually in the world and 2 billion are used in Turkey annually. There is a big misconception about the recyclability of paper cups because even if most of the products are recyclable it difficult to recycle and because of this, tons of paper cups are not being recycled annually. According to some researches for the annual production of paper cups, 20 million trees are cut down and billions of gallon of water is used every year. This means usage of paper cups has a big impact on carbon footprint. Even some countries like the UK is considering to ban disposable coffee cup outright soon. I am sure that every week in AGU Campus more than a hundred paper cups are used and thrown to the garbage. These paper cups are bought by AGU students to mostly drink coffee and tea. And, I think if AGU students were aware of this information they wouldn’t use that much paper cups and maybe some of them would bring their cups.

Muhammed Emin Dursun

All of us have impacts to the earth. Because of the things we have done in our life we have an ecological footprint which shows the amount of impact we have done to our ecology. So after my observements I have made through in my and my friends daily life, there is a problem that seems small but after its innocent face it has a lot of impact to our world. Problem is the amount of packaged products we use in our life instead of localy grown products. Everyone uses packaged products because it is more durable, easier to keep, cheaper and can’t be produced at home.  But when we buy packaged products we also create plastic pollution and it creates a lot of pollution while it is producing due to the waste coming from factories also while it is transported from factories to the shops it creates air pollution too.

Hikmet Can Doğancı

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

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• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
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