Reflection week 2

   This week has been awesome and we have gotten so much work done. We grinded out our flyers which consisted of sustainability, composting, and recycling. These flyers had a ton of work put into them using the app canva Caroline showed us. We were productive with our work on these and finished them up in a few hours all combined. They were fun to make and we had so much fun doing it.

we got busy at home and started our morning by setting up a call with Mark Kodak, Caroline’s step father. Mark has a strong background in the recycling business he worked for sunshine recycling. His job for them was to create a business model to most effectively recycle. His job consisted of a lot of math, he had to calculate how much energy it would take to ship recycling to the factory versus how much it actually took to recycle the bottle. For isolated towns like Telluride CO, he found that energy to ship the recycling was more than the actual process. This brought up a great point for Is as we have been promoting recycling for our senior project. He talked about the benefits, our earth looks cleaner, and we are protecting wildlife and ourselves! His main point of his business was to take these recyclable items and naming them into something else instead of shipping them off to a factory. He used an example of a glass bottle, grinding it up into sand and selling it to the town to use for development and other things it may be needed for. We plan on diving deeper into this when writing our individual papers, I am very grateful to have gotten the chance to speak with Mark. He was so knowledgeable and genuinly cared about his work and how it helps better this world as a whole. After this we brought the rest of our trash to the dump and see more of what goes into the process. 

We ended up hiking Mt. Kearsarge and once we got to the top, we climbed up the fire lookout tower where we were greeted by a nice man named Ron! Ron proceeded to show us how what he does during his day at work. It was very interesting and we decided to ask Ron some questions about trash. He said, “Most of the trash I see is during the fall, many peoples water bottles will be placed down carelessly and then blown away by the strong gusts of wind” (Ron). He explained how most of this trash ends up at the bottom of the mountain and people like him have to go out of their way to pick it up. He said that due to global warming, there has been a significant increase in forest fires around New Hampshire. This is due to the green house gasses released into our atmosphere by man made things. He was so invested in his work it was inspiring to hear him speak his mind. Our team learned so much from Ron and we are very grateful to have been able to meet him at the top! This week overall was challenging in its ways but such a rewarding one.