Category: Georgia Collins

by Georgia Collins

You may have already heard of the campaign, started in Australia in 2011 by an environmental group based in Perth, called Plastic Free July. This year the project has more than 2 million people from over 150 countries pledging to minimise their use of plastic for the month of July. There are three levels of challenge, the simplest being to eliminate all single-use non-recyclable plastic in your daily life, such as that from takeaway coffees and plastic bags. I was introduced to it by a friend, and we have both decided to take on the full challenge; we will not use any non-recyclable plastic or single use plastic for the whole of July.

To get started with Plastic Free July, we signed up with the website, http://www.plasticfreejuly.org/ and took the ‘Pesky Plastics Quiz’. This was really interesting for me as I thought I was quite aware of plastic and was already avoiding excessive packaging. However, this quiz really showed me how much single-use, non-recyclable plastic I use and, scarily, how little I had noticed.

As well as avoiding anything with plastic wrapping or single-use plastic, we’re also finding alternatives for common everyday things. For example, bin bags can be replaced with compostable or newspaper liners (although thus far we’ve managed to recycle, compost or reuse all of our “waste”). We’re also ditching yoghurt pots… did you know that making your own yoghurt is actually really easy? (Making soya yoghurt, though,… not so much!). We’re also making a concerted effort to buy from shops that sell items either unpackaged or in recyclable containers. Hopefully through such alternatives we will fix our bad-plastic-habits for good.

As I’ve never studied economics/ politics/ anything societally useful, I don’t really get why there just isn’t a ban on all plastic that cannot be reused, composted or recycled, especially when a really cool, environmentally-friendly alternative already exists! For example, take a look at Vegware. Totally amazing! I can’t get over the fact that takeaway boxes can be compostable! I recommend looking at stuff like this as a good break from the actual work you are supposed to be doing and to restore one’s faith in humanity and human innovation. It also makes a nice change from being depressed about our detrimental impact on the environment.

Currently, many privately-produced products are public-waste problems. We can all fantasize (well, maybe not ALL of us, but I do it) about companies having to adopt closed-loop systems for their packaging: can you imagine if Coca-Cola suddenly had to be responsible for their plastic bottles?! I mean ALL their plastic bottles… even all the really, really old ones currently in the sea. But Lush, a cosmetics company, have already taken the initiative and are responsible for all their packaging (just because you’re an environmentalist doesn’t mean you can’t look and smell fantastic). Although it is frustrating that most big companies aren’t responsible for the effect they have on our environment, we can’t afford to be complacent as we all have some responsibility for creating plastic waste. We need a collective change, a cultural makeover that will reach every single one of us, and that most definitely can begin at home. The Earth is all of our homes after all, and right now we are just messing it right up. We all can take some responsibility for this, and movements like Plastic Free July are such an eye-opening way of realising how little we do.

We all know what plastic does, where it ends up… everyone must have seen Blue Planet by now. We can’t say we don’t know. What we can say though is, “no thanks!” to any single-use plastic. We can bring our own take-away cups, cutlery, lunch boxes and bags, and avoid the ridiculous packaging at many shops. Rather than just shaking our heads with dismay at some ridiculously wrapped vegetable (like, shrink-wrapped coconut?!) or getting upset about whales dying from swallowing plastic bags, we can use these emotions to do something and to stop polluting with plastic. You are responsible for what you buy, so don’t buy stuff that ends up on our beaches, buried in a hole and outliving the entire human population, or getting stuck in some poor albatross.

Go on, and make a fish happy by going plastic free!

PS. As part of Plastic Free July, my friend and I are saving all the plastic that we have inadvertently obtained. The count so far is 2 pieces of plastic packaging tape, a plastic bag from some unavoidable packaging (from a new pair of goggles – the goggles were in a plastic case, then in a plastic bag, then in a padded envelope…), and a pot holding some olives bought back in June. And we are only in day 4!

By Georgia Collins

The life of an academic can be a solitary one. Wander around the average research institute of a late afternoon and you are likely to see individuals making great efforts to ignore the fact they are in a building full of other people: shut away into tiny isolated offices or crammed into shared workspaces, everyone desperately using ever-larger headphones to try and block out the noise of their colleagues and ‘get on with their work’. Even walking around to get a drink or go to the toilet becomes an exercise in extreme social avoidance. Intense staring at the floor, fixed grimace smiles and glazed eyes, all designed to put anyone off who does happen to look up and think you might be up for a chat. On occasion the ‘I have a deadline’ panic face is observed, often accompanied by the hurried walk. Together these are excellent tools for extreme social avoidance, but must be used in moderation or people start asking if you are done yet – expecting a party, etc. when you are. Busy staff and students can often see other people as a distraction, a nuisance and a drag on their precious work time. We barely restrain our irritation when some poor soul interrupts our intellectual process/ writing of ‘important’ emails/ reading silly things on the internet/ YouTube video watching/ re-reading the same paper for the fifteenth time (select as appropriate). Politeness and the social norm of saying ‘good morning’ are often the only reasons people even look at another human.

It’s a sad state to be in. Here we are, this collection of individuals, clumped together but yet all alone. Each one of us isolated in our enclosed minds; worrying over ever-increasing workloads and failed experiments, panicking over deadlines and trying to figure out what were we supposed to be doing here in the first place.

But all is not so bleak. We do not need to resign ourselves to a life of ignoring people with our strategy of headphones and minimal eye contact for the sake of science. Writing in Nature, Rebecca Heald, Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of California Berkeley, reveals her key to success in promoting a collaborative and supportive research environment where scientists are encouraged to talk to each other. Together with two other colleagues, she created the ‘Trilab’, a place where scientists from three different groups talked, socialised, worked and shared their research with one another. They even created a special ‘lunch room’ by knocking down a wall in the institute to make a space big enough for them all to have food together .

Professor Heald shows that through fostering a collaborative environment, her own team, as well as the other two labs involved in the ‘Trilab’, benefit from each other’s expertise, friendship and even grant proposals and lab space. They hold joint weekly lab meetings where junior scientists get to hear about a range of different techniques and ideas outside of their own field and learn how to explain their science to non-expert colleagues. This also seems to provide the confidence and space for group members to collaborate and explore new ideas together, leading to new and exciting research directions.

“What benefits the larger group also benefits the individual lab, and vice versa. A network of human interactions is central to progress and success,” she states. Professor Heald believes that cooperation is key and that leaders of the group should respect and encourage the diversity of a group, as each individual brings a range of experiences to the research team. She also encourages young researchers to seek out places where this sort of environment could occur, but that even where it is difficult to envisage, a collaborative mind-set can improve the health of individual labs in any situation.

So, next time you plug in your headphones or try to look busy when somebody comes near your desk, why not try smiling and asking them what they are up to? Or tell them what you are stuck on? Maybe we all can start trying to build our network of human interactions. What benefits others is likely to benefit ourselves and, you never know, by reaching out and talking, you might be writing about what happened next in a Nature paper one day yourself.

Read the full piece from Professor Heald:
“A lab co-op helps young faculty members to thrive”. Comment and Opinion. Nature 556, p. 402