Like millions across the United States, I gathered outside with all of my friends to watch the solar eclipse. We drove to an area that had ninety-nine totality and sat outside enjoying nature and the finally warm weather. We all had our solar eclipse glasses and got to enjoy the day listening to bad renditions of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” by Bonnie Tyler and joking about what people before science thought was happening whenever there was an eclipse. We wondered how many poor women had been accused of being a witch because of the eclipse. Throughout the day, the sky got dimmer and dimmer as if it were cloudy, but we could see the sun. The glasses allowed us to see the moon slowly covering the sun, but without them you would have no idea it was happening. When the total eclipse finally happened, we got to watch the sky darken as if it was 9 pm. We got to remove our glasses and admire the eclipse. The moon, dark with a halo of light behind it. Stars illuminated the sky. Eventually, the moon kept orbiting and the sky lit up as if nothing happened. We carried about our day leaving our solar eclipse glasses discarded in the trash, recycling, or if you are like me, still sitting in the cup holder in my car.



I saw so many news articles and reporters talking about the importance of getting the glasses so you did not damage your eyes, but I saw no one talk about what you should do with the glasses when you are done. Are they recyclable? Do you throw them away? Is there an organization that collects them? I did not know.



When I did research, I got mixed results. Some websites say that the glasses are recyclable. Some said they were not because the lenses are not recyclable. Some websites said if you removed the lenses, you could recycle them. However, there are a few organizations that you can donate your glasses to that will distribute the glasses to countries where they do not have access to the millions of glasses, we had here in the states the next time the eclipse happens. Astronomers Without Boarders collects these glasses by mail or at one of their local drop off spaces. They collected glasses from the 2017 solar eclipse and were able to distribute three hundred thousand of them across the world for the 2024 eclipse. If you still have your solar eclipse glasses, consider donating them to Astronomers Without Boarders. They are happy to cover the shipping cost if that is a concern for you. I wish there had been more media attention about this organization and a greater focus on what to-do after the solar eclipse and hope to see that in the future.



Astronomers Without Boarders Information:

Email: collectionnode@astronomerswithoutborders.org

Drop Off locations in Ohio:

Barberton Public Library

Greene County Public Library (7 locations)

Bowling Green City Schools

Washington-Centerville Public Library

Redeemer Christian School

Carnegie Public Library

**The City of Grandview Heights and Sustainable Grandview

Fairfield County Health Department in Lancaster

Kristina J Danielak, DDS

Napoleon Public Library

Athens-Hocking Solid Waste District

Firelands FFA – Firelands High School

Shores & Islands Ohio

Keep Toledo/Lucas County Beautiful

Miami County Solid Waste District

Twinsburg Public Library



**Closet to Campus

Link to the website with addresses: https://astronomerswithoutborders.org/programs/solar-glasses-distribution#collection_node



Sources:

Jarosik, Jamie, and Channing King. “Eclipse Glasses Can’t Be Recycled, but You Could Give Them a Future.” WDTN.Com, WDTN.com, 5 Apr. 2024, www.wdtn.com/eclipse-2024/eclipse-glasses-cant-be-recycled-but-you-could-give-them-a-future/.

Palmer, Kim. “What to Do with Your Eclipse Glasses Now That It’s All Over.” Crain’s Cleveland, 8 Apr. 2024, www.crainscleveland.com/eclipse/places-recycle-solar-eclipse-glasses.

Rick.Fienberg. “How to Recycle Leftover Eclipse Glasses.” Solar Eclipse Across America, 12 Apr. 2024, eclipse.aas.org/eye-safety/recycle-donate.

Shelton, Beatrice. “What to Do with Leftover Solar Eclipse Glasses.” American Academy of Ophthalmology, 8 Apr. 2024, www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/what-to-do-with-leftover-solar-eclipse-glasses.

With social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram becoming increasingly popular, trends are consistently going in and out of style. It is almost impossible to keep up with. This has led to an increase of traction to “fast fashion” shops like Zara, H&M, Forever 21, and Shein. CNN describes Fast Fashion as a business model that focuses on producing garments in bulk as quickly as possible to match current trends. When Zara first opened, it prided itself on having a design developed for consumer purchase in the store in just fifteen days.  

Currently, the fashion industry accounts for ten percent of carbon emissions. Since the year 2000, the number of garments being created has doubled. It is estimated that consumers buy sixty percent more clothing now and wear them for half as long. For companies to make money and sell clothes that fit these microtrends, they sell the clothes really cheap, and make them even cheaper. The primary fabric used in these clothing items is polyester which takes about 200 years to decompose and releases tons of microplastics back into the food chain. Additionally, fast fashion brands heavily rely on cheap labor to produce their clothes. According to Geore Washington University, of the seventy-five million factory workers in fast fashion factories, only two percent of those employees make a livable wage. These factory workers work long hours, in inhumane conditions, and still cannot afford to support themselves or their families. Child labor is also popular amongst fast fashion factories.  

Clearly, fast fashion is wrong. It is not sustainable for the environment and uses unethical means of staffing in order to create the clothes. So, how do we implement sustainable fashion? Sustainable fashion relies on consumers investing in clothing pieces that they can wear for a long time. Similarly, it means buying less products and supporting second-hand clothing stores as well as vintage clothing. Repurposing old clothing is also important with upcycling initiatives rising in popularity.  

How do we collectively implement sustainable fashion to the vast majority of the public? Well that starts with influencers and celebrities. Both influencers and celebrities determine what is trendy and what is in style. Whatever they choose to promote as a collective is the direction that fashion will take. All of these celebrities and influencers are payed by brands to promote different products. This includes the fashion that they choose to promote.  

As a society, we are far from implementing sustainable fashion. We are far too caught up in social media and matching the trends, that investing in wearable clothes for years is not happening. The fashion industry has a strong marketing campaign that focuseson making money through high sales, and sustainable clothing brands do not have the money to invest in that luxury. Sustainable clothing brands are more expensive than fast fashion brands, which means they are less likely to be chosen by the consumer, as they can buy more options for the same cost of one sustainable article of clothing. Real financial investment needs to be made in order to make sustainable fashion the norm amongst the general population. Until then, we will continue to see the rise of fast fashion brands.  

Sources: 

Aglet. “The Influence of Celebrities in Fashion Design: Fashion Design.” Villioti Fashion Institute, 12 May 2022, villiotifashioninstitute.co.za/the-influence-of-celebrities-in-fashion-design/#:~:text=The%20relationship%20between%20celebrities%20and,flock%20to%20emulate%20the%20look.  

Chan, Emily. “What Does Sustainable Fashion Actually Mean?” Vogue India, 12 Apr. 2021, www.vogue.in/fashion/content/vogues-ultimate-guide-to-sustainable-fashion.  

Maiti, Rashmila. “Fast Fashion: Its Detrimental Effect on the Environment.” Earth.Org, 4 Mar. 2024, earth.org/fast-fashions-detrimental-effect-on-the-environment/#:~:text=The%20Dark%20Side%20of%20Fast%20Fashion&text=It%20dries%20up%20water%20sources,of%2050%20billion%20plastic%20bottles.  

McDonald, Amaya, and Taylor Nicioli. “What Is Fast Fashion, and Why Is It so Controversial?” CNN, Cable News Network, 24 Nov. 2023, www.cnn.com/style/what-is-fast-fashion-sustainable-fashion/index.html. 

Amongst large companies, it has become common to see them invest in carbon offsets. What this means is that for every pound of carbon emission they release into the air, they invest in a solution that reduces carbon emissions by X percent in order to create a neutral carbon footprint. This is fairly common amongst companies that rely on factories, airports, plane carriers, politicians, and celebrities. However, these solutions are not as productive as they may seem.

One of the most popular solutions companies invest in to offset their carbon emission is planting trees. Even the United States passed a bipartisan act called the Trillions of Trees Act where the US committed to planting trees in order to combat climate change. It seems like a great solution. Planting trees combats deforestation, absorbs carbon, provides oxygen, and can even prevent flooding. On the surface, planting thousands of trees seems great. But why is that not a sustainable solution for offsetting carbon?

Well, planting trees is a performative fact. When you look at the statistics and the actual impact planting trees has, it is far lower than you might expect. In November of 2019, volunteers planted 11 million trees. After three months, only ten percent of the saplings they planted were still alive. They were planted at the wrong time and were not taken care of properly, leading to most of them dying. Organizations love this initiative, but after doing the research, it is not a productive mode in countering carbon emissions.

A study was done in India, a country who has invested in planting trees for over 50 years, and results concluded that it had no evidence of having a substantial positive effect on the environment or combatting carbon emissions. Rather than investing in mass numbers of trees being planted, companies need to invest in organizations that focus on regrowing trees for the future and preserving developed forests and ecosystems that we already have. In order to do that, companies must evaluate the resources and supplies they are using. Rather than investing millions of dollars in planting new trees, invest in solutions that cut down the number of trees being used for paper products that the company uses.

Another aspect that is not talked about enough when it comes to planting trees is the effect on the ecosystem. By cutting down trees, you are destroying ecosystems and homes to thousands of organisms that rely on that environment for food and shelter. However, when you prepare to plant trees, you are also disrupting the ecosystems of organisms that already inhabited that land. Land must be cleared to make space for the millions of trees that these companies and organizations pay to be planted.

Planting trees, and similar solutions to offsetting a carbon food print is all misdirection. It is the “easy way out” of real environmental change. It is far cheaper for companies to throw money at a performative solution than to actually invest in products that do not use fossil fuels and are not eating up billions of trees for paper products. If a company wants to pride itself on investing in sustainable solutions or being an “environmentally friendly company” they need to show it. Performative Action is out, real change is in. Put your money where your mouth is and invest in real sustainable solutions.



Sources:

“Benefits of Planting Trees.” Benefits of Planting Trees – Bowling Green, Kentucky – Official Municipal Website, www.bgky.org/tree/benefits#:~:text=Trees%20give%20off%20oxygen%20that,for%20many%20birds%20and%20mammals. Accessed Apr. 2024.

Jones, Benji. “The Surprising Downsides to Planting Trillions of Trees.” Vox, 22 Sept. 2021, www.vox.com/down-to-earth/22679378/tree-planting-forest-restoration-climate-solutions.

Skene, Jennifer. “Planting Trees Isn’t a Climate Plan-It’s a Distraction.” Be a Force for the Future, 13 Feb. 2020, www.nrdc.org/bio/jennifer-skene/planting-trees-isnt-climate-plan-its-distraction-0.

“Understanding Carbon Offsetting.” WWF, www.wwf.org.uk/myfootprint/challenges/understanding-carbon-offsetting. Accessed Apr. 2024.

If you open TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, or the news and search for climate change, you will get similar answers: The World is Ending. Global warming is on the rise, the icebergs are melting, deforestation is ruining ecosystems, pollution is impacting more cities than ever, etc. Similarly, I see videos all the time that say the earth won’t be sustainable for my kids or future generations to see. In short: we are killing the Earth, and we are killing it fast. These news articles are written to incite a reaction: we need action, and we need it fast. However, headlines like these exaggerate the issues preventing real change from occurring. If the world is so doomed, nothing I do is going to stop it.

The world is not doomed. Granted, the world is not in the best shape, but it is far from doomed. Headlines that provoke fear and this “doomism” do not promote fear or action, rather they are promoting apathy. I would argue that the media has a huge responsibility in the current climate crisis facing the world today. Titles like, “Humanity has 20 years to shape up or face mass extinction” promote false information and numb the audience’s reaction. These “click-bate” titles the media push in order to get views have created an idea that there is little to nothing that can be done to save the Earth, so why bother taking any action? It will not solve the problem. Because of this idea, the average person is unlikely to change their daily behavior because they believe the climate crisis is much larger than it actually is.

So, who is to blame for the climate crisis we are facing? Big Corporations? City Pollution? Factories? Farmers? Humans? I would argue that the media has a huge responsibility in the climate change crisis we are facing. These “click-bate” and hyperbolized titles have undermined the research and work thousands of scientists have put into bettering various aspects of the Earth. Similarly, true crises are not being taken seriously as they are getting lost amongst these headlines. This attitude of apathy being created is dangerous. We are losing a huge part of the population who could be making a real change towards climate change, but don’t because they think the problem is far greater than the small changes in their daily life.

In short, the media plays a huge role in how information is consumed amongst the general public. Fear-mongering articles no longer provoke responses, but rather apathy so it is time for a change to be made. We need to shift our mode of communication into accurately displaying data and facts and provide real solutions for the public to prevent the climate crisis from growing. Stop pushing fear and doom, and post the hope and action required.

“It is important to communicate both the threat and the opportunity in the climate challenge. Those paying attention are worried, and should be, but there are also reasons for hope. There is still time to avoid the worst outcomes, if we act boldly now, not out of fear, but out of confidence that the future is largely in our hands.”


Sources:

Degroot, Dagomar. Opinion | Our Planet Is Not Doomed. That Means We Can, and Must, Act. – The Washington Post, 7 Oct. 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/07/our-planet-is-not-doomed-that-means-we-can-must-act/.

Nardi, Anne. “The Issue of Clickbait and Exaggeration in Environmental Journalism.” North Central Region Water Network, 6 Apr. 2021, northcentralwater.org/the-issue-of-clickbait-and-exaggeration-in-environmental-journalism/.