Nothing in life is free.
And a group of environmental studies students at UPEI is for the first time presenting an environmental symposium at the W.A. Murphy Student Centre on campus that will focus on the true costs of many of our purchasing choices.
“The topic of the symposium is the real cost of things, so the cost of things before the products get to us, the travel (costs), the production costs to the environment making the things that we use all the time (and more),” says Molly Stevens.
The three guests — Phil Ferraro of the P.E.I. Adapt Council, UPEI associate professor of chemistry Michael Shaver and Halifax author Chris Benjamin — will be speaking.
The students themselves will present poster displays that pertain to their term papers which examined the true costs of things and their impact locally, nationally and globally.
Rodney Reid focused on horticulture and the local economy.
“There’s a cost to the environment, there’s a cost socially, especially for rural communities where the food systems have collapsed basically,” he says.
Reid notes that a lot of the food systems, even in the beef or poultry industries, have closed down and moved into a corporate setting because there are not enough profit margins lef for a smaller farmer to survive.
“So what I basically talked about in my paper was bringing it back to the community and how people could support each other in the community so that everyone could earn a decent living,” he says.
Stevens tackled the environmental impact of the clothing industry, including the difference between synthetic and natural fibers and how they break down at the end of their wearable life.
“When they get to the landfill a natural fiber will break down a lot faster than a synthetic fiber,” she says.
However, natural fibers have their own environmental price tag, says Stevens, who cites that the cotton industry uses approximately 25 per cent of the world’s pesticide and is very water intensive.
She also delved into the eco-fashion revolution, which some in the industry are leaning towards in terms of making items that last longer and are more versatile.
“A lot of places are trying to design a score system so each article of clothing will have a score so when you’re buying something you can know that if it has a bad score that someone else is paying for it somewhere down the line to make that clothing,” Stevens says.
She also addresses the fashion industry’s constant push to consumers to keep up with ever-changing trends, which particularly affects teenage girls.
“If they don’t have the latest thing other girls or people in their school will notice and so they feel that they have to get that stuff or they’re going to be made fun of,” Stevens says.
Lily Maxham focused on the environmental, social, economic and ethical implications of the poultry industry in the United States, in particular.
“Specifically I looked at Tyson, which is the main chicken producer for the United States,” she says.
“For the ethical I looked at the living situations for a lot of the birds. They live in confined animal feeding operations and it’s like an illuminated area with a certain amount of birds and it’s said that the birds aren’t even able to open one wing because there’s no room.”
Antibiotics and growth hormones added to the feed makes them grow faster than what their bones and heart can keep up with, Maxham adds.
“And since they’re getting so big they’re unable to move . . . and there are actually a lot of deaths per year (because of that practice).”
The environmental cost of the runoff of poultry industry waste is immense.
“There are 40 different diseases that you can contract from animal waste from chickens,” Maxham says.
“And there are a lot of health problems with antibiotics; 80 per cent of the U.S.’s antibiotics are actually going into animal feed and it’s not to cure any kind of sickness it’s just kind of like a preventative measure and well as a growth promoter. But it causes problems because it create an antibiotic resistance and then humans can actually uptake that and become resistant as well.”
This symposium will help people to make informed decisions on what they purchase.
“If you come to the symposium you can learn the differences and how you can make wiser choices,” Stevens says.
