opinion: carbon calculator, week 8

 

 

Week 8 in the continuing series of what is missing from Carbon Calculators.  

There is a list of the things that those calculators don’t ask, thereby eliminating them from their algorithm. These are the things that are sometimes the meat of the matter, so to speak. By altering these things, you could affect your true footprint in ways unimaginable and truly make our planet sustainable.

 

DRINKING SODA

The way this simple drink impacts our lives is incredible.  

There are the obvious things like the emissions produced from the production, marketing and transportation of the cola.  But, what about the not so obvious things.

The can is made out of aluminum.  While most of us recycle, it doesn’t change the fact that the raw material, or resource, was taken from the Earth in the first place, never to be returned.  Also, the recycling process does not have a 100% reclamation rate.  There are residual losses that have to be made up for by taking from the resource, again.  In other words, lets say you need 100 cans, so you recycle 100 cans.  However, that process only makes 80 cans, so you need to obtain 20 cans worth of raw material.  But now, you need 200 cans because sales have increased this year.  Now, you need to obtain 120 cans worth of raw material.  

The cans, until the FDA issues a ban, contains Bisphenol-A.  This is a chemical that is used in the synthesis of making the cans or plastic bottles.  Most research indicates that this is an environmental hazard, in that it is toxin in our bodies that acts as a hormone mimicker, creating cancers and deformities on vast scales.

The biggest culprit to making sodas an environmental cesspool… the high fructose corn syrup.  In the last 50 years, corn has become the largest commodity crop in the world, but mainly the United States.  It now accounts for 80% of our agriculture, althought 0% of it is edible to humans.  Unless, of course, it goes through a chemical process altering it into HFCS.  Despite what the commercials say, this stuff is NOT as natural as sugar.  

How does this hurt the environment?  There are many, but the biggest issue: pollution.  Commodity corn is very different than the corn you grill during the summer.  Commodity corn is the corn that is used to sweeten everything in your cupboard, feed our livestock, makes the cereal you eat in the morning, and even makes the boxes that the cereal comes in.  Commodity corn is 100% genetically modified.  

This means that a farm that used to only be able to produce 10 bales of corn, can now produce 200 bales of corn.  The plant has been genetically engineered to not mind close quarters.  However, the problem with this is that because of how much corn is being grown and lack of little else, it has sucked up anything good from the soil and left it barren.  Currently, for every American there is considered to be 4 acres of food available to them.  In ten years (!), that number is expected to decrease by 50%.  A major part of this is because some of the land has to be taken out of the equation because it is dead.  In order to grow all that corn you need fertilizer and pesticides.  And, not the stuff that used to be available to us.  As we have gotten stronger and stronger pesticides, we have gotten stronger and stronger pests.  There is one weed that has proliferated across 22 states, and the only thing that will kill it is Agent Orange.  Want to know how they found that out?  The same company that made the GMO corn, well, they make Agent Orange.

So we have barren land, we have weeds and bugs that won’t die and are killing every crop that is not corn, and we also have dead zones in the ocean.  All the poisons we are putting on the corn to make it usable, are getting washed off the plant and that water is making its way into the ocean.  In fact, like clock work, at harvest time, there is a plume of dead in the Gulf of Mexico because of fertilizer and pesticide runoff that traveled down the Mississippi.  Therefore, our fish are dying and the ones that are alive are pumped full of these awful chemicals that we are then grilling up to eat with the corn!  

Lastly, your soda is making you fat.  The science can be explained, point by point.  However it is interesting to note that as our intake of HFCS has gone up, our waste lines have increased.  But, the point that is necessary from this… the heavier you are the more likely you are going to turn up the air conditioning, stick to a commute in your car, buy more clothes because your size is going up, and so on.

The heavier you are the more of a drain on the environment you are.