How to throw a summer party without plastic waste

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This week:

• How to throw a summer party without plastic waste
• End of the line for many small cars
• Scientists are buildingsaunas for frogs

How to throw a summer party without plastic waste

June marks the end of the school year, and one Vancouver elementary school celebrates with a summer carnival.

For the past few years, Risa Sargent, who volunteers with the school's parent advisory council, has been wondering: what can be done to reduce the plastic and paper waste that piles up after everyone's finished with their pizza, burgers and other food?

In the past, the council has asked the hundreds of attendees to bring reusable plates.

But the response has always been lukewarm, said Sargent.

"People forget or, you know, if you're going to a barbeque, you don't necessarily want to carry a ketchup-covered plate back to your house," she told What On Earth.

"So how can we encourage people or help them to bring their own? If that isn't possible, what are the other options?"

Regarding the first part of Sargent's question, Jiaying Zhao suggests that anyone wanting to organize a more environmentally friendly summer gathering could consider offering a prize for reducing waste.

"[The] two things that are most effective to change people's behaviour are ease so make it easy and reward," said Zhao, a professor of psychology and environmental sustainability at the University of British Columbia.

Zhao gives an example from her own campus, where people have a 10 per cent chance of winning a free coffee when they bring their own reusable mug.

"This lottery system can really incentivize people to bring their own cups," she said. "This can reduce waste. This can also create a sense of pleasure and enjoyment."

If offering a reward for good behaviour isn't possible, renting what you need for the party is one other option.

But if that's outside of your budget, there are more affordable ways planners can source reusable plates, cutlery and serving ware.

The groups Clark Park Party Box, in Vancouver, and Scarborough Zero Waste, in Ontario, lend reusable party kits filled with plates, cutlery, cups and table cloths.

Some cities also have a "Library of Things" where anything including party supplies can be borrowed.

But if you've exhausted all other options and must use some disposables, Belinda Li suggests buying cutlery made of fibre-based materials such as wood, bamboo or bagasse (sugarcane).

Paper plates are also a greener option than plastic plates because paper can generally be composted, said Li, the co-founder of the Food Systems Lab at Simon Fraser University.

While there are a lot of plastic products labelled "compostable" or "biodegradable," Li says most will only break down under very specific conditions. Because of that, they're not accepted by most municipal composting programs and usually end up in the landfill.

Li said one option is serving finger food that doesn't require plates.

"That way, it reduces both your cost as well as the amount of waste that you are producing," she said.

If plates are needed, Li and Zhao recommend sticking with reusables as much as possible.

Sargent says her parents' council is doing that this year by once again, asking people to bring their own. But it also purchased second-hand plates from thrift stores for those who didn't bring one and asks them to make a donation to the parent council's "sustainability fund." Council volunteers will wash the plates so they can be reused at the next event.

If people are still not motivated to bring reusables to the party, Zhao has one message for them: "Bring your own or you're going to have to eat off somebody else's plate."

Vivian Luk

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Reader feedback

We asked you to share your experiences with bike sharing, and got this note from Jake Roslyn: "I am a huge fan of Toronto's Bike Share program. I used to be a regular subscriber when I lived downtown, but when my landlord sold my place I was priced out of my old neighbourhood and had to move to the suburbs. There's a Bike Share station by my new apartment, but not by the nearest transit stop, which severely limits the usefulness of the program for me. If I wanted to own a bike in my condo, I would need to pay to have a bike rack installed on top of the cost of a bike, plus I would need to bike up two levels of parking garage to get to the street. I miss Bike Share dearly, but it needs more transit connectivity. Once it has that, I believe that Bike Share and transit will be the best way to get around downtown."

We're still interested in hearing more of your experiences withbike sharing services in your city, your thoughts about what you'rereading in this issue, andtopics you'd like us to explore.

Write us at whatonearth@cbc.ca.

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The Big Picture: End of the line for many small cars

A little while ago, we asked readers whether they had trouble buying a smaller vehicle amid a market full of SUVs and trucks, and some shared their experiences. It turns out that they aren't restricted to certain communities or dealers. Equiterre, a Quebec-based environmental advocacy group, has been tracking the disappearance of compact and sub-compact cars in the Canadian market. The graphic above shows models that have disappeared since 2019. "To our knowledge, only three models of subcompact are left: Mitsubishi Mirage, Nissan Versa and Fiat 500e," Anthony Ct-Leduc, the group's media contact, told CBC News in an email. Some manufacturers, such as Ford, GM and Volvo, are focusing almost exclusively on SUVs and trucks in North America. Meanwhile, many would-be buyers of small cars have been pushed toward larger, more expensive vehicles that don't need to meet the stringent emissions standards that smaller cars do and happen to be more profitable for manufacturers.

You can read the full article, How the automobile industry turned us into SUV drivers, here.

Emily Chung

Hot and bothered: Provocative ideas from around the web

• Multinational corporations in India have built many Western-style buildings that rely heavily on air conditioning to keep cool, heating up their surroundings. Now Indian architects are reviving traditional materials and design features that kept buildings cool before the invention of air conditioning.

• Denmark is introducing a tax on the greenhouse gases produced by methane-burping cows and other livestock. It's billed as the first carbon tax on agriculture in the world.
  
• The climate impact of burning coal, oil and gas must be taken into account when deciding whether to approve fossil fuel projects, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom has ruled. The case sets an important precedent, the Guardian reports.
  
• Two years ago, a group of 13 teenagers sued the Hawaii Department of Transportation. A settlement agreement was reached last Thursday and the department will now plant at least 1,000 trees a year and develop a net zero transportation plan and clean energy goals.
  
• A new Canadian law aims to tackle environmental racism by requiring the government to study the links between race, socio-economic status and industrial pollution and develop a strategy to address any harms.

This DIY brick sauna is helping frogs fight disease

Wedged into the tiny holes of masonry bricks, which heat their bodies up to near 30 C, you might think Australian green and golden bell frogs would be uncomfortable.

But new research says the amphibians love it, and that these DIY dry saunas made with spray-painted bricks housed in plastic greenhouses could give them an edge in fighting a deadly fungus.

"This is really exciting," said Anthony Waddle, a biologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and lead author of the new study published in Nature. "If frogs are given the opportunity, they can [help] themselves."

Waddle and his team designed experiments involving easily obtained materials, setting these makeshift saunas up in a semi-wild habitat on Macquarie University campus to see if frogs would use them to fight off a global killer.

The fungus is Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (shortened to Bd, but also referred to as chytrid, pronounced kit-rid), and it is responsible for declines in the population of more than 500 amphibian species and the extinction of at least 90 others.

"I think it's been one of the most devastating pathogens that Western science has recorded," said Christina Davy, a biologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, who was not involved with the study.

"It infects the skin of the amphibians and it interferes with their ability to move water and gases across their skin," explained Davy.

Waddle compared chytrid's effects to an athlete who drinks too much water, disrupting the body's sodium and potassium levels, eventually leading to cardiac arrest.

Davy adds that chytrid is fast-acting, hardy, can spread without hosts and is found around the world. When it enters a new area, previously uninfected and endangered species can be wiped out.

But before you imagine an amphibian version of the spores in The Last of Us, chytrid does have preferences and really hot temperatures, close to 30 C, are not among them.

Waddle and his team worked with green and golden bell frogs, an endangered species that's native to New South Wales. After infecting frogs with chytrid, they created mesocosms a controlled outdoor environment of different frog habitats. These included the so-called frog saunas, and the resulting toasty and humid climate was highly preferred by the frogs, Waddle explained.

But he also found that when "frogs had access to these shelters, their body temperatures were higher and over time they had lower infections." On top of that, frogs that cleared their infections using this high heat were more resistant to re-infection.

Ana Longo, an amphibian disease expert and biologist at the University of Florida, called the experiment simple yet elegant, but cautioned that it faces challenges in how it would scale to other species and in the wild.

"Amphibians are so diverse and they have so many different habitat preferences," she said from Gainesville, Fla.

However, Longo says when it comes to a threat as devastating as chytrid, there are few tools available outside of a controlled zoo environment, such as anti-fungal treatments.

"We need bold measures at this point," Longo said. "We know that [a] single measure is not going to be effective across all the species. So I think we just have to try different things."

Waddle says the materials cost him around 70 Australian dollars (around $64 Cdn). Both Davy and Longo appreciated how approachable and affordable this solution could be for anyone to build.

While declines in frog species from chytrid have been observed around the world for decades, Davy at Carleton University says it doesn't always kill. Her own research found it to be widespread in Ontario in frogs and salamanders, and doesn't result in mass death.

But she warns that tolerance may not apply to newer strains.

"There's real concern right now about bringing a new species of chytrid fungus to North America," Davy said. "And there's real concern that if it reached [the continent] it could also be really devastating."

Anand Ram

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Editors: Emily Chung and Hannah Hoag| Logo design: Skdt McNalty