Blue and teal streaks dance across a timeless white space that everyone seems to partake in and enjoy. This is not a classic tie-dyed T-shirt or a masterpiece by Monet, but nevertheless, it is both an aesthetic and a permanent problem facing all of us as C of C students.
This is the familiar design of the plastic foam cup in its Hungry Cougar incarnation. These cups pop up all over campus more often than wireless cutouts or Guy Harvey, but while loss of wireless Internet is temporary and fish shirts may be a passing trend, the plastic foam cups we use will not go away.
Plastic foam is immortal and, regardless of where it ends up, will never decompose.
Our high consumption means that the College of Charleston is throwing away a lot of plastic foam in the forms of gargantuan Chick-Fil-A cups and the take-out carry-alls from the Hungry Cougar. If we are leaving an infinite legacy on our world, it is through plastic foam.
The prime ingredient in these cups, among other difficult-to-recycle receptacles, is expanded polystyrene, a type of petroleum product. Found in everything from CD cases to packing peanuts, polystyrene permeates almost every aspect of our lifestyles and allows us to survive. With such a “get-it-to-go” way of life as the one we have, we need a material that can allow us to function in a breakneck and cheap manner. The emphasis is on the “cheap,” and as a result, polystyrene cups are flimsy and unforgettable. While an aluminum can’s decomposition takes around 500 years, there is no time rate of breakdown for expanded polystyrene.  What better to keep food from going rotten than a material that never rots?
Plastic foam sticks with the globe forever, but it does have some pluses. Polystyrene contains no Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which can further the degradation of the ozone layer. CFCs used to be included in aerosol cans until a variety of environmental campaigns led to legislation banning them.
Polystyrene is a code six recycling item and when recycled, it is used as an ingredient in thermometers or thermal insulation, including both home insulation or food containers.  However, the outlets and opportunities to recycle the crunchy material are very small in our campus settings, which means that in order to reduce plastic foam waste, we either need to find opportunities to gather and recycle our cups and containers, or find a new material to hold our drinks.
While still not completely environmentally sound, as almost nothing is really “impact-free,” the materials found in another type of to-go cup are much more capable of being compressed and disposed of with smaller impact. Some restaurants feature a waxy paper that gives the cup a glossy texture and a significantly smaller footprint. This type of cup is not uncommon, and a majority of fast food franchises are offering this type, including Moe’s Southwestern Grill, McDonald’s and Wendy’s.
Some other places feature a cup made from corn that is firm and completely practical. Being biodegradable means these cups start from the ground and end in the ground. The rehashed corn cups featured at catering junctions and King Street’s World Oriental Kitchen (W.O.K.) are marginally more expensive than the impressionistic ones we currently have; however, they are a fantastic final goal.
The Dash for Trash event that littered the Cougar Mall this past semester indicated how much we students really throw away and how much space that really takes up. Trash does not disappear, it is like any other energy: there is always the same amount of it somewhere. While we are not responsible for the final sepulcher of the waste we create, it is our responsibility to utilize our goods to the fullest, which might mean reusing cups or bottles, as well as making sure our negative impact on the environment is kept to a minimum.
I believe that with the massive amounts of cups we use at the school, we absolutely must find an alternative material that is both more compression-capable and that also has a smaller carbon footprint in order to keep our negative impact to a minimum.
All over America’s newsracks sit retrospectives of the past 10 years. The pages, specifically in TIME Magazine’s November issue, spell out the 2000s as “the decade from Hell” and one saturated with bloated greed and irresponsibility.  The feature spells out the decomposition of economic systems, the deconstruction of New Orleans and the breaking down of the ozone layer. While these are certainly detrimental events, I do not think the last 10 years constitute the “worst decade ever” as surely there have been times with scarier and more colossal issues. Nevertheless, the articles trouble me because they paint our generation and the generation that leads us in such a self-centered and environmentally self-destructive light.
Perhaps these reminiscences can teach us something about the way we are living. While the last 10 years might have been rough on all facets of life, it is not time to quit and it certainly is not time to stand idly by while mountains of waste contend with molehills of activism.
The next 10 years can be a turnaround and a rebirth. Just committing to look at our individual impact and really think about it can make our new year and new decade better than the last.
With the new year comes a slew of New Year’s resolutions, which some people are better at keeping than others. While the prospect of losing weight and quitting smoking might not be as easy as it sounds, reducing  impact only takes a small commitment on everyone’s part and is a resolution we can stick to. If enough people rethink how to use their materials, we can ring in the new year and the new decade a few steps closer to becoming a cleaner and less environmentally impacting institution.