How many pens do you have? 10? 20? 50?
Multiply that by billions of people and calculate how many pens there are in the world and how many of them end up in the trash. Or even how many don’t even make it to the landfill, given how often we lose pens…
While we often discuss the environmental impact of many plastic items, we don’t often think about eco-friendly and zero-waste options for the everyday writing instruments we all use almost every day. However, in addition to the inks left in disposable ballpoint pens polluting the soil and water, the plastic bodies of these pens cannot be recycled.
As part of the 2024 Plastic-Free July events, the IMU Sustainability Club collaborated with the IMU Sustainability Office to encourage people to move away from plastic pens and to promote the use of bioplastic or recycled material body pens as sustainable choices. For this purpose, our students from the Sustainability Club and our Sustainability Office team visited the offices and social areas in Göztepe North Campus on July 19, 2024, informed our campus community about the environmental pollution caused by single-use plastic pens that we frequently use in our daily lives, and distributed environmentally friendly pens with seeds to our campus community. During the event, participants were informed that many of the plastic-bodied ballpoint pens they frequently use in their daily lives are not recycled and many of them do not even end up in landfills. Attention was drawn to the fact that in addition to the environmental pollution caused by the plastic bodies of the pens, the inks inside the pens blown by the wind also pollute the soil and water.
With this social responsibility project carried out jointly by the IMU Sustainability Club and the Sustainability Office, a total of 50 campus community members received eco-friendly, seed pens with recycled paper and biomaterial body free of charge. With the use of these pens, a total of 400 grams of plastic waste production was prevented for the next year and this plastic was prevented from remaining in nature for 450 years. In addition, it was aimed that the trees that would grow by leaving a total of 200 seeds on the tops of the pens would reduce the negative effects of deforestation and contribute to biodiversity. Participants were informed that they could bring their compostable pens to the Sustainability Office when their lifespan ended and throw them into the compost application carried out by the office. Thus, in addition to contributing to our University’s zero waste project by reducing the amount of plastic waste in our campus areas, it also contributed to the reduction of people’s environmental footprint.
The “Plastic-Free July” social responsibility project, which has been managed by IMU Sustainability Office since 2022, was carried out by IMU Sustainability Club this year. The academic consultancy of the project was undertaken by Res.Asst. Ayça ÇELİKBİLEK from IMU Sustainability Office team, who is also the academic advisor of IMU Sustainability Club, the club president Res.Asst. Furkan ERUÇAR and Lect. Zehra SAVAN.
Within the scope of the 2024 activities of the “Plastic-Free July” project, IMU Sustainability Club (IMUSUS) invited people to challenge them to remove a single-use plastic product they use in their daily lives every day for a month and step into a plastic-free life. During the challenge, environmental awareness was raised by providing information about the waste generation and environmental pollution caused by these plastic products every day through social media accounts. Following each of these informative social media posts, people were presented with sustainable alternatives with natural ingredients and packaging that do not produce plastic waste, which they could use instead of that plastic-containing product. IMUSUS also collaborated with 18 companies in Turkey and the world that are pioneers in sustainability and have sustainability labels in order to carry this awareness to consumer behavior. Thanks to this cooperation, on certain days of the challenge, with the sponsorship support provided by the companies, sustainable products were presented to both our students and staff and the public in order to create a new behavioral change in their daily lives. Thus, while enabling people to take the first step towards a plastic-free life, it also contributed to reducing the amount of single-use plastic waste and the environmental footprint of our campus community.
“Plastic-Free July” movement has been celebrated around the world since 2011, challenging people to eliminate single-use plastic products from their lives by raising awareness about plastic pollution and the amount of plastic they use.