Water Pollution

Posted by Cameryn Roach in English 1 · Giknis · Y Band on

The issue I’ve chosen to focus on, as you know, is trash pollution. There are companies and individuals working towards cleaning up beaches and oceans to help keep our oceans safer. For example, there’s a documentary you can view on Netflix called A Plastic Ocean. In this Craig Leeson-directed documentary, Dr. Lindsay Porter and Ben Fogle begin the movie with finding a specific area of the ocean filled with trash and oil when they and their team were whale watching. The rest of the film goes over litter dissections, different areas of the world affected by litter, and what certain are doing or can do about it. Another example of people making a change are a group of people in Cameroon that make boats out of plastic bottles to “prompt people to think about how they consume and dispose of plastic bottles”. They needed more fishing boats, so they recycled the littered water bottles in their community and made boats to help with their issue. My opinion on how things should change is just for everybody to start small. Things always start small before they grow, so if everybody started small then we’d see a bigger change in our communities and such rather than only a few people trying to take care of a whole neighborhood’s situation.


For my agent of change, I wanted to have my household go through a habit change. I wanted my family to watch what we were buying and throwing away to reduce the amount of waste we produced. This idea might’ve worked, but at the time I didn’t think it would’ve worked well since I didn’t know how to measure the amount of trash we produced per week. My second idea was to be a local ambassador for the JUST Water company. While we were working on our second Y&TW post, I had reached out to them for information I could use. They didn’t respond until my class was halfway through our Agent of Change stage of the Y&TW project. I had contacted Bonnie Boyes, a PR representative of the company. The last email that exchanged between us was me explaining my idea to her and seeing if the company would be okay with that, but Ms. Boyes never responded. My third and final idea was to do something more like DIY with water bottles. An ironic idea I had was to form the water bottles into the shape of a trash can. With the little time I had left, since I had spent part of it giving the JUST Water company more time to respond, I went to work. It didn’t work like how it should’ve, but maybe if I had more time and different materials, it could’ve. My experience was frustrating, but throughout the process I got to learn about different people involved in the purification system which is something I’m grateful for.


During this project, I did feel overwhelmed about what I was going to do for my agent of change. Once I got an idea of what I could do, sometimes it was hard to follow through with it, so I was forced to move on to a new idea. But I was glad that I got such an opportunity to help my community in any way. I learned about the different ways that plastic was being used and affecting people around the world and primarily in the U.S. I learned that some people don’t always come through for you when you need them to, and that others do try their hardest to help you get where you need to go. I feel like I could’ve worked harder on initiating my agent of change itself, but I’m okay with what I have. For others, or myself, when it comes to helping fight against pollution, you can reach out to companies and small businesses that specialize in this type of treatment for communities like yours.


My annotated bibliography is here if you want to view it. 

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