On the morning of Handprint Day, I was writing the simplified steps of how a plastic bottle is manufactured and how you end up drinking out of it, on strips of a cardboard box I had cut up. The cutouts of the cardboard box had, until recently, encased the metal clothing rack on which now hangs my limited wardrobe that I brought to India with me.
When I finished Sharpie-ing the last step: The water bottle takes 400-500 years to decompose, I was already a few minutes late to the event: almost all the other employees of Centre for Environment Education (CEE, my host organization) had already set up their booths on a green lawn around from our office for the open community event, ready to welcome the hundreds of expected children, families, college students, and neighbors to learn, play, teach, tell, observe, and understand about the environment and climate action.
Handprint Day celebrates individual actions that we can all take to reduce our footprints while living on this one Earth we have. The story of the origin of the name Handprint is one I’ve heard many times now, after a few months of working at CEE. It started with a 10-year-old girl named Srija from Hyderabad who was part of a CEE project. She wished to take actions toward sustainability. It was Srija who inspired the CEE’s launch of Handprint Actions at UNESCO’s 4th International Conference on Environmental Education held at Ahmedabad, India in 2007.
“The Handprint represents the belief that we can make a difference through individual and collective actions to solve environmental problems.” (CEE, 2014)
The Handprint has become one of the flagship messages from CEE, through which I am helping to design a training module about climate change for middle school teachers. The project comes along with an Activity Handbook, and Handprint actions are the basis for some of the activities we are designing.
For various projects now, including the teacher training module, I’ve developed curriculum and presentations that involve a breakdown of the concept of the carbon footprint. It makes so much sense that the opposite of these footprints we leave behind, in the form of flying in planes, eating diets that have more impact on the environment… are the actions we take with our hands (and our minds) to offset our footprints.
Once such activity was the one I had designed and written on cardboard for Handprint Day, which I was calling in my head The Plastic Bottle Value Chain and out loud to kids it would be called, “Where does a plastic bottle come from?”
I had designed it around one extremely important Handprint Day action: Recycling. I had originally thought: there is really nothing special about recycling, it’s the most common thing people say, it’s like pushing at an open door — everyone already knows how virtuous and important for the environment recycling is. It’s easy to say one word: recycle, but there is so much knowledge behind that to understand why and more so how.
However, there were two aspects I wanted to communicate through this activity, and I wanted to do it in a way that was understandable to kids whose attention I would only have about five minutes of, at best.
- Plastic is made from petroleum (byproducts) and petroleum comes from deep under the ground.
- It is possible for products to be used and reused in a closed system.
As the lawn filled up with kids, many of whom were much too young to understand my activity, even if I could have explained it in Hindi or Gujarati, I laid out the cardboard steps of the process. Put yourself in the misspelled Adidas shoes of the group of middle school boys walking up to my table.
Can you put these in order? (I’ve given you the first and the last steps to get you started!)
- Petroleum is extracted from deep below the ocean floor’s surface.
?. The plastic bottle is filled with water.
?. You buy and drink the water.
?. The petroleum is shipped to a refinery.
?. The petroleum is turned into PET plastic pellets.
?. You throw the water bottle in the trash bin.
?. The water bottles are shipped to a store near you.
?. PET plastic pellets are molded into the shape of a plastic bottle.
- The water bottle takes 400-500 years to decompose.
(Note: See correct order at the very bottom.)
It’s simple enough with some thought, and even easier when you can pick up each step, hold it in your hand, and rearrange until you meet a logical chain of events. Of course, when we met the obvious end at The water bottle takes 400-500 years to decompose — it doesn’t really end there.
After my table visitors rearranged the steps correctly, I asked them about an alternate ending to the fate of the landfill. Almost everyone was ready with a response: “you recycle the bottle, right?”
Under the table, I had a secret second pile of cardboard strips with these steps written:
- You save the plastic bottle and give it to the kabadiwala or take it to a recycling place.
- The plastic bottle is cleaned and dried.
- The clean plastic bottle is melted back to PET pellets.
These additional cardboard pieces turn this linear path from petroleum to landfill into a cycle (or a recycle, if you will). We can visualize the whole process here:
Climate action and Handprint Actions look all sorts of different ways and recycling one plastic water bottle, or choosing to use your own reusable bottle, is a step in the right direction. While it’s a step in the right direction and a choice that we all can make on a regular basis, it’s also important that I acknowledge recycling as a system has its flaws and it’s discouraging to learn. But much of my work at CEE is bigger than that — it’s about how to scale these Handprint Actions up to schools and teachers, and thus our neighborhoods and states. Handprint Day was my reminder that climate action is both big and small.
As the Saturday morning event wound down, a group of boys came up to the table with a very clear, yet unspoken, goal in mind. I had one plastic water bottle on the table, and one boy flipping it just once turned into almost the last hour of the event being people coming up and slipping in between, taking turns trying to land this water bottle on the table like a gymnast at the end of her routine.
I have to admit I was discouraged at first — my cardboard cutouts had lost out to the enemy: the plastic bottle (and its associated internet trend). But at this point at the event, I had done my cardboard activity with almost everyone who attended Handprint Day. Climate action can look like playing a game like this too.
While not perfect, recycling, community events, flipping water bottles, offers us a way not to completely erase our footprint, but to lessen it. They are ways to tread lighter on this world, to use our hands and minds to work against the marks our footprints leave, and work towards the future, even if it sometimes looks like this:
Answers in order from above:
- Petroleum is extracted from deep below the ocean floor’s surface.
- The petroleum is shipped to a refinery.
- The petroleum is turned into PET plastic pellets.
- PET plastic pellets are molded into the shape of a plastic bottle.
- The plastic bottle is filled with water.
- The water bottles are shipped to a store near you.
- You buy and drink the water.
- You throw the water bottle in the trash bin.
- The water bottle takes 400-500 years to decompose.
Cited in this Blog:
Centre for Environment Education. (2014). Handprint. Handprint.in. https://www.handprint.in/#:~:text=Handprint%20was%20launched%20in%202007,act%20for%20the%20common%20good.
